Greek Teachers Study Day at the British Library

Yesterday I attended a Study Day for Teachers of New Testament/Koine Greek (for info on previous days see here). From the Greek teaching side we had presentations on teaching syntax to second year students, deponent verbs to first years, and how to handle principle parts in teaching Greek, as well as some impromptu sharing of good practice. But that may not interest readers as much as the NT manuscripts we saw.
On two previous study days I have given talks about ways of introducing textual criticism and reading manuscripts into Introductory and Intermediate Greek teaching. So I was pleased that yesterday's Study Day took place at the British Library and featured a presentation on NT manuscripts in the British Library (with special reference to the new Sinaiticus project, which has been noted here periodically) and a brief showing of a number of interesting manuscripts in the afternoon.
One of the things mentioned by Scot McKendrick was that the BL digital catalogue of illuminated manuscripts is online and explanding (here). This interprets "illuminated" very generously and so provides images of manuscripts with will take in not only portraits and other such illuminations, but anything remotely decorative (such as decorated initial letters, canon tables etc.). For example images of the decorations in the binding of NT ms 700 (Egerton 2610) are on-line and for some manuscripts with 'proper' portraits there are also images of straight-forward text pages too (e.g. ms 481; Burney 19).
Typing "Gospels" gets 83 results so there are riches here (and more to come as the catalogue gets to be complete).

Information about manuscripts are also available in the general on-line manuscript catalogue (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/INDEX.asp). Some of these are pretty brief.

It was great to see a good variety of manuscripts (from over 200 Greek NT manuscripts in the BL); yesterday we saw:
P5 (BL Pap. 782 + 2484)
P13 (BL Pap. 1532v)
P18 (BL Pap. 2053v)
R/027 (BL Add. MS 17211)
81 (BL Add. MS 20003)
700 (BL Egerton 2610)
l181 (a majuscule lectionary, AD 980; don't have note of BL ref)

And some LXX texts:
Rahlfs 907 (BL Pap. 2047)
Rahlfs 2051 (BL Pap 2556)
Rahlfs U (Psalms)
Rahlfs 952 (Song of Solomon and Aristides)

And P. Egerton 2.


So thanks to the organising committee (Steve Walton, Jane McLarty, Geoffrey Williams) and the local hosts (Scot McKendrick and Juan Garcés).