The literary scholar Gérard Genette characterised a paratext as the ‘means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers’.Footnote ¹ Manuscripts of the New Testament frequently involve rich paratexts that frame and tease out its meanings; that is Garrick Allen’s focus in this lucid, enjoyable book.

To illustrate the force of paratextual framing, Allen details the modern examples of The Schofield Bible and The Green Bible. His dislike of Schofield’s approach extends to a handling of his example, Matthew 24, which sometimes seems dismissive, as when he refers to the passage as a ‘pep talk’ (p. 18; cf. p. 69, where he refers to Jesus’ ‘loquacious blessing’ of Peter). Such asides fortunately do not typify the approach of the volume as a whole. More representative is the discussion, brief but telling, of how the Schofield and Green paratexts may be compared to the presentation of the twelfth-century manuscript, GA 2604 (Dublin, CBL W 139, diktyon 13571). Allen knows this witness well and skilfully acquaints the reader with it during the course of his book. One of his recurrent observations is that print culture has impoverished paratextual imagination, a reflection that readers might wish to fill out by recourse to the contributions of Werner Kelber (e.g., Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory: Collected Essays of Werner H. Kelber [2013]).

Titles are powerful examples of paratexts, and in the case of the New Testament, their changeability offers rewarding matter for investigation. That is a topic in which Allen has invested himself, and he here brings out examples of the treasures he has stored. Cross-referencing is paratextual, and Allen’s treatment of the Eusebian canon tables is a wonder of clarity. He then compares those Gospel paratexts to the Euthalian tradition for Acts, the Catholic epistles and Paul’s letters. As a whole, he concludes this section by asserting that paratexts ‘make canons’, a claim that might be put in dialogue with the view that canons are themselves an example of paratextual framing.

Bibles, both old and new, include various kinds of prefaces. Allen deals with them as a group, but then makes clear that they vary in form and function, especially by way of example from GA 2604. That collection of Gospels is followed by a treatment of Acts, the Catholic epistles and Paul’s letters in GA 1162 (Patmos, St. John the Theologian Monastery, 15, diktyon 54259). This provides for balance not only in regard to content (in a field that tends to skew towards the Gospels) but also in regard to the Euthalian and Eusebian traditions.

Allen also calls attention to the paratextual concern for pronunciation, a natural interest when lections are indicated, and an indication of the intersection of written and oral activity that merits closer attention. Paratextual engagement with issues of how texts are heard may reflect a larger dynamic, articulated by Matthew D. C. Larsen: ‘the fluidity of the oral performance and the fluidity of textual production are mutually beneficial and connected in a process that is not unilateral’.Footnote ² GA 1162 lists the ‘divine testimonies’ in Acts, in which citations of the Scriptures of Israel are meant, but also Matthew, the Apostolic Constitutions and Aratus the Astronomer. Allen thinks of this material as ‘the earliest explicit engagement with the use of Jewish scriptures in the New Testament’. The explicitness of the list is presumably the emphasis he intends, since it is in fact part of a larger tradition; the treatment of the lists is on the whole informative.

Given the purview of the book, I was pleasantly surprised to find a treatment of the Johannine comma, and it is a very informative one, illustrating the power of a paratextual approach in evaluating the text that is to be read. The remainder of the discussion takes up lines of investigation that might be pursued further, situating the book within the orientation of Westcott and Hort that ‘knowledge of documents should precede final judgments upon readings’.Footnote ³ Once that advice seemed impracticable in view of the relative inaccessibility of those documents. But digitisation has been promising and might deliver an environment of learning in which more of us can take part in consulting materials, and benefit from advice such as Garrick Allen offers in this inviting and nicely illustrated book.