Blog Maintenance: New Subscription Manager

Hi all. For a while the blog has used Feedburner.com to keep track of subscriber stats and to handle email subscriptions. Unfortunately, Feedburner has basically been dead in the water for some time. Recently Google announced it would drop support for the email subscription feature altogether. 

So, as of today, I have switched the ETC blog over to Follow.it to handle both features. If you currently receive the blog by email, I am working on moving your email over. So far, I’ve managed to migrate the most recent 100 subscribers but I’m waiting on someone on their staff to do the rest. (Update: All is now migrated.) If you don’t want to wait, you can always subscribe with this link—unless you’re a robot. Your ETC emails will now be delivered through Follow.it which gives you some control over how and when you get them. 

I’ve also updated the RSS icon at the top of the page to point you to Follow.it. The email subscription form in the sidebar does the same. If you want to bypass Follow.it altogether, you can still do that using the Atom link. If none of this means anything to you, you might be a robot.

Please let me know if you spot problems.

Free Book (Open Access): Georgi Parpulov’s new catalogue of catena manuscripts

This is one I’ve been looking forward to for a while.

Georgi R. Parpulov’s new book, Catena Manuscripts of the Greek New Testament: A Catalogue Texts and Studies, Third Series (Piscataway, NJ; Gorgias, 2021) is open access and has been published. The publisher’s page for the book is here, but a FREE pdf of it is available here.

I haven’t read the book in full yet, but I have been able to look at one place. I’ve had a very casual and low-priority interest in Niketas of Herakleia’s Catena in Lucam for a few years now because of one of the sources Niketas used, and when I checked the group of manuscripts I had been looking at (pp. 122–123), Parpulov lists two additional manuscripts that are members of that group that I didn't previously know about.

If you’re not familiar with Parpulov, you should be. When I see his name on the schedule of conference presentations, I usually just plan to drop whatever else I’m doing to go hear him.

As a bonus: here is another one of Parpulov’s publications that is also free: “Kr in the Gospels”, which is a must-read for anyone interested in Family 35.

Congrats, Georgi!

C.H. Spurgeon on the Preservation of Scripture

[Note: I originally wrote this post over a year ago during UK lockdown but didn't post it at the time.]

It’s no secret that for many years now, I’ve had an unhealthy obsession a healthy respect for the Last of the Puritans. I was recently working on a side project, and I had left a note for myself to “find a way to put Spurgeon in.” It was really just a joke to myself. [Update: I found a way!] Nothing wrong with an occasional irrelevant reference to the man, even if it’s against an editor’s wishes!

I decided to follow my note up and search his sermons for references to manuscripts again, and after sorting away all the references to sermon manuscripts, I came across something I had not seen before.

C. H. Spurgeon (1834–1892),
looking amused

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) preached his sermon no. 3303 “on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society” on Thursday evening, 14 May 1885. (By the way, the Bible Society has an amazing library in Cambridge.) The sermon wasn’t published right away. It was one of the posthumously-published sermons that finally came to print about twenty years after he died. Spurgeon’s text for the sermon, “A Very Early Bible Society,” is 2 Chron. 34:15, 18, 19—when Hilkiah finds the lost Book of the Law.

Spurgeon has a whole sermon point on “that Peculiar Preservation which God has extended to the Scriptures which he has inspired” (somewhat ironically, in light of the fact that he was preaching this from an instance in Scripture in which God’s Word appears to have been lost to his people for a time). I have shown elsewhere that Spurgeon spoke out at times in favor of textual criticism and even occasionally mentioned textual variants from the pulpit. Once, he even preached from a phrase that is in the Revised Version but not the King James Version because homoioteluton/visual similarity caused a phrase to be omitted in the majority of manuscripts (κληθῶμεν καὶ ἐσμέν, but κλη/και and θ/ε would be very similar in some hands as well). Spurgeon drank deeply from the wells of the Puritans and carried their intense respect of Scripture with him his whole life. He vehemently defended the reliability, truthfulness, and infallibility of the Scriptures, but he also understood that our access to God’s Word is not the same as what God’s Word is ontologically. Here, I stumbled upon a section in which Spurgeon defends the preservation of Scripture, but he also affirms that copies of Scripture have errors and can be corrected by comparing them to other copies. I quote a few sections below:

Now look you along through all the ages, and if you are a reverent believer in the Word, you will be filled with grateful wonder that the Sacred Roll has been preserved to us. Through what perils it has passed, and yet, as I believe, there is not a chapter of it lost; nay, nor a verse of any chapter. The misreadings of the copies are really so inconsiderable, and are so happily corrected by other manuscripts, that our Bible is a marvel in literature for the comparative ease with which the correct text is discoverable. It seems to me that God’s divine care has extended itself to the whole text, so that, with far less care than would be needed by any classic author, the very words of the Holy Spirit may be known. As the wings of cherubim overshadowed the mercy-seat, so do the wings of providence protect the Book of the Lord. As Michael guarded the body of Moses, so does a divine care secure the Books of Moses. I invite lovers of history and of famous books to look into the interesting story of the immortality of Scripture. Let us think of that special preservation with reverent gratitude.

Quickly, note here that Spurgeon does imply that the “correct text” does need to be discovered, but God’s preservation is evident in the “comparative ease with which” that is done: “with far less care than would be needed by any classical author.” In apologetics terms, Spurgeon is giving an early version of the comparison of the Bible/New Testament with classical literature, perhaps most famously made by F.F. Bruce and recently discussed by James B. Prothro.

Review of Falcetta’s Bio of J. Rendel Harris

The new issue of BBR has my review of Alessandro Falcetta’s The Daily Discoveries of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter: A Biography of James Rendel Harris. It’s an account thick with detail of a life marked by some remarkable adventures. The man survived not one but two German U-Boat attacks and “discovered” the Odes of Solomon in his own office!

One feature I wished for in the book was a bit more of Rendel’s own voice. Falcetta appears to have worked through all the personal correspondence and there were times I would have liked to hear them rather than Falcetta’s summary of them. One other thing I didn’t mention in the review is the extreme price. Thankfully, I noticed today that the publisher has put out a much more affordable paperback edition. It’s worth a read.

You can read the review here.