Irenaeus

122 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy

I have, however, so far come across six more, non-biblical Christian manuscripts
from the seventh century or earlier that use the diplai. They are:

P.Mich. xviii.764, a two-column papyrus roll, dated by the editor to the second or third

century,^23 so, very much contemporary with P.Oxy. 405. It is a fragment of an unidenti-

fied homily or treatise. The left margin of the right-hand column contains diplai marking

citations of Jeremiah 18:3-6 and 1 Corinthians 3:13.^24

Paris Bib. Nat. P.Gr. 1120, a late third-century,^25 two-column papyrus codex found at

Coptos, Egypt, containing two of Philo’s works.^26 As Roberts pointed out, it is clearly

a Christian copy of Philo, as shown by the nomina sacra abbreviations for God, Son,

Father, Spirit, and Lord.^27 It appears from the transcription that the scribe abandoned the

effort to mark quotations after a few leaves in each treatise, and the editor remarks that in

the second treatise, where the writing is more rapid, the sign is rounded in the shape of a

comma.^28 Interestingly, this is the codex of Philo which contained as stuffing for its cover

the fragments of Luke now known to New Testament textual critics as P^4.^29

A papyrus fragment given the Gregory-Aland number P^7 , variously dated anywhere from

the late third to the sixth century.^30 This is actually not a New Testament manuscript but an

unknown work which contains a quotation of Luke 4:1-2, marked with marginal diplai.^31

A sixth-century papyrus codex of Hilary of Poitiers’ De Trinitate, marked evidently later

in the sixth century by Dulcitius of Aquino (Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 2160).^32

A late sixth- or early seventh-century papyrus copy of Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides

found at Toura (van Haelst 683, cf. 684) which uses the diple to mark Old Testament and

New Testament texts.^33

Illustration 2. P. Oxy. 53.3699 (LDAB 4859), Philosophical Dialogue, perhaps part of Aristo-
tle’s Protrepticus, second century, papyrus roll, identified by McNamee as one of the early
examples of the use of marginal diplai for quotation. Image courtesy of the Egypt Exploration
Society and Imaging Papyri Project, Oxford.