At the SBL meeting in Atlanta, we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the blog at the annual ETC blogdinner, and the founding father Peter Williams held a speech looking back at the ten years and ahead into the future. Incidentally, we celebrated the 5-year anniversary at the SBL meeting 2010, held in Atlanta too.We did not make much of the 10-year anniversary here on the blog, but I thought it would be nice to note a few things (better late than never):
1. The blog started out on 14 Oct 2005 when Peter Williams wrote the first blogpost: “What this blog is about”. In his Atlanta speeach, Peter told us that he had not planned to found the blog, it was a spur of the moment thing which he did because he was angry – particularly at Bart Ehrman's views on the NT text (Pete's subsequent review of Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is our most popular blogpost ever).
Peter Head wrote his first blogpost on 26 Oct, although he had already made pertinent and characteristic comments to the first post:
"I think a white background would be more appropriate for an evangelical blog:
a) more echoes of positive biblical symbolism;
b) better approximation to brightness of original manuscripts (both parchment and papyrus);
c) better reflection of the history of the Bible as a published book;
d) I could probably read it without squinting."
2. The ETC blog had a very different lay-out in the beginning, first briefly with a black background, but then for a few years with old burgundy and white letters (a combination which caused problems to some readers). You can see what it looked like here (by this time in Nov 2005 I had joined the blog and we were eleven contributors).
3. In the end of 2006, blogmeister Williams was appointed the new warden of Tyndale House, and from about that time he handed over the main responsibility for the blog to Peter Head and myself.
4. In 2009 we made some updates to the design and experiments with colors and design. We kept the old burgundy in the header and the letters, but now it was more reader friendly, see here.
5. In October 2014, Peter Gurry, PhD student in Cambridge, joined the blog and helped us give it the current nice new look.
6. At this point we have posted 2385 posts on various topics in textual criticism and other stuff, and, according to Blogger, for what its worth, we have had 2684329 pageviews. As you can see in the sidebar, the top 5 posts in our history are:
- Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus
- Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism
- Jesus Had a Sister-in-Law
- Breaking News on the First-Century (?) Fragment of Mark
- The forgery of the Lycopolitan gospel of John
I for one am deeply indebted to the contributors to this blog! I look forward to the next decade!
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