The Nothing May Be Lost: Fragments and the New Testament Text is a collection of nine new research papers in the field of New Testament textual criticism.
The chapters derive from presentations given at the Twelfth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament which, instead of being held in person, was an online meeting over ten weeks between January and March 2021, coinciding with the third national lockdown in England.
They comprise a study of a New Testament papyrus (P50) which suggests that it may be a modern fake, a quest to locate all the fragments of the most dispersed Greek New Testament manuscript (Lectionary 2434), an analysis of an Arabic text of Romans, the use of digital tools to recover illegible texts in a Pauline catena manuscript (GA 1506), the application of probability structure analysis to determine the relationship of the members of Family 13, an account of the early Latin commentary on Job by Philippus Presbyter, the first publication on a manuscript of Romans newly added to the official register (GA 2962), observations on a catena manuscript of Acts (GA 886), and a study of the quotations of two passages of John in early Christian writers. Five other papers from the Twelfth Colloquium have been published in other venues, including the discovery of a fragmentary new witness to the catena of Codex Zacynthius.
The collection has been edited by four doctoral students at ITSEE: Clark Bates, Jacopo Marcon (now a research fellow in Berlin), Andrew Patton and Emanuele Scieri. The international range of contributors comprises scholars from the UK, France, Belgium and the USA. In keeping with previous papers from the Birmingham Colloquium, it is published in the Texts and Studies book series by Gorgias Press.
The volume, which includes several papers on manuscripts with a biblical commentary in the form of a catena, is sponsored by the European Research Council CATENA project. In addition to being available through Gorgias Press, it has also been released in Open Access.
A few places are still available for participants in the Thirteenth Birmingham Colloquium, which will be held in Birmingham and online in May 2023.
