Hill—Irenaeus, the Scribes, and the Scriptures 121The Diple as Literary Siglum
Kathleen McNamee notes that the diple, like other sigla, had been used in literary texts
at least since the second century BCE.^15 In the Homeric tradition, it was often used to
mark a place in a text to which a separated commentary (ὑπομνήματα) corresponded.^16
But McNamee calls the diple “a general-purpose symbol”^17 and notes (in her Table 2)
that it is used to mark division in the text, to mark a quotation, to indicate an error, a
variant, a marginal note, and that sometimes its meaning is uncertain.^18
The Diplai in P. Oxy. 405 and Other Christian Literature
In P.Oxy. 405, diplai are clearly being used to mark a quotation, as Grenfell and Hunt
noted in their original report.^19 But how common was the practice of using the diple
to mark quotations? In 1992, according to McNamee, there were “roughly three hun-
dred Greek literary papyri from Egypt in which sigla appear in the margin or between
the lines.”^20 Of these three hundred, McNamee finds thirty-three that use the diple,
and of these thirty-three only twelve use the diple as a marker of quotations. Clearly,
these twelve must represent a very small minority of the Egyptian literary texts that
contain quotations, showing that the marking of quotations was rather exceptional. Of
the twelve manuscripts that use the diple to mark a quotation, the earliest are from the
second century, which contributes five.^21
The use of diplai, or any other marginal markings, to indicate quotations was thus
not the norm. And P.Oxy. 405 turns out to be not only possibly the earliest Christian
example but among the earliest of all examples. Of other surviving Christian theological
works from the early period, many, such as the mss of The Shepherd of Hermas, do not
contain quotations per se. Others do contain quotations but no marginal markings.^22Illustration 1. P.Oxy. 405 containing Irenaeus’s quotation of Matt. 3:16-17. Reproduced by
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.