Eighth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament5-6 March 2013

The Eighth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament is rapidly approaching, taking place in Birmingham on 5-6 March 2013.

On this page (University of Birmingham) you find just about everything you need to know (including a booking form).

Presentations during the two-day colloquium include:

• Dr Amy Anderson (North Central, MN) – Family 1 in Mark: Preliminary Results
• Dr Stephen Carlson (Uppsala) – Did Scribes Really Corrupt the Text of the New Testament? A Look at the Textual History of Galatians
• Dr Simon Crisp (Birmingham) – “Dear Dr Nestle...”: The Correspondence of Erwin Nestle with the BFBS and the ‘Nestle-Kilpatrick’ Greek New Testament Edition of 1958
• Dr Toan Do (Franklin, WI) – Ἁμάρτητε or ἁμαρτάνητε? Reading 1 John 2:1b with the CBGM
• Dr Hans Förster (Vienna) – The Text of the Gospel according to John
• Dr Jan Krans (Amsterdam) – New Testament Conjectural Emendation and the Church Fathers
• Oliver Norris (London) – Evidence of an unusual Gospel harmony in the Carmen Paschale of Sedulius
• Prof. Tom O’Loughlin (Nottingham) – Divisions as Exegesis in the Book of Revelation as found in the Book of Armagh
• Rebekka Schirner (Mainz) – Augustine as a Textual Critic of the Old and New Testament
• Ulrike Swoboda (Vienna) – The Gospel of John and its Original Readers
• Matthew Steinfeld  (Birmingham) – Origen's Text of Galatians
• Dr Satoshi Toda (Tokyo) – The Eusebian Canons
• Dr Tommy Wasserman (Örebro) – Lectio vehementior potior: Scribal Violence on Violent Texts?

Oxford Conference on Garima Gospels

There is a fascinating two-days-conference in Oxford at the beginning of November, presenting the earliest known Ethiopic Gospels, the so-called Garima Gospels. It seems that the Ethiopican dark age (roughly the 7th-11th centuries) left the text of the Ethiopic New Testament largely unharmed. See here.


Update: See Peter Head's blogpost about the Garima Gospels here.

Online lecture New Testament Textual Criticism

With some trepidation (and aware of some of the inaccuracies) I give you the promised link to the talk I gave for the Faraday Institute two weeks ago (this should lead you to the Cambridge University Media website). It was great to see Dan Batovici and Peter Head there (as well as many other friends). And yes, I use the term 'original text'. Most people understand this term better than some of the more recent proposals (intelligibility over technical precision).

Editio Critica Maior: changes between the 1st and 2nd editions

The 28^th edition of the Nestle-Aland text presents, for the Catholic Epistles, the text of the 2^nd edition of the Editio Critica Maior (not yet published). A comparison of the text of ECM¹ with the text of NA²⁸ (= ECM²) indicates that there are 13 differences between the first and second editions, as follows:

Reference	NA28 (ECM2)	ECM1
Jas 1:20	οὐ κατεργάζεται	•οὐκ ἐργάζεται•
Jas 1:22	♦μόνον ἀκροατὶ	ἀκροατὶ μόνον
Jas 2:4	καὶ οὐ διεκρίθητε	οὐ διεκρίθητε
Jas 2:15	λειπόμενοι ὦσιν	λειπόμενοι
Jas 4:10	τοῦ κυρίου	κυρίου
1 P 2:5	θεῷ	•τῷ• θεῷ
1 Pet 5:1	τοὺς	οὖν
2 P 2:18	ὄντως	•ὀλίγως•
2 P 2:20	κυρίου	•κυρίου ἡμῶν•
1 J 3:7	Παιδία	τεκνία
2 J 5	γράφων σοι καινὴν	καινὴν γράφων σοι
2 J 12	ᾖ πεπληρωμένη	πεπληρωμένη ᾖ
3 J 4	ἐν ἀληθείᾳ	ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ

It is striking that 8 of the 13 differences between the two editions are not marked by either a diamond (♦)—which “indicates passages where the guiding line is split in the second edition of the ECM, because there are two variants which in the editors’ judgement could equally well be adopted in the reconstructed initial text” (NA²⁸, “Introduction,” 55*)—or  bold dot(s), which sometimes signal alternative readings of equal value to the text and sometimes simply mark passages calling for “special critical consideration” (ECM, 24*). Furthermore, of the 5 readings that are marked by bold dots or the diamond, none are marked by both dots and a diamond.

A comparison of bold dotted and diamond readings throughout the Catholic Epistles produces the following results (all numbers subject to confirmation):

Total # of readings with diamond, dot(s), or both:           107

# of diamond readings with no corresponding dot(s):       19

# of readings with both diamond and dot(s):                      22

# of dotted readings with no corresponding diamond:       66

That is, of the 107 marked variants, only 22 (20.5%) share the diamond and dot(s), while 85 (79.5%) have either one or the other, but not both.

These numbers indicate that the means of signaling uncertainty in the text—dotted readings in ECM¹, and “split guiding line” readings in ECM² (= the diamond readings in NA²⁸) overlap in only about 1 in 5 instances. Of the 88 “dotted” readings marked in ECM¹, only 22 of them (25%) are marked in ECM²—a noticeable reduction. But at the same time, of the 41 diamond readings marked in ECM², nearly half,  19 (= 46%), are new to that edition—a substantial proportion of the whole. Finally, one must keep in view the fact that of the 13 differences between ECM¹ and ECM², 8 (61%) are not marked (with a diamond or dots) in either edition of ECM.

Mike Holmes

Islamic apologetics book on NTTC

A kind correspondent has drawn my attention to Sami Ameri's book Hunting for the Word of God, which is featured on its own website. You can watch an introductory video with its compelling music here.

Here's the outline:

Introduction

A Preserved New Testament?
Restoration of the Original Text:  A Mere Deceptive Claim
Why We Cannot Trust the Greek Manuscripts?
Why We Cannot Trust the New Testament Versions?
Can We Really Restore the Original New Testament through Patristic Citations?
Can the Witnesses Sustain Each Other?
An Ambitious goal and an Early Fail
“But That Does Not Affect the N.T. Reliability and Message!”

A Preserved Qur’ān?
The Early History of the Qur’ān
Authentication of the Qur’anic Readings
The Manuscripts in the Islamic Scale
The Testimony of the Extant Manuscripts
Wallace’s Seven Fables
Ten Shocking Facts
Small’s Delusion
Non-Muslim Scholars Testify to the Originality of the Text of the Qur’ān

Appendix:“Jesus’  Gospel”?

References

I've ordered the book for Tyndale House library. Is there anyone out there who might be interested in writing a review? No doubt they will be shocked to learn that there are actually differences between New Testament manuscripts ...

Update: See also this post about Keith Small's research on Quran MSS.

Imagining letters on parchment - Minuscule 2412

These days I am more surprised to find that a manuscript is not online than to find it is. Chicago has lots of good stuff including highres images of Minuscule 2412. Most of the pages have a white block for the main text, while the wide margins are darkish yellow. If I look long enough at the outside margins, I could nearly convince myself that we have the remains of letters here (lower margin, image 8, also some of the previous pages):

Even if the manuscript is a palimpsest (and I have heavy doubts myself), there won't be enough left to reconstruct a text and therefore be pretty useless information. I can think of some options that could explain these marks ranging from patterns within the actual parchment to marks made in the preparation of the material, or even offprints of some other page made in the process of binding. I am not sure if it is worth anyone's time, actually. It is probably as useful as looking at marginal dots.