Forthcoming Book on the Pericope of Jesus and the Adulteress

From Dave Black:

I am pleased to announce that The Pericope of the Adulteress in Modern Research has been accepted for publication in T & T Clark’s Library of New Testament Studies series. You may recall that SEBTS hosted a major conference on this topic in April of 2014.

Well, the papers have now been assembled in book form. Yours truly and my former assistant and current Th.M. student Jacob Cerone are serving as editors. Here are the contents:

Foreword:  Gail O’Day
Preface: David Alan Black
Introduction: Jacob N. Cerone
Chapter 1: John David Punch: “The Piously Offensive Pericope Adulterae”
Chapter 2: Jennifer Knust: “‘Taking Away From’: Patristic Evidence and the Omission of the Pericope Adulterae from John’s Gospel”
Chapter 3: Tommy Wasserman: “The Strange Case of the Missing Adulteress”
Chapter 4:  Chris Keith: “The Pericope Adulterae: A Theory of Attentive Insertion”
Chapter 5: Maurice Robinson: “The Pericope Adulterae: A Johannine Tapestry with Double Interlock”
Chapter 6: Larry Hurtado: “The Pericope Adulterae: Where from Here?

I’ll just say that I’m delighted that Gail O’Day agreed to write the foreword and Larry Hurtado the response. And, of course, I am grateful beyond words to T & T Clark. If this book in an way contributes to even one person coming to a better understanding of this key New Testament passage, then the conference was worth the effort a billion times over.

Houston, Inside Roman Libraries

G.W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) is an important resource.

Blurb:

Libraries of the ancient world have long held a place in the public imagination. Even in antiquity, the library at Alexandria was nearly legendary. Until now there has been relatively little research to discover what was inside these libraries, how the collections came into being and evolved, and who selected and maintained the holdings. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, George Houston examines a dozen specific book collections of Roman date in the first comprehensive attempt to answer these questions.

Through a careful analysis of the contents of the collections, Houston reveals the personalities and interests of their owners, shows how manuscripts were acquired, organized, and managed, and identifies the various purposes that libraries served. He takes up the life expectancy of manuscripts, the sizes of libraries, and dangers to books, as well as the physical objects within libraries from scribal equipment to works of art. The result is a clearer, more specific, and more detailed picture of ancient book collections and the elements of Roman libraries than has previously been possible.

Reviews: Scott G. Bruce (BMCR); Larry Hurtado blog. 

The Missing Manuscript and the Case of Variant Boundaries

[Edit: Please see the comments to find out how I was fooled by my own expectations; there is little in this post except an illustration of my misreading of the manuscript]

According to NA27/28 there is a variant at the start of Mt 10:33 (οστις δ̕ αν αρνησηται ...)

1) text οστις δ' αν

2) οστις δε (as in NA28; 1 2 as in NA27) B L 1424 pc

3) και οστις W

Quiz question: on the basis of the presented evidence, what do you think Codex Ephraemi rescriptus reads?

Since the images are online, we can check for ourselves:



Οστις δ απαρνησηται

When we look only at the first words it seems that C reads (2), οστις δε. But it also becomes clear that the variant unit as given in the pocket editions of NA27/28 cannot capture the full situation. The following verb has something to do with the variant οστις δ' αν. In some early Greek bookhands the Π and Ν are rather similar as the connecting line of the Ν between the two verticals can be quite horizontal. The presence or absence of αν is not unrelated to the presence / absence of απ- in the verb απαρνησηται.

So this is the full picture (ignoring variants in -ηται / -εται [L X 71 99 243 245 478*]):

1) text οστις δ' αν αρνησηται

2) οστις δε αρνησηται B L 517 1424 pc

3) οστις δ' απαρνησηται C

4) οστις δ' αν απαρνησηται Θ fam 1 fam 13 pc

One way in which these variants can be related to one another is to assume (2) is the origin, morphing into (3) under influence of the regularly occurring απαρνεομαι, whilst (1) is a scribal corruption of (3). The final reading is then a conflation between two secondary readings, namely (1) and (3). Of course other orders are feasible as well, for example those that start with taking the text (1) as the source of all the others. It is just that the patterns of corruption are less obvious in those orders.

Anyway, if we accept the boundaries of the variant as given in the pocket editions, C ought to be cited in support of the variant reading οστις δε. A line of support that looks like B C L 1424 has quite a bit of weight. The failure to mention C, however, is understandable in light of what follows. Shame that it requires so much work to understand C's omission from the apparatus.

R.I.P. Roger Omanson 1946 – 2015

Roger Omanson has passed away on April 30 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer at the age of 68.

Omanson devoted most of his career to bible translation with the United Bible Societies, and authored numerous articles and books including A Textual Guide to the Greek New Testament: An Adaptation of Bruce M. Metzger's Textual Commentary for the Needs of Translators (Hendrickson Publishers, 2006; see here). 

Obituaries in The Courier-Journal Obituaries and Baptist News Global.

Museum of the Bible: Interesting interview with David Trobsich

David van Biema has an interesting interview with David Trobisch: “David Trobisch lends Green family’s Bible Museum a scholarly edge”

The interview poses the question of the nature of the theological tensions between Trobisch and Steve Green as, in Trobisch’s words “two parties standing at opposite ends of the Christian spectrum talking to each other and working together”.

Cf. also here.

Texts on wood and bark

For obvious reasons we are accustomed to thinking of biblical texts on papyrus and parchment (the most obvious reason is that most biblical texts were in fact written on papyrus and parchment). Among the minuscules we also find manuscripts written on paper. We may also be vaguely aware of biblical texts written or inscribed on other material (ostraka, inscriptions etc.), which are of significant interest on the liminal margins of the book culture of early Christianity (for a survey of this material [which never once uses the word "liminal"] try this). Among OT manuscripts we also have material on lead and silver.

Two other types of material are of interest. One is the wax tablet. These are reasonably common, and were used for teaching, composition, and even semi-permanent records.

It is interesting that there are at least thirteen Greek OT texts surviving on tablets (acc. Fraenkel's Verzeichnis), including for example this one in Michigan, with Proverbs 7.3-13 in Greek - where, as appears to be generally the case, text survives because it penetrates through the wax into the wood (and the wax does not survive):

As far as I am aware (feel free to correct me), there are very few examples of tablets with text from the NT, and none in the Liste (although there is an interesting set of discussions about the compositional possibilities of wax tablets and the gospels here and here and here). For possible examples, both containing portions of the Lord's Prayer see P. Baden 4.60 (van Haelst 346); van Haelst 349 (unedited).

Another option is wood and bark strips. Perhaps the most interesting are the well known Vindolanda tablets - preserved in northern England where there was a peculiar parallel with conditions for papyri in Egypt - the papyri were preserved in Egypt because they never got wet, the Vindolanda tablets were preserved in England because they never got dry. (this one is about the fighting capabilities of the wretched Britons):

There are no biblical texts from Vindolanda, but it may well be the case that wooden surfaces were used more widely in Europe. Recently 915 texts on wood and bark were excavated from Novgorod, and among the many more there may well be Christian texts among them.