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Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32.5 (2010)

and literary features, Aasgaard identifies a broad range of narrative tools which demonstrate 'that IGT has considerable narrative quality' (p. 52). The assumed social setting is seen as potentially accounting for the literary register of the text. The study detects resonances with eastern Mediterranean village culture, and consequently it is argued that the text reflects 'a rural village world, inhabited by a free, variously well-to-do, but overall thriving population'middle class' people occupied with agriculture and artisan work' (p. 71). While some of the pericopae in the text may appear bizarre to modern sensibilities, it is argued that in fact they provide 'a picture of Jesus very much in accordance with what was likely to be the process of maturing and gender adaptation for a male child' (p. 112). There follow discussions of intertextuality, comments upon a number of the strange sayings, analysis of the text's theological profile, and evaluation of the impact of Christianity's first children's story. The various appendices provide, among other features, a handy edition of the Greek text mainly from Codex Sabaiticus, and an English translation. This is an important and rich study of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which advances some previous lines of scholarly enquiry, but also raises a number of fresh and highly significant questions. Paul Foster The Earliest Christian Hymnbook: The Odes of Solomon James H. Charlesworth, ed. & trans.
CaC; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009, 978-1-60608-646-9, $20.00, xxxvii + 134 pb

Despite his many wide-ranging achievements, Charlesworth has maintained an interest in the Odes since his doctoral work. The present book is an attractively produced translation of the Odes with a fairly long introduction. This introduction has a devotional tone, in keeping with the aims of The Odes Project (www.theodesproject.com), which aims to introduce the Odes as worship material for the church. Charlesworth promotes the Odist as 'the Poet Laureate of Earliest Christianity' (p. xxxv), although that is slightly at odds with Charlesworth's view (contra, e.g., Emerton) that the Odes were written in different milieux across many decades (p. xxii, which calls for research into the date of each ode). Charlesworth goes over the standard introductory issues, such as date (early second century) and original language (Syriac, though this is less widely held now than when Charlesworth began his work on the Odes: witness, e.g., Lattke's new Hermeneia commentary). Charlesworth also provides a classification of the origins of the different odes into 'Jewish' or 'Christian' or 'proto-Gnostic', sometimes more than one of these, in the case of Ode 30, all three. There are also footnotes with cross-references to other early Jewish and Christian literature, many of which are reproduced from Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2. Overall, despite the title (wasn't the Psalter the 'earliest Christian hymnbook'?), there is no great sensationalizing. It is interesting, however, that the section on the 'Importance of the Odes' is almost entirely taken up with the significance of their feminine imagery (pp. xxxii-xxxiv). Reassuringly, the translation is not

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simply cut-and-pasted from OTP 2, but has been revised (even if there is rarely any significant change). A lot of the notes, however, are imported wholesale from Charlesworth's OTP 2 notes. It is interesting to note this more public profile of the Odes in the eponymous Project the present volume may well continue to evoke interest for a wider audience, even if there are also references which might not be so accessible to the intended lay readership, such as the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (p. 14) and Tertulliano De oratione (p. 102). The present volume will not be a must-buy for most readers of the booklist, who probably own either the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha or Sparks's Apocryphal Old Testament (with J.A. Emerton's translation). Simon J. Gathercole Early Christian Books in Egypt Roger S. Bagnali
Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2009, 978-9-691-14026-1, 20.95, ix + 110 hb

The present volume is a masterly distillation of Bagnall's thoughts on a range of issues related to the title. Chapter 1 questions claims of second-century dates for papyri, orthodox or heterodox, but Bagnali does not think this should cause worry: statistical data about relative pagan-Christian populations and pagan-Christian books in second-century Egypt lead to the conclusion that one Christian manuscript from this time would be a reasonable expectation. Bagnali then provides two 'case studies' of scholarly datings of papyri. The notorious use of phoney parallels in Thiede's first-century dating for the Magdalen Papyrus is instructive, as is the legitimate scholarly disagreement over dating the fragments o Hermas. Thereafter, a chapter on the economics of book production will be less relevant to readers of this journal, since useful evidence only really becomes available in the sixth century. Finally, Bagnali reinforces existing observations about Christian use of the codex for (broadly) scriptural texts (while stressing that non-Christians also used codices extensively), and speculates that the codex format may have nothing to do with the its ability to hold a fourfold Gospel or a Pauline letter collection, and be more a matter of Romanization, given that the codex was probably of Roman origin and association. This book confirms that not many, if any, know more about this subject than Roger Bagnali. It has a number of merits, not least that it is very short. Overall, it is an extremely useful book, which should press scholars to greater precision dating NT papyri in the future. The material is presented marvellously clearly, with difficult statistical data arranged accessibly in tabular form. Bagnali is pretty ruthless with views differing from his own, while some of his own arguments are rather speculative: in general (e.g. on the book-buying class emerging in the early third century), he admits this fact, but on the number of Christians in Egypt he is probably on less secure ground. Overall, however, this superb book is a must-read for anyone interested in the matters upon which it touches. Simon J. Gathercole

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