ABSTRACT
The story of Euplus signals to us that Christians were already, by the turn of the fourth century, known as a "bookish" people. The contemporary fields of material scripture and book history have complicated those understandings and undermined latent assumptions about the bible, by drawing attention to the forms and history of mediation of the text, and the development of a particularly Christian book culture. The first and most obvious instance of textual practices among Jews and Christians is the act of interpreting those texts—chiefly, biblical texts. Another manuscript that challenges many scholarly notions of what ancient texts ought to be like is POxy 1075, a fragment of a third century papyrus roll discovered in Oxyrhynchus. When "magic" was encountered in what were otherwise fields of "religion," as in Christian or Jewish texts or practices, then the magical dimensions were emphasized and the religious dimensions marginalized.
