Oxyrhynchus and Oracles in Late Antiquity

Chapter 9 Oxyrhynchus and Oracles in Late Antiquity

Alexander Kocar1

“O my Lord God Almighty and Saint Philoxenus my patron, I beseech you by the great name of the Lord God, if it is your will and you are helping me to take the banking-business, I beseech you to bid me learn this, and speak.” These sentences were penned on a small piece of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus, published as P.Harr. I 54. On the basis of this manuscript, and its “twin,” P.Oxy. XVI 1926, Herbert Youtie demonstrated the presence of lot oracles at the shrine of Philoxenus in Oxyrhynchus.2 These two nearly identically worded manuscripts from the same hand provide evidence for the divinatory practice in which the petitioner would write two lots, one with a positive response and the other negative, and submit both to the shrine. This chapter adds another dimension to the divinatory rites practiced at the shrine to Philoxenus by arguing that oracular codices – consulted alongside and mediated by a ritual expert – were likely in use at the shrine as well. To this end, this chapter situates two previously unpublished miniature manuscripts among the divinatory practices of the late antique Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus.3 I provide a translation of two fragmentary Coptic miniature oracular codices uncovered during the sixth season of excavations at Oxyrhynchus, inv. 68 6B.24/F(1–3)a and 67 6B.15/F(1–5)a, that I am editing for the Egypt Exploration Society’s publication series, The Oxyrhynchus

1 I wish to express my gratitude to AnneMarie Luijendijk and Bill Klingshirn for inviting me to participate in the conference on sortes. I thank AnneMarie for her continual guidance on all things sortilege. I am grateful to Dirk Obbink who gave me access to the Coptic texts discussed in this chapter and to Nikolaos Gonis for his support and suggestions for improvement. Finally, I want to thank Lance Jenott for his helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 Herbert C. Youtie, “Questions to a Christian Oracle,” ZPE 18 (1975): 253–57. P.Oxy. XVI 1926 reads in translation: “O my Lord God Almighty and St. Philoxenus my patron, I beseech you by the great name of the Lord God, if it is not your will that I speak either about the bank or about the weighing-office, to bid me learn this, in order that I may not speak.” 3 For a good general introduction to Oxyrhynchus and the excavations of Grenfell and Hunt, see Peter Parsons, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World (London: Phoenix, 2007) and the collected essays in Oxyrhynchus: A City and Its Texts, ed. A. K. Bowman et al. (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2007).

Papyri.4 For convenience, I refer to these two manuscripts as fragment 1 and fragment 2 respectively.5 I consider by whom and in what social context these miniature oracular texts were likely produced. In particular, I examine the possible affiliation between these two sortes fragments and divinatory practices conducted at regional saint shrines in Egypt. And finally, I argue that fragments 1 and 2 were most likely affiliated with the shrine to Saint Philoxenus in Oxyrhynchus and thereby provide additional evidence of the expanding importance and authority of these shrines in the fifth-century and beyond.6

1 Text and Translation7

Both fragments are from miniature codices, with fragment 1 made of papyrus and fragment 2 of parchment. In E. G. Turner’s typological survey of papyrus and parchment codices, he defined a miniature codex by its most conspicuous trait, its size. According to Turner, codices are miniature, whether they are parchment or papyrus, if they measure less than 10 cm in width.8 Our two manuscripts fall into this category, with fragment 1 measuring 8 cm wide by 7.7 cm and fragment 2 measuring 6 cm wide by 7 cm. Expanding on Turner’s analysis, and concentrating in particular on Coptic miniature codices, Malcolm Choat categorized fifty-six existing manuscripts according to six groupings: 1) sacred texts, 2) prayer/ritual, 3) liturgy, 4) handbooks, 5) education, and 6) other literature.9 AnneMarie Luijendijk, building on the groupings outlined by Choat, has suggested making another

4 I am very grateful to the General Editors of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Amin Benaissa, Nikolaos Gonis, and Peter Parsons, for their generous permission to discuss these texts here in advance of their publication in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series. 5 Until now, the publication and study of Coptic materials found at Oxyrhynchus have been sporadic. The magnitude of this oversight is compounded by the wealth of Coptic sources that survive from Oxyrhynchus. After cataloguing the sheer volume of Coptic texts, Sarah Clackson encouraged future study by pointing out that there are likely 400 or more literary and documentary Coptic texts from this site that have yet to be published. Clackson, “Coptic Oxyrhynchus,” in Bowman, Oxyrhynchus, 332–41, esp. 333. 6 See AnneMarie Luijendijk’s contribution in this volume, and Luijendijk, Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 7 For a critical edition as well as palaeographical and codicological description of these two pieces, please see P.Oxy. (forthcoming). 8 E. G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1977), 25. 9 Malcolm Choat, “Miniature Codices in Coptic,” unpublished handout circulated at the Society of Biblical Literature in 2007. I give my sincere thanks to Malcolm Choat for sharing his handout with me.