The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Graeco-roman Memoirs, 86)

This volume contains editions of forty-one texts, theological, literary, subliterary, and documentary. The theological section includes large fragments of the First Apocalypse of James (5533), an early Christian narrative of conversations between Jesus and his brother, James, before and after Jesus' death. The Greek text is otherwise lost and scholars have depended on two often conflicting Coptic versions. The first of seven magical papyri is a second-century exorcism manual (5542), with the divine name written in Palaeo-Hebrew letters. A series of potted lives of the Successors of Alexander the Great illuminates the history of ancient life-writing before Plutarch (5535). A fragment of commentary on Aristophanes (5536) and five grammatical texts (5537-41) complete Section II. The twenty-four documents in Section III provide a mass of new evidence concerning slavery in the Roman world. Various aspects of the lives of the enslaved come to the fore, including slavery from infancy, repeated sales, displacement across the Mediterranean, employment in weaving and wet-nursing, and manumission. The photographs show all the new theological, literary, and subliterary texts, and eleven of the documents.