A Modern-Day Scribe

A beautiful story in Christianity Today here: "Nine Years, 782,000 Words Later, South Carolina Woman Completes Handwritten Bible."

Bernard Ramm on Textual Criticism (1957)

For Christmas, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicals founded by Billy Graham, has opened its full archives. These go back to 1956 and make for educational reading on the history of American evangelicalism.

Pertinent to this blog is an article from CT’s second year by Bernard Ramm. Ramm was a key figure in the neo-evangelical movement of the mid-20th century. He was, according to CT’s obituary, “best known for drawing evangelical theology into dialogue with science and culture.” Given the importance of both Ramm and CT in evangelicalism, I note here a brief comment from a 1957 article that Ramm wrote titled “Are We Obscurantists?” In it, he touches briefly on textual criticism.

The evangelical has no means of settling the text of the Scripture outside the usual methods of scholarship. There is no official copy of either the Hebrew or Greek Testaments. There are only copies of them. There is only one conceivable method of settling the text of Scripture and that is by the employment of the general science of textual criticism modified to fit the peculiarities presented by the biblical texts. When Calvin treated the text of Scripture, he employed the methodology he learned as a humanist and attempted scientifically to determine the true readings (cf. B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, p. 58). Warfield himself affirmed in another place that “processes that are valid for the ascertainment of a secular are equally valid for the ascertainment of a sacred text” (Critical Reviews, p. 81).

Evangelicals may believe that God has remarkably preserved the text of the Old and New Testaments, but to determine the precise text of Scripture is a problem for scientific criticism. This is the essence of the evangelical position, and there is, therefore, no place for obscurantism here.

Since the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies in the 1930s, American evangelicals have sometimes suffered a nagging inferiority complex when it comes to academics. (It certainly doesn’t help when our finest historian says we have no mind!) All that makes for interesting background to Ramm’s appeal to textual criticism as one way to say we’re not, in fact, backwoods idiots. I suspect if Ramm were alive today, he would still agree with his assessment from 1956.

Hixson on Mark Fragment at Christianity Today

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve surely heard about the new Mark fragment which is now the earliest dated copy of this Gospel. You may also know there is some discussion about its publication and the claim that it was once up for sale. But, if you’re still wondering what all the hubbub is about, go read Elijah Hixson’s new article at Christianity Today. Elijah first broke the news that the fragment was being published here on this blog and he’s been closely tracking new developments ever since.

Here’s the conclusion:

Many people—including Carroll himself—believed that the Greens had at some point purchased the manuscript until it appeared in an Oxyrhynchus volume. Obbink recently denied attempting to sell the manuscript to the Greens, according to Candida Moss and Joel Baden, writing for The Daily Beast. When I contacted Carroll and Obbink for statements, Carroll replied that he had nothing to add to or subtract from his story, and Obbink did not respond.

This new publication is only the first word on the manuscript. There is surely much more to come. Manuscript dates are often disputed, though I expect the question will be whether P137 could be later, not whether it could be earlier. Multi-spectral imaging and digital image processing open new doors to deciphering and understanding manuscripts, and P137 might benefit from such types of analysis.

Rather than disappointment that P137 is not quite as early as once thought, the publication of P137 is a cause to celebrate. We have another significant find, and it is the earliest manuscript of Mark 1! The excavations of Oxyrhynchus continue to yield valuable artifacts of antiquity including new biblical manuscripts after over a century of publishing. We can happily look forward to more unknown treasures yet to come.

A Somewhat Brighter Day for Theology in Sweden

Two years ago I wrote a sad blogpost on a black day for theology in Sweden and a follow-up post including a link to an article in Christianity Today. In a national evaluation of education in Theology and Religious Studies conducted by the National Board of Higher Education in Sweden (Högskoleverket), Örebro School of Theology, along several other institutions, was severely criticized for being too focused on Christian theology, etc, etc.

The whole evaluation process, nation wide, was, according to many, biassed and characterized by prejudism and a lack of clear evaluation criteria, which opened up for arbitrariness at different levels. It was severaly criticized by many representatives from different institutions and backgrounds. Subsequently, however, one of the responsible civil servants retired, and the other was transferred, so none of them took any part in the subsequent process to follow up the decisions. Moreover, the National Board of Higher Education got a new director (who is a theologian himself). The evaluations in all areas (including Theology) will look very different in the future, and one of the first things will be the working out of clear criteria in co-operation with those institutions to be evaluated.

From my personal viewpoint, the visit by the evaluation team two years ago was a very unpleasant experience indeed. It felt something like a police interrogation, but I am trying to put that behind me now and look forward.

In any case, the authorities then gave us, and several other Swedish institutions, one year to make necessary changes, which we did. For example, we had to transfer all practical courses to the non-academic sphere; we had to offer more courses in History of Religion, outside the classical theological subjects, and also integrate more critique of Religion.

To take an example, Homiletics, is now outside the system for higher education and does not grant any credit points. (It will still be necessary for those students who are preparing for ministry to have theory and training, but it will be outside the academia.) Our ambition has been to combine these necessary changes with an improvement of the quality of the education (especially that part which is outside the system for higher education). In the future, against the background of the so-called Bologna Process with its emphasis on "employability", it could happen in the future that even these more practical courses can return to the academia, but for now it is impossible – there can be no "confessional elements" in education.

Today came the decision from the National Board of Higher Education that Örebro School of Theology, among five other institutions, may keep the right to grant the degree of Bachelor of Theology 180 Credit points, whereas one institution looses its right. We can now draw a sigh of relief. There was still some minor critique which we will have to pay attention to in the future, but for now we will have some piece and quiet – well, at least soon – I was just interviewed by the local bransch of Swedish television (SVT) about the positive outcome.

This is a somewhat brighter day for theology in Sweden, in particular in Örebro.

Update: TV interview (in Swedish)