The Earliest Christian Artifacts

My review of Larry Hurtado’s latest book, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, has just been published in the online Review of Biblical Literature. The book makes a major important point, and does so well, namely that the actual manuscripts of early Christian literature, their physical features and characteristics, are largely unknown to most scholars of early Christianity in anything other than a superficial way. Hurtado’s invitation to remedy this is so important that, in my review, I forego altogether commenting on a few insignificant but jarring features, such as the reference to “linear Darwinian evolution” (it isn’t, and any educated individual ought to know that in our day and age), and the rather silly statement that the divine name in some manuscripts is ‘set apart’ from all other words by being transliterated as opposed to translated – as though this were not true of names in general. The book remains a wonderfully worthwhile read in spite of such features, which are extremely few, and is on the whole full of information that most scholars of early Christianity lack. In short: I recommend reading Hurtado’s book!