Resurrecting Early Christian Lives - Project Plan

Resurrecting Early Christian Lives investigates ancient papyri relevant to the rise of early Christianity within the multi-cultural context of Greco-Roman Egypt. Specifically we will examine in detail the complex networks of identity and authority and how Christians saw their new religion as part of their other identities (Greek, Egyptian, Roman, merchant, monk). Papyrus documents unearthed from the garbage dumps around the outskirts of Bahnasa in Egypt, known in antiquity as Oxyrhynchus, the city of the ‘sharp-nosed’ fish, are a rich resource of ancient data. Since the early 20th century this vast heap of papyri has yielded a range of ancient texts: the lost poetry of Sappho, new gospels and homilies, private letters, and documents such as contracts, loans, census returns, and fiscal accounts. The information extracted reaches across disciplines: history, classics, religion, philosophy, the history of economy, More importantly, due to the immense volume of papyrus fragments discovered, these texts continue to produce new data and new discoveries. Yet in tracking the rise of early Christianity, most converts are hard to distinguish from their neighbours in their architecture, burials, or economic activity until the fourth century at the earliest. Isolating these texts, evidence of early Christian lives, requires a new methodology and more expeditious techniques. Building on data from the crowd-sourced transcriptions of the Ancient Lives project, we will now data mine papyri relevant to early Christianity. Furthermore, to increase the range of our dataset, we will also develop a transcription tool for Coptic, the final stage of the indigenous language of Egypt, notably used by Christians. To do so, we will implement a Coptic language version of Ancient Lives, allowing for the crowd-sourced transcription of these poorly known and unpublished texts, and, for Greek and Coptic texts, we will develop both a unique mining tool for the Ancient Lives database and a prototype basic universal search interface for scholars and interested lay people to data mine and organize Christian texts