Culture
Old news
by Nick Smith
The new number of the beast – 616 – is but one revelation of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, rescued by scholars from the garbage dump of history.
Oxyrhynchus. It’s hard to spell and looks even harder to say. But it’s a word that will change what we know and how we think about the Son of God, the devil and ancient civilisation.
Oxyrhynchus is an ancient Graeco-Egyptian town, about 160km southwest of modern-day Cairo, where 19th-century scholars unearthed from antiquity’s rubbish tip more than 400,000 papyrus fragments, comprising about one-fifth of all classical works in existence.
Trouble was, the bulk of the collection was unreadable: blackened, scorched and damaged, ancient treasures beyond the reach of human eyes.
Until now. Today, religious scholars will be arguing over the findings: the true number of the beast (is it really 666?), the collected sayings of Jesus Christ, a book of quotations by the Son of God and a lost book of the New Testament, one of the Apocrypha, early Christian non-canonical gospels that the church excluded from the official New Testament.
As Dr Dirk Obbink – head of Oxford University’s Oxyrhynchus imaging project, whose task is to bring back to life the unreadable papyri – says, the discovery will be controversial.
First, the number of the beast, immortalised in Revelation and in the anthems of a legion of heavy metal bands. Oxyrhynchus yielded a third-century fragment of the earliest surviving edition of Revelation and the number is not 666 but 616.
Written in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, the number is arrived at by giving numer-ical value to Greek letters, a favourite pastime of the educated ancients.
Although fundamentalists insist that the number – whether 666 or 616 – refers to the devil, most scholars accept it was early Christian code meant to be understood only by believers. The 666 number is thought to refer to the emperor Nero, while 616 is code for Caligula, who enraged Christians and Jews by trying to erect statues of himself in the Temple at Jerusalem. So, 666 or 616? Nero or Caligula? Let the academic argument begin.
There is a lot of fruitful ground for speculation and this actually gives hardcore material evidence,” says Obbink, who adds that Christian scholars comprise one of Oxyrhynchus’s largest reading groups. “There will be theological debate … and these [papyri] fuel the debate and sometimes decide them.”
The contents of the Revelation fragment were first published in 1999, decoded without the aid of special imaging equipment (more on that later), but is only now receiving publicity. What is new are the 250 fragments of text not seen for centuries that have only now been brought back to life.
This includes a lost New Testament work called the Book of Hermas, which means “pastor”, says Obbink, on the phone from Berkeley in the US, where he is guest lecturing on the papyri before returning to Oxford.
Scholars knew about the Book of Hermas and other Apocrypha, he says, but “they didn’t get into the New Testament because they were kind of renegade books”. Hermas is “stories of Christ being a pastor to people”, he says. Also uncovered in the papyri were a fragment of collected sayings of Jesus – “a sort of greatest hits” – and a book of quotations by the Son of God.
Although these additions to the canon of religious works might further fuel Da Vinci Code-style myths, Obbink says the real controversy is, as always, about chronology.
“People try to date them earlier than they really are, because they want Christianity to start earlier than it does,” says Obbink. “They want it to go all the way back to the lifetime of Christ.”
But remember, these priceless papyri are from an ancient rubbish dump. The writing had to be common, popular and in wide circulation – like, say, an ancient Jackie Collins novel – before it was consigned to the tip. Although a definitive date is yet to be published, the fragments are highly unlikely to be from Christ’s time.
But there is an awful lot of pre-Christian material, which is why the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is called the classical Holy Grail, a find so vast, it could – if only it were legible – redraw the map of classical civilisation.
How old exactly? “We found a fragment of the seventh-century BCE poet, Archilochos – so he’s pretty old, as old as Homer, as old as the Iliad and the Odyssey,” says Obbink. Archilochos is also the veritable Byron of the ancient world and just as widely read in his time. “He was a famous poet, but he was a little bit racy. He wrote poems about how he seduced his girlfriend’s sister, got in a fight and attacked his girlfriend’s father … he was kind of a bad-boy poet.”
Of all Archilochos’s work, only 500 lines survive, so to discover Oxyrhynchus’ additional 30 lines is invaluable for classical scholars.
“He was a soldier poet; he wrote about fighting and battle and being a mercenary soldier, hiring himself out to fight for other people. And this new poem is about the Trojan War, so he’s comparing his own experience as a soldier – where he had to retreat and flee in battle – to an episode that happened before the Trojan War, when the Greeks were trying to get to Troy.”
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