This is a little bit weird and a little bit wonderful. Christians in a small town in America got up on Easter Sunday and wrote the entire New Testament in chalk on the town's sidewalks. Fantastic. Report here. (HT: JB)
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.
- Contributors
- Peter M. Head (ed)
- Tommy Wasserman (ed)
- P. J. Williams, and others
it'd be interesting to study scribal habits therein.
ReplyDeleteDue to the ephemeral nature of the manuscript(s), it's already too late to do any textual examination. But I do offer the hypothesis that there were more scribal errors than if they had used a modern language version.
ReplyDeleteGreek manuscripts from peripheral areas tend to bear this out.
Daniel, is your hypothesis based on unfamiliarity with the language of the King James Version in comparison with that of modern versions? I'm not as familiar with scribal habits in manuscripts from the areas of which you speak.
ReplyDeleteThis took place in a small town in the South. The King James Version is still THE Bible in many rural southern churches and communities, and the language of the KJV is often the "liturgical language." Knowing how dominant the KJV is in places like this, and knowing how often I start quoting a verse in the ESV and finish it in the KJV (even after using the ESV for years!), I would actually expect there to be more errors if they had used a modern translation, than the KJV.
That's the Word on the street.
ReplyDeleteWhile the medium was ephemeral, a facsimile copy was made before the original was destroyed in a "flood".
ReplyDeletehttp://whiteville.mycapture.com/mycapture/category.asp?eventID=1448092&CategoryID=17557
You can complete your textual analysis for only $25/sidewalk panel. I think that makes the whole New Testament only about $25,000... about 4-5x what the 1999 Vaticanus facsimile will cost you;).
bob