The next CSNTM Text & Manuscript Conference is scheduled for May 28-29, 2026 in Plano, TX (just north of Dallas). I went to the inaugural conference and really enjoyed it. This year's theme is on the ECM and the call for papers has just gone out. Here are the details:
A few years ago I presented a paper at ETS on textual criticism in the Reformation. The session was well attended and the feedback I received was positive. So I’m pleased to say that a revised version has just been published in my seminary’s journal, the Midwestern Journal of Theology.
This article is not meant to be a comprehensive study by any means: it’s more of a potted history. But for those new to the subject, I think it provides needed historical and theological context for understanding how the Reformation debates influenced and encouraged textual criticism.
You can read it on my Academia page or at the journal’s website. The entire issue is open access. (Sorry in advance for the typos.)
At the SBL in Boston I met my co-editor Sidnie White Crawford at the OUP booth to take a picture with our “baby” – The Oxford Handbook of Textual Criticism of the Bible which has just been published (see here for more details).
There is an SBL/AAR promocode, EXAAR25, which is valid thru 9 December (three more days) which gives 40% discount! (which means $136 in US and only £69 in UK/Europe).
You will find the whole conference promotion list here.
New article by Peter Rodgers in Filologia Neotestamentaria, XXXVIII, 2025
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
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.
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.
Special thanks to Peter Montoro for finding the venue and to the pastors at the church for hosting us on such short notice.
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.
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
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
Altered, Not Antique: The Latinized Greek Text of 1 Corinthians in GA 629
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
Revisiting GA 205 and 2886 in the Gospel of Mark: History, Reception, and Text
Notes
A Note on the “Sons of God” in Latin Quotations of Deut 32:8d
Reuniting Codex Angus (GA L2378) with Its Lost Bifolium
Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Response to Richard Fellows
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
