Fri Jan 10 00:08:31 1997

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 00:02:51 -0500 (EST)
From: Maurice Robinson 
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Subject: Re: Ms half-lives
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On Thu, 9 Jan 1997, Professor L.W. Hurtado wrote:

> On how many mss might have been produced, economic factors figure in 
> also.  Seems to me vaguely that historians refer to economic 
> crunch(es) in the 3rd century Roman empire.  Might this be relevant?

I would think so, to an extent.  However, in the pre-4th century period,
the church was basically a persecuted body, and yet it still managed to
prepare and obtain at least minimal copies of the NT scriptures for its
use, so the possibility of sacrificial giving to support obtaining of
papyrus (which even under an economic crisis would probably still remain
cheap) would probably be quite likely and would not necessarily impede
normal production of NT MSS by local churches or individual Christians to
any great degree.  Of course, economics might preclude the use of
professional scribes for the purpose, but I suspect that such was rare in
any case in the era before the legitimization of Christianity while the
church was under threat of persecution.

_________________________________________________________________________
Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D.           Professor of Greek and New Testament
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary     Wake Forest, North Carolina
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