Blogdinner Nostalgia

I have just written a speech for ETC blogdinner tonight in Boston, when we will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of this blog and we will have a big anniversaryquiz where guests can win fine bookprices. 

Here are a few random images from past blogdinners for the sake of pure nostalgia. I cannot remember when exactly we had our first blogdinner, but I said we broke a new record in New Orleans 2009 with 35 participants so that was not the first. The first photo shows Peter Head preparing his legendary blogdinner address – spiritual, witty and starting out from a Greek text read from his well-worn Novum Testamentum Graece. Normally, they were written a few minutes before delivery, and sometimes, I think, on a handkerchief (that might be my improvement of a good story).

 ETC blogdinner, New Orleans 2009

 

 

ETC blogdinner, New Orleans 2013 

 

 

ETC blogdinner Atlanta 2015 (10th anniversary speech)

   

ETC blogdinner Denver 2018 (first one with a quiz)

2025 Blog Dinner Tickets

Here are details for our annual SBL blog dinner. This year is a big one since its our 20th anniversary as a blog! It will be Sunday night at 7:15pm at Tremont Temple Baptist Church. That’s about 1.5 miles from the convention center. Yes, it does mean missing the Cambridge reception, but it’s worth it. As always, everyone is welcome, even those who don’t love textual criticism or Donald Trump.

Details

There doesn’t seem to be a NT text criticism session Sunday night. That means we will probably not be able to easily travel as a group to the church. So just plan to meet there.

• Cost: $28.75 (includes pizza, Baptist drinks, salad, and fees); no tip needed unless you really like my jokes!
• Time: 7:15pm–9:30pm on Sunday, November 23rd
• Place: Tremont Temple Baptist Church, 88 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02108
• Emcee: Probably me unless I can convince John Meade to come and use his Boston accent
• Giveaways: hopefully some books will be given away!

Special Requests

• Car: if anyone will have a car at SBL that you could use to help us pick up the pizzas, could you email me? That would be a huge help and we will give you a free ticket too. We got one, thanks!
• Allergies: If you need gluten or dairy free pizza, can you let us know in the comments? Peter Montoro is willing to accomodate those but only if he knows ahead of time.

Buy Tickets

Thanks

Special thanks to Peter Montoro for finding the venue and to the pastors at the church for hosting us on such short notice.

Lunch at ETS!

It's that time of year again. We've been emailing behind the scenes about an SBL blog dinner and have yet to come up with a solution, but rest assured, we're working on it. That being said, we know that some people come to ETS and not SBL, and we want to have an opportunity to get together with this crowd, too.

May I propose that we all walk to some place nearby for lunch on Wednesday, 19 November after the TC/Canon section on Christology in the Apocryphal Gospels that morning (according to the ETS app: Copley Place - Fourth Floor: Hyannis). We'll plan on leaving at 11:45 AM, so be there and plan accordingly. On the map, I saw a Raising Cane's and a Shake Shack nearby. I'm sure there are other good places as well, and having our lunch on Wednesday will give us the day before to walk around and get some good ideas for where to go. Legend has it that the Wizard of Byz might even make an appearance.

New Novel by Peter Rodgers

I announce the publication of my fourth and final historical novel in the Scribes series, entitled "The Star of the East." It is set mostly in Ephesus, and  features the developing text of both the Greek New Testament and the Greek Old Testament (LXX) and the versions, Aquila, Symmachus and especially Theodotion. Notes at the end of the novel offer the reader the opportunity to learn more about the text and the late second century church and empire.

from the back cover:

The Star of the East: Nathan was a Jewish Christian scribe in the church of Rome. In 189 AD he was asked by his bishop to travel to Ephesus (with his colleague Justin) to represent the Roman church in its growing controversy with the eastern churches over the date for the celebration of Easter. Nathan is also charged with the task of reviewing the new translation of the Old Testament in Greek being prepared by Theodotion of Ephesus with the assistance of his granddaughter, Miriam. Follow Nathan as he discovers new challenges to the church’s unity, new approaches to the text and language of scripture, growing tensions between the church and the synagogue, and a friendship that would forever change his life. (Amazon, KDP, 2025)

Peter Rodgers

New issue: TC Journal 30 (2025) at a New Home

Big News about TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 

 

The TC journal has now begun migrating to a new homepage alongside Journal of Biblical Literature and Review of Biblical Literature at the Scholarly Publishing Collective and in terms of layout it has gone through an extreme make-over taking it from the 1990's into the 2020's in terms of appearance and accessibility.

 

 

The current volume 30 has just been published on the new homepage and all previous issues will migrate in the coming weeks. The journal was started by Jimmy Adair in 1996 and is one of the first open access academic electronic journals in the world. Personally I started working on this journal from the SBL meeting in 2009 and soon became senior editor. This also happens to be the journal in which I published my own first academic article back in 2002.

The 2025 volume contains five articles and four notes, and there will also be a number of reviews and a review article soon to be added. As ever, all content is open access.

ARTICLES

The Greek Subscriptions to Hebrews and the Position of the Letter in the Corpus Paulinum

Christian Schøler Holmgaard

Altered, Not Antique: The Latinized Greek Text of 1 Corinthians in GA 629

Andrew J. Patton

 

The Crux of Psalm 22:17: At the Crossroads of Textual and Literary Criticism

Seth D. Postell; Joseph L. Justiss

 

Otto Thenius and Zacharias Frankel on the Text of the Books of Samuel

Theo A.W. van der Louw

 

Revisiting GA 205 and 2886 in the Gospel of Mark: History, Reception, and Text

Matthew Whidden

 

Notes

A Note on the “Sons of God” in Latin Quotations of Deut 32:8d

Chrissy M. Hansen

 

Reuniting Codex Angus (GA L2378) with Its Lost Bifolium

Hefin J. Jones

 

Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Response to Richard Fellows

Elizabeth Schrader Polczer

 

The Presence of Martha in the Archetype of the Bethany Narrative in John: A Counter-Response to Elizabeth Schrader Polczer

Richard G. Fellows

Note on Job 30:28 in the Complutensian Polyglot

Today, I'm finalizing my ETS/SBL paper reviewing Biblia Hebraica Quinta Job (2024) and its use and citation of the Greek versions. For the most part, the editor, Robert Althann, conservatively follows Ziegler's Göttingen Iob (noting the few places where prior scholarship already corrected Ziegler). But in one place that I found, he decided to go his own way and suggested that Ziegler's reconstructed text is actually the variant, and the text in the apparatus should be considered the Old Greek.

The text in just about every Greek manuscript and daughter version reads στένων πεπόρευμαι ἄνευ φιμοῦ, ἕστηκα δὲ ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ κεκραγώς “groaning without restraint I walked about, and I stood in the assembly crying out.” The Hebrew reads “I go about darkened, but not by the sun (בְּלֹא חַמָּה); I stand in the assembly and cry for help.” Rashi and the Targum confirm the reading of MT. On the other hand, Vulgate, Peshitta, and Symmachus (ἀθυμῶν) read חַמָּה “the sun” as חֵמָה “without heat, anger.”

In short, Althann proposes that the original translation had ἄνευ θυμοῦ “without anger” but was corrupted to ἄνευ φιμοῦ. The only evidence for this reading is the insignificant catena manuscript (Ra 523), Iulian's commentary, and the Complutensian Polyglot (!). As I was reviewing the Polyglot, I couldn't help but notice that the Vulgate's (sine furore) “without anger” was also the text of the newly prepared interlinear Latin translation of the Greek, which must have been corrected to read ἄνευ θυμοῦ “without anger.” Given the evidence, it seems the editor of the Comp Pol corrected the Greek of the Seventy towards the Latin of the Vulgate.

It turns out, Ziegler had already concluded similarly about the Comp. Pol. here and in Job 38:30 in his Einleitung (p. 57), “In his revision according to M, the editor consulted the Vulgate in several places.” Although the Greek manuscripts for parts of the Comp. Pol. are unknown, in the case of Job at least, we know that Cardinal Ximenes used the manuscript Rahlfs 248 loaned to him by the Vatican which had ἄνευ φιμοῦ.

Thus, the editors of the Comp. Pol. did not simply print the text of their manuscript. They made corrections towards the Hebrew, probably via the Latin Vulgate as well as the many marginal readings of the Three Jewish revisers in Rahlfs 248. Althann's suggestion, based on Schleusner's own proposal, is probably to be rejected in light of this evidence. But I'm always happy to entertain and investigate new proposals like these, especially ones based on a plausible and known Hebrew source as BHQ attempted to do in this case.

---

UPDATE

BHQ followed Critique textuelle de l'Ancien Testament (vol. 5, p. 289) for this suggested correction to Ziegler's Iob. But CTAT does not engage Ziegler's Einleitung on the Complutensian Polyglot either.

The Blog Dinner Is On

Good news! After no small difficulty in finding a place to host us for the annual blog dinner, we think we have found a place. We are still working out details on the price, so stay tuned for ticket sales, which we hope to come out under $30. 

In the meantime, mark your calendars for Sunday, November 23, 2025 at Tremont Temple Baptist Church at 7:15pm. That should give us time to get to the church from the last TC session that evening. 

The address is 88 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02108. The church is about 1.5 miles from the Hynes Convention Center. That’s a 30 minute walk for us non-Olympian walkers. I’m sorry for that but it’s the best we could do. (Some of us from warmer climates may need to Uber to survive.)

We do hope many of you can make it as this is our 20th anniversary as a blog and the dinner is always the highlight of SBL for many of us. 

A special thanks to Christian Askeland and Peter Montoro for working on this!

Peter Martyr Vermigli on 1 John 5:7

I was just doing some reading in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Commonplaces tonight and came across his treatment of 1 John 5:7–8. Vermigli (1499–1562) was a major Italian Reformer who seems to be gaining renewed appreciation today. 

In his section defending the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he brings up 1 John 5:7. What caught my attention is that he does not think he needs the Comma to prove the Trinity since he finds everything he needs theologically in the part of the text that is not in question. What’s interesting about this is that this same trinitarian interpretation of the three (earthly) witnesses is the most likely cause the the clause about the three heavenly witnesses. In other words, because Vermigli follows the early interpretation of 1 John 5:7–8, he does not need to follow the later text of it to prove his point. Had later theologians followed his lead, the debate about these verses might have been far less extended and acrimonious.

Here’s his discussion. The full source is here.

The Oxford Handbook of the Textual Criticism of the Bible, eds. Crawford & Wasserman

Any day now, Oxford University Press will publish The Oxford Handbook of the Textual Criticism of the Bible edited by Sidnie White Crawford and myself. I think we began working on this handbook in 2019, and there were many hurdles along the way, but soon I will hold the volume in my hand. Hopefully, the OUP will bring some copies to the SBL in Boston, but you can never be sure. In the meantime you can get 30% off with the promotion code AUFLY30 (enter code at checkout) at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-textual-criticism-of-the-bible-9780197581315.

Below the flyer, I have pasted the table of contents (minus page numbers).

It is possible to read a bit on google books (e.g., the whole introduction which summarizes the chapters). 

  

Introduction

Sidnie White Crawford,

Tommy Wasserman

 

PART I OVERARCHING ISSUES

 

1. The Formation of the Jewish Canon

James C. VanderKam

 

2. The Formation of the Christian Canon

John D. Meade

 

3. Philosophies of Textual Criticism for the Hebrew Bible

Ronald Hendel

 

4. Beyond “Textual” and “Literary” Criticism: A New Paradigm for the Study of Textual History

Molly M. Zahn

 

5. Philosophies of Textual Criticism for the New Testament

Michael W. Holmes

 

6. Book History, New/ Material Philology, and Paratextual Criticism

David Davage and Liv Ingeborg Lied

 

PART II THE HEBREW BIBLE AND THE DEUTEROCANON

 

7. The History of Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century

Eugene Ulrich and Sidnie White Crawford

 

8. The Earliest Texts of the Hebrew Bible

Emanuel Tov

 

9. The Masoretic Text and Its Value for Textual Criticism of the

Hebrew Bible

Armin Lange

 

10. The Significance of the Septuagint in the Textual Study of the Hebrew Bible

Anneli Aejmelaeus

 

11. The Samaritan Pentateuch and Its Value for Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Hila Dayfani

 

12. The Syriac Peshitta and Its Value for Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Bradley J. Marsh Jr.

 

13. The Latin Versions and Their Value for Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Andrés Piquer Otero and Pablo A. Torijano

 

14. The Targumim and Their Value for Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Leeor Gottlieb

 

15. Editing the Hebrew Bible: Biblia Hebraica Quinta

Innocent Himbaza

 

16. Editing the Hebrew Bible: The Hebrew University Bible Project

Michael Segal

 

17. Editing the Hebrew Bible: The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition

Ronald Hendel

 

18. Teaching Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

John Screnock

 

19. The Theory and Practice of Textual Criticism of the Septuagint

Tuukka Kauhanen

 

20. The Practice of Hebrew Bible Textual Criticism in the

Twenty- First Century

Drew Longacre

 

21. Issues in the Textual Criticism of the Deuterocanon

Benjamin G. Wright III

 

PART III THE NEW TESTAMENT

 

22. The Practice of New Testament Textual Criticism in the Twenty- First Century

H. A. G. Houghton

 

23. The History of New Testament Textual Criticism

Jan Krans and An- Ting Yi

 

24. The Dating of Early Christian Manuscripts: Paleography and Material Culture

Pasquale Orsini

 

25. Text- Types and the Coherence- Based Genealogical Method

Peter J. Gurry

 

26. The Greek New Testament Manuscripts and Other Witnesses

Elijah Hixson

 

27. The Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic Versions of the New Testament

Andreas Juckel

 

28. The Latin Versions of the New Testament

Georg Gäbel

 

29. The Coptic Versions of the New Testament

Christian Askeland

 

30. The Ethiopic Version of the New Testament

Curt Niccum

 

31. The Gothic Version of the New Testament

Carla Falluomini

 

32. Patristic Evidence in New Testament Textual Criticism

Holger Strutwolf

 

33. Criteria for the Assessment of Readings in New Testament Textual Criticism

Tommy Wasserman

 

34. The New Testament Text, Paratexts, and Reception History

Jennifer Wright Knust

 

35. New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis

Elizabeth E. Shively

 

36. New Testament Textual Criticism and Digital Humanities

Claire Clivaz

 

37. Critical Editions of the Greek New Testament from the Twentieth to Twenty- First Century

Annette Hüffmeier and Gregory S. Paulson

 

38. New Testament Textual Criticism in Teaching and Practice

Amy S. Anderson

 

The Earliest Systematic Use of GA 03 in the Modern Period

A few years ago, Dirk Jongkind posted a brief article on this blog about GA 372, a minuscule manuscript of the synoptic Gospels and the first few chapters of John. As he noted then, this manuscript certainly gives the appearance of being a copy of a printed edition. While it seems to have been copied by hand, it includes faux wood cuts capitals, and does not include nomina sacra or ekthesis. As Teunis Van Lopik helpfully pointed out in the comments to that article, the scribe of this manuscript is  Johannes Honorius, whose “script formed the basis for the font of  the pontifical press.” 

However, the text does not match any printed edition. In preparing the forthcoming Tyndale House Textual Commentary, Dirk and I noticed a few places where the text overlapped with that of GA 03. In his comment, Teunis had suggested that this manuscript might have been intended as the printers copy for a canceled Greek New Testament project, noting that “in 1560-1561 a congregation of four cardinals, assisted by Guglielmo Sirleto worked on the text of the Vulgate and the Greek New Testament. Some documents, produced during the existence of this congregation, are still available. To this small collection I will add GA 372.” 

Since this project was based in the Vatican, it raises the possibility that the edited text of which GA 372 was intended as the printer’s copy had made use of GA 03. Consulting the TUT results for GA 372 in Matthew, I discovered that it has 16 “2” readings, 16 “1/2” readings, 26 “1” readings, and 6 Sonderlesarten.

The high number of “1” readings in GA 372 rules out the possibility that it is simply a copy of GA 03, which only has one such reading in Matthew. However, a consideration of the non-majority readings in GA 372 make it almost certain that the text of which it is a copy was corrected against GA 03 at some stage in the process. 

The Sonderlesarten are especially telling. There are six of these in GA 372. In three of these (6:4, 23:3, 37:4), it agrees straightforwardly with GA 03. In fact, in 37:4, GA 372 agrees with GA 03 in a reading found in only two other witnesses (01 and 873). In two others (15:3 and 58:3C), the distinctive reading of GA 372 can be simply explained as either a conflation or a partial correction of a standard TR edition against the reading of GA 03. In only one case (59:3), is there no obvious relation between a Sonderlesarten of GA 372 and the text of GA 03 and this particular reading is much less distinctive than the others, being found in a large number of minuscules.

The “2” readings continue the same pattern. Out of the 64 Teststellen in Matthew, GA 03 has the “2” reading in 42 locations, or about 66% of the time. According to TuT, GA 372 has only 16 such “2” readings. In 14 of these locations, GA 372 has the same reading as GA 03, including a number of places where the “2” reading is found in a tiny handful of other witnesses (e.g. 35:2, a reading otherwise found only in five other known witnesses—GA 05 032 163 2680 2737). One additional location (32), while being classed as a “2” reading, is found in no fewer than 590 manuscripts in the TuT collation, so it is hardly distinctive. In the final location (20), a consultation of the images reveals an error in TuT—GA 372 does not have the “2” reading here, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that this is the one location where GA 03 does have a “1” reading. It is quite striking that GA 03, while having “2” readings only 66% of the time, can explain *all* of the distinctive “2” readings in GA 372. 

To sum up, of the 16 “1” readings and 6 Sonderlesarten in GA 372, all but 2 of them can be explained by the comparison of a standard Byzantine text (or printed TR edition) with the text of GA 03. Given Teunis’s previous identification of GA 372 as a remnant of an edition of the Greek New Testament prepared in Rome, it seems clear that those who were preparing this edition made use of GA 03, which would make this the earliest known systematic text-critical use of this manuscript in the modern period. It is perhaps worth noting that GA 372 is not discussed in Yi’s history of the early text-critical use of GA 03, From Erasmus to Maius.

As a useful follow up to this study, if anyone had a list of distinctive readings of various early TR editions in the Synoptic Gospels, it might be possible to determine if GA 03 was compared to a Byzantine manuscript or, as I suspect is more likely, to a printed edition. If the latter, it is entirely possible that this edition is still in the Vatican library, waiting to be discovered. 

RIP Chrys C. Caragounis (1940–2025)

The Centre of Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University has announced that Professor emeritus Chrys C. Caragounis has passed away at the age of 85. 

 

Professor Chrys C. Caragounis has died at the age of 85. He was born in Athens in 1940 and studied theology at London University, where he received a Bachelor of Divinity with honors in 1971. He continued his studies at Uppsala University and defended his thesis The Ephesian Mysterion in 1977. Caragounis' academic career included positions at Uppsala University, London School of Theology and the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven, before returning to Sweden in 1987 where he concluded his career as Professor of New Testament Exegesis at Lund University. 

Is GA 2021 Part of the Same Manuscript as GA 1848?

Working on a footnote for the forthcoming Textual Commentary on the Tyndale House Greek NT, I was doing a little digging into the manuscript collection of Paul Pétau. Mill used three manuscripts from this collection for his edition of the Greek New Testament, which he labels as Pet. 1., Pet. 2., and Pet. 3. 

Pet. 1. seems fairly clearly to be the same as, Nederland Leiden Universitaire Bibliotheken Voss. gr. Q° 77, GA 328, Diktyon 38184. Pet. 3. also seems to be fairly clearly the same as Vaticano Città del Vaticano Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) Reg. gr. 179, GA 181 + GA 2819, Diktyon 66348, a manuscript used by Zacagni for his edition of the Euthalian apparatus. 

Unfortunately, Pet. 2., the manuscript I actually wanted to identify, has proved rather harder to track down. By Tischendorf’s day, it had already disappeared. In the prolegomena to Tischendorf’s edition, written by Gregory, it is noted that “hodie latet” (now missing). Despite this, Tischendorf seems to have cited this manuscript from Mill’s edition, using the numbers 39 for Acts and the Catholics, 45 for Paul, and 11 for Revelation. The reading of greatest interest is, of course, Revelation 13:18, where Mill notes that Pet. 2. reads χιϛ, or 616. Unfortunately, I was not able to track down any manuscript with this reading. 

However, it was this research that lead me to GA 1848. This manuscript, which was also once part of the Petau collection, has been divided into a large number of individual volumes, now divided between the BNF and the Vatican. BNF Grec 108, 109, 110, 111 and BAV Reg. gr. 76 are all known to be a part of this same manuscript, which was copied by Georgios Hermonymus in the late 15th century. 

BAV Reg. gr. 68] (GA 2021) has the same copyist, also comes from the Pétau collection (according to Xavier Rincel’s dissertation). On examining the images side by side, they also share a number of distinctive formatting features, including a rubricated running title, large gaps for initials (mostly not filled in), and general mise-en-page.

According to the Liste, GA 1848 is a copy of GA 467, also copied by Georgios, and which has a very similar layout. Since GA 467 contains Revelation, if GA 1848 is a copy, it seems reasonable to suppose that it also would have contained Revelation. Given that GA 2021, in addition to all the other features, has been bound into the same miniature volumes as the different portions of GA 1848, it is very likely part of the same manuscript. If this is confirmed by other researchers, the two should be linked together in the Liste. 

When I initially discovered this, I had hopes that GA 2021 would prove to be the missing Pet. 2. However, a quick cross-referencing of of the Sonder- and Singulär- lesarten in the TuT of GA 2021 with the readings of Pet. 2. in Mill’s apparatus, as well as a few checks of the readings of Mill in GA 2021 itself, did not reveal any significant correspondences, leaving Pet. 2. “hodie latet” in our day, as it was in Gregory’s. 

Bates Reviews New Book on the Origins of Greek Minuscule

For those who don’t know Clark Bates, he wrote his ThM thesis under my supervision on the origin of minuscule script. I learned a lot from his research. He has gone on to finish his PhD at the University of Birmingham (UK) on catena MSS. In the latest issue of The Byzantine Review, he has a substantive review of a new book on that subject. Here is how the review starts:

It is not very often that one has occasion to review a work that disrupts,challenges, and refutes one’s own earlier research and suppositions. Neither is it often that such disruption is well-received. Nina Sietis’s recentmonograph on the origin of the ‘Studite Minuscule’ has provided me withboth opportunities.

Well, that got my attention! He goes on:

In this thoroughgoing and well-written book, Sietis offers readers an outline of the institution of the Studios Monastery andthe biography of its most influential abbot, Theodore, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the research related to the development of the literary minuscule script often associated with the same monastery and abbot. The historical and paleographical details of the first volume are accompaniedand amplified by a catalogue of Studite manuscripts in the second one. Because most researchers will probably engage with Volume I, I will devote most of my review to it but reserve some comments for the catalogue of Volume II.

Sietis’s book is in two volumes, the first of which is open access. But for those of us who can’t read Italian or can’t read it well, you will want to read Clark’s review to get a good sense of the book’s argument. I will be among those who need to update my lecture notes accordingly.

Updated Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism

I have just started to update our most popular blogpost ever, the bibliography on the Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Texual Criticism. Yes, it has now surpassed Elijah Hixson's magnificent piece on First-Century Mark as well as Peter William's breaking news on the archaelogical discovery of Q (I am thankful to see that someone added a disclaimer "THIS POST IS A JOKE FOR APRIL FOOLS DAY!"). In any case, I just added in some few new entries to the bibliography, two of which got an asterisk (among the top ten). But there are many more to add. Do you have any suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

Introductions and surveys

• *Crawford, Sidney White, and Tommy Wasserman, eds. The Oxford Handbook on Textual Criticism of the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.
• *Quarles, Charles, New Testament Textual Criticism for the 21st Century: A Practical Guide. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2025.
  

Current trends views and debates

• Holmes, Michael W. "New Testament Textual Criticism in 2020." Early Christianity 11.1 (2020): 3–20.

Working with manuscripts

• Lied, Liv Ingeborg and Brent Nongbri. Working with Manuscripts: A Guide for Textual Scholars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025. [This is a general guide, not focused on biblical manuscipts]

Current trends in dating NT papyri

• Nongbri, Brent. God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. [A provocative monograph summarizing Nongbri's several challenges to narrow and too early dating of the papyri].
• Wasserman, Tommy. “Beyond Palaeography: Text, Paratext and Dating of Early Christian Papyri.” Pages 151–162 in The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri at Ninety:Literature, Papyrology, Ethics (open access). Edited by Garrick V. Allen, et al. Manuscripta Biblica 10. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2023. [This chapter contains a response to some of Nonbgri's challenges and emphasizes the continuity between Christian and Jewish scribal cultures.]

Scribal habits

• Hixson, Elijah. Scribal Habits in Sixth-Century Greek Purple Codices. NTTSD 61. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
• Malik, Peter. P.Beatty III (P47): The Codex, Its Scribe, and Its Text. NTTSD 52. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
• Mugridge, Alan. Copying Early Christian Texts: A Study of Scribal Practice. WUNT I.362.  Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.

Practice of NT textual criticism

• *Houghton, H. A. G. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion to the Sixth Edition of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2025.

Conjectural emendation

• Kamphuis, Bart L. F. New Testament Conjectural Emendation in the Nineteenth Century: Jan Hendrik Holwerda as a Pioneer of Method. NTTSD 56. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Update: I have added Charles Quarles new introduction under Introductions and surveys and marked it with an asterisk.

Ancient Books Website

My thanks to Drew Longacre for drawing my attention to a new web resource on ancient books from William A. Johnson and Nicholas Wagner at Duke. As the website explains:

The Ancient Books Website (ABW) joins a long tradition of open- access tools for papyrological research. The website provides data complementary to those in tools like the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB), now part of Trismegistos (TM), and the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP). The data captured here are focused on two areas: (1) reconstruction of the physical details of each literary papyrus, and (2) analysis of the scribal features.

Currently, they have two main datasets online that give detail on the physical features and scribal features of bookrolls. Again, from the website:

Physical features. The website provides measurements for width and height (measured or calculated) for features like column, intercolumn, roll, letters, and vertical spacing. 

Scribal features. So far, the website provides synoptic analysis of the punctuation, and of scribal usage for nu-movable and iota adscript. We will be adding to these data over time. 

Datasets for early codices is said to be coming in 2026.