I am blogging from Oslo Central station (Burger King wireless). I have just been to Menighetsfakultetet here in Oslo, Norway, to teach New Testament textual criticism for two days, and it has been a treat. The auditorium was practically full; in the audience were professors, including my very hospitable host Karl Olav Sandnes who had invited me, and graduate and postgraduate students. They were all very interested in the subject and I did my best to increase that interest. I normally bring with me some "artefacts", i.e., various facsimiles, papyrus, ink and reed pen, images of MSS, etc. I had also prepared quite an extensive power point presentation with a lot of images and examples. They enjoyed my various anecdotes, which I cannot resist telling, not least the one about the famous Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen (see here). I also mentioned that when Maurice Robinson was there in Oslo to examine Greg.-Aland 2866 (which I subsequently identified as Greg.-Aland 2483), and had made an appointment with Schøyen at his house, he just came back from a ski tour (this is very typical for the Norwegians, "gå på tur").
The first day was focused on the history of textual criticism leading up to recent developments. The second day was focused on the practice of textual criticism, the nature of various apparatuses (NA27, UBS GNT, ECM, Swanson) and tools. The students spent some time transcribing and collating manuscripts from images and we considered textual problems in Mark 1:1; John 1:3-4; Rom 5:1; Rev 13:18 ("the number of the beast" - here we also considered Irenaeus' discussion of the problem).However, we started the second day of practical textual criticism with an instruction video (in Norwegian):
After the teaching, I went to the very nice little exhibition in the university library of their fine papyrus collection where I saw Greg.-Aland P62. But more about that in another post.