Yesterday, I heard from Juan Garces, curator of manuscripts at the British Library, that they had had 20 million hits on the Codex Sinaiticus website, after all the images of Codex Sinaiticus were released two days ago, before the website cracked down under the pressure, in spite of the fact that they had cloned it so as to redirect traffic at five or six different places (don't ask me how it works). Now it is apparently up and running again.
And I wondered yesterday when I looked at our blogstatistics why on Monday we had almost three times as many visitors as usual (and Tuesday too). Was it Bill Warren's post on pizza lacunae? Then I just realized that people are now searching for "Codex Sinaiticus" like crazy out there. Juan Garces told me he had very busy days during the conference with interviews from CNN, Reuters, etc, etc. No wonder there is now a huge interest in this treasure (but for how long). Anyway, I would prefer interest in Codex Sinaiticus over Codex Gigas, i.e., the Devil's Bible (which was the search term on this blog that drove most traffic from search engines a while ago).
Now I have arrived safely in Birmingham and will soon attend the next conference. Today the VMR is officially launched (see Peter William's previous post) and there is a special conference to celebrate the Mingana collection, and tomorrow we will have a special day on one of the GNT MSS in the Mingana collection.
I will come back to reports from the Sinaiticus conference later. I can say that it was a very nice conference with ca 200 attendees and a lot of good papers that gave many new insights, treating the codex from all sorts of aspects. I did miss Dirk Jongkind who was one of the invited speakers, but caught the flu and had to stay in bed. I look forward to the publication of the papers and I hope to read Dirk's contribution there (although I of course have his excellent monograph).
These are busy days. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a journalist at Christianity Today wanting an interview on my blogpost, A Black Day for Theology in Sweden. I don't know how I will find time for this and it has to be done no later than Thursday.
A forum for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages to discuss its manuscripts and textual history from the perspective of historic evangelical theology.
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- Peter M. Head (ed)
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- P. J. Williams, and others
Indeed, the event generated "front page" items on CNN, BBC, and the New York Times. David Parker and Juan Garces both appeared and spoke in the CNN video clip.
ReplyDeleteRight, and we just noted watching the CNN clip at the ITSEE that Hugh Houghton's head made it into the picture in the background, so now he's famous too!
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