David Horrell on Insights from the Earliest Manuscripts of 1 Peter

The latest NTS includes an article by David G. Horrell entitled 'The Themes of 1 Peter: Insights from the Earliest Manuscripts (the Crosby-Schøyen Codex ms 193 and the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex containing P72)' which is an interesting attempt to look at the early reception of 1 Peter through a close investigation of the manuscripts as a whole.

More Leaves of Sinaiticus

A new leaf from Codex Sinaiticus has been found, as I have reported earlier here and here.

Paul Foster drew my attention to a news article on this discovery in the Independent today:

A Greek student conservator who is studying for his PhD in Britain, Mr Sarris had been involved in the British Library's project to digitise the Codex and quickly recognised the distinct Greek lettering when he saw it poking through a section of the book binding. Speaking from the Greek island of Patmos yesterday, Mr Sarris said: "It was a really exciting moment. Although it is not my area of expertise, I had helped with the online project so the Codex had been heavily imprinted in my memory. I began checking the height of the letters and the columns and quickly realised we were looking at an unseen part of the Codex."

Mr Sarris later emailed Father Justin, the monastery's librarian, to suggest he take a closer look at the book binding. "Even if there is a one-in-a-million possibility that it could be a Sinaiticus fragment that has escaped our attention, I thought it would be best to say it rather than dismiss it."

Only a quarter of the fragment is visible through the book binding but after closer inspection, Father Justin was able to confirm that a previously unseen section of the Codex had indeed been found. The fragment is believed to be the beginning of Joshua, Chapter 1, Verse 10, in which Joshua admonishes the children of Israel as they enter the promised land.

Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Father Justin said the monastery would use scanners to look more closely at how much of the fragment existed under the newer book binding. "Modern technology should allow us to examine the binding in a non-invasive manner," he said.

Mr Sarris said his find was particularly significant because there were at least 18 other book bindings in the monastery's library that were compiled by the same two monks that had re-used the Codex. "We don't know whether we will find more of the Codex in those books but it would definitely be worth looking," he said.

Now let's hope for more leaves to be found!

Read the whole story here.

John 14:17c

Jim Hamilton draws my attention to his extended discussion of the text of John 14:17c in James M. Hamilton Jr., "Appendix 2: 'He Is with You, and He Is in You?' The Text of John 14:17c," in God's Indwelling Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments (NACSBT; Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2006), 175–82.

Aland's Kurzgefasste Liste On-line Soon

Ulrich Schmid of the INTF just announced in a comment to a previous post that a database version of the Kurzgefasste Liste der griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments (ed. Kurt Aland) will be published on-line soon, perhaps by the end of September. This will allow fantastic new possibilities of doing simple or advanced searches among the catalogued MSS, including, for example, new search fields with information like "exemplar of" and "copied from." New information on individual items can be added continuously, I suppose under editorial supervision.

We very much look forward to this on-line tool!

Biblioblog Top 50 for August 2009

The biblioblog top 50 for the month of August 2009 is up. Jim West is the top blogger for the 6th month in a row. Congratulations! Jim is quite active in the blogosphere — there are no less than ten posts on his blog from yesterday! This blog has moved up one slot to 27th place. It seems we have a stable readership and that is nice.

Apart from the top 50-list there are almost 250 additional biblioblogs listed. It seems like very hard work to produce all these statistics. This time some "metabiblioblogs" like the biblioblogtop50 blog itself has been removed from the list: "We [the blogeditors] were meaning to say that we had dropped the ‘meta-biblioblogs’ (us, and biblioblogs.com) from the listing. It was all getting a bit incestuous." If it had been included it would, according to Alexa statistics, have been listed as no. 8 (so that is the explanation why this blog moved up one place...).

Review of Parker's Introduction

In the latest Review of Biblical Literature we find a review of David Parker's An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts by Matteo Grosso. Recently, I met Matteo at the SBL in Rome, where he presented a paper. He is very appreciative of Parker's approach, although, like most other reviewers, he points out that this is not an actual handbook to NT TC:

[T]he most original features of this work pertain to its content. Certainly, this is not a handbook of New Testament textual criticism as such a genre has been traditionally conceived. Being rather An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts from a certain point of view, it offers much more: it starts from the specific treatment of the actual tradents of the New Testament text (the manuscripts), then covers the principal problems of the discipline. It is not just a matter of internal organization: the priority bestowed by the author to the manuscripts is palpable all through the book. Coherent with Westcott and Hort’s golden rule, according to which “Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings,” which Parker states in capital letters as early as page 2, his approach grants a special focus on the artifacts that carry the New Testament texts and the many ways to deal with them. In doing so, he effectively avoids the always impending danger of overlooking the fact that the text of the New Testament, as reconstructed in the various critical editions in use, is an abstract entity, while it existed (and exists) concretely in many different forms.

Read the whole review here.

In the same issue of RBL a review of Reuben J. Swanson's, Reflections on Biblical Themes by an Octogenarian, by Peter Penner may be of interest. There is an essay by Swanson that deals with textual criticism. Penner writes:

Textual Criticism”: The essay on text criticism is another helpful tool that the author has used with students and ministers interested in the topic of textual criticism. A helpful introduction, illustrations that challenge the reader, and solid work with Greek texts offer much help to the reader who looks for a good initiation to the area. The content demonstrates deep knowledge and years of Swanson’s experience in this field of New Testament scholarly work, even when one could disagree on the interpretation and the outcomes of the argument.