P.Oxy. 1.5 and the Codex Sangermanensis as ‘Visionary Living Texts.’ Visionary Habitus and Processes of ‘Textualization’ and/or ‘Scripturalization’ in Late Antiquity

Recent studies stress, with varied perspectives and nuances, that much of the corruption of proto-Christian accounts are products of the “orthodox” Tendenzen intending to safeguard the holy texts from possible depredations of “heretical” parties (see the studies by Ehrman, Head, Hernández Jr., Royse, etc.). In this view, every re-reading of the text is to some extent a re-writing of the text: the variants produced by ancient scribes show us what they thought the text said, i.e., what it really meant. This approach implies the necessity to gain knowledge of an individual scribe’s copying habits, highlighting that particular readings reveal scribal specificities. This paper aims at analysing two cases of individual scribal interventions on visionary texts of late antiquity: the papyrus from Oxhyrhynchus n. 1.5 (3rd-4th cent. CE), specifically a text containing a passage from Hermas’ Mand. 11.9—10, and a manuscript of IV Ezra, the so-called Codex Sangermanensis (9th cent. CE). Both the cases reveal figures of entrepreneurs (the scribe? Or the customer?) engaged in related typologies of individual acquisition/intervention, appropriation, modification, and transposition: P.Oxy. 5 offers a very interesting case of interpolation, completely absorbed in the text of the Shepherd of Hermas, concerning a prophetiké taxis; the Codex Sangermanensis presents the ablation of an entire section of 4 Ezra 7 for specific ideological reasons. This paper also aims at analysing the process of reformulation connected to a specific late-antique religious habitus, i.e. the visionary habitus, a socio-cultural pattern that results into processes of exegesis, interpretation and re-proposition of previous authoritative accounts in and for specific environments.