Top 10 Posts in 2016

These are the top ten most read posts for the blog in 2016 according to Google Analytics. Not all of these were written in 2016 of course. For last year’s list, see here.

1. BREAKING NEWS: Archaeologists find Q
2. Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism
3. More on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and Walter Fritz
4. Debunking Silly Statements about the Bible
5. Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus
6. Is the Longer Ending of Mark Inspired? (with Poll)
7. Does Scripture’s Self-Attestation Apply to Textual Criticism?
8. Breaking News on the First-Century (?) Fragment of Mark
9. How Many Variants Make It into Your Greek New Testament?
10. Historic Editions of the Greek New Testament online

Happy new year, everybody!

Happy New ETC Year!

Welcome to a new year with the ETC blog and lots of textual criticism!

At the SBL meeting in Atlanta, we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the blog at the annual ETC blogdinner, and the founding father Peter Williams held a speech looking back at the ten years and ahead into the future. Incidentally, we celebrated the 5-year anniversary at the SBL meeting 2010, held in Atlanta too.



We did not make much of the 10-year anniversary here on the blog, but I thought it would be nice to note a few things (better late than never):

1. The blog started out on 14 Oct 2005 when Peter Williams wrote the first blogpost: “What this blog is about”. In his Atlanta speeach, Peter told us that he had not planned to found the blog, it was a spur of the moment thing which he did because he was angry – particularly at Bart Ehrman's views on the NT text (Pete's subsequent review of Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is our most popular blogpost ever).

Peter Head wrote his first blogpost on 26 Oct, although he had already made pertinent and characteristic comments to the first post:

"I think a white background would be more appropriate for an evangelical blog:
a) more echoes of positive biblical symbolism;
b) better approximation to brightness of original manuscripts (both parchment and papyrus);
c) better reflection of the history of the Bible as a published book;
d) I could probably read it without squinting."

2.  The ETC blog had a very different lay-out in the beginning, first briefly with a black background, but then for a few years with old burgundy and white letters (a combination which caused problems to some readers). You can see what it looked like here (by this time in Nov 2005 I had joined the blog and we were eleven contributors).

3. In the end of 2006, blogmeister Williams was appointed the new warden of Tyndale House, and from about that time he handed over the main responsibility for the blog to Peter Head and myself.

4. In 2009 we made some updates to the design and experiments with colors and design. We kept the old burgundy in the header and the letters, but now it was more reader friendly, see here.

5. In October 2014, Peter Gurry, PhD student in Cambridge, joined the blog and helped us give it the current nice new look.

6. At this point we have posted 2385 posts on various topics in textual criticism and other stuff, and, according to Blogger, for what its worth, we have had 2684329 pageviews. As you can see in the sidebar, the top 5 posts in our history are:

• Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus
• Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism
• Jesus Had a Sister-in-Law
• Breaking News on the First-Century (?) Fragment of Mark
• The forgery of the Lycopolitan gospel of John

The Most Read Posts in 2015

As 2015 comes to a close, it’s time for that yearly tradition, the Year in Review. Here at the ETC blog we’ve had over 165 posts and over 172,000 hits in 2015 according to Google Analytics. (Blogger stats are much higher because apparently they count bots and spiders.)

So what have been the most read posts here? People are very interested in the oldest NT manuscript. Bart is always popular, but so are the top ten essential works in NT textual criticism and historic editions of the GNT (probably helped by being on the main navigation).

Rank	Title	Hits
1.	Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism	7,473
2.	Questions about “First Century Mark”	2,814
3.	Breaking News on the First-Century(?) Fragment of Mark	2,272
4.	Historic Editions of the Greek New Testament online	2,096
5.	What is the Oldest Manuscript of the New Testament?	1,743
6.	Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus	1,596
7.	Has anyone seen “First Century Mark”?	1,292
8.	How many books in the New Testament?	983
9.	New NT Papyrus Manuscripts	917
10.	Journal Rankings for New Testament	896

Slightly different, here are the most popular posts written in the last year.

Rank	Title	Hits
1.	Questions about “First Century Mark”	2,814
2.	Historic Editions of the Greek New Testament online	2,096
3.	What is the Oldest Manuscript of the New Testament?	1,743
4.	Has anyone seen “First Century Mark”?	1,292
5.	New NT Papyrus Manuscripts	917
6.	Distribution of New Testament Manuscripts by Century	827
7.	Lunn on the End of Mark. Part 3	798
8.	The Gospel of Jesus Wife and Grondin’s Interlinear	793
9.	A New Papyrus of the Gospel of John	787
10.	How Many Variants Are There in the Greek New Testament?	720

Thanks to all our readers. Happy New Year!

Ebojo on P46: When Nonsense Makes Sense

New Article: E.B. Ebojo, ‘When Nonsense Makes Sense: Scribal Habits in the Space-intervals, Sense-pauses, and Other Visual Features in P46,’ The Bible Translator 64 (2013), 128-150.

Abstract
This article explores the visual and paratextual features embedded in P46 and assesses how these reflect a microcosm of ancient book production enterprise as well as its eventual construal by the reading community that used it. Accordingly, it also suggests ways in which the copying habits of the scribe who produced this manuscript may be similarly unveiled through these features.

Edgar completed his PhD on P46 in Birmingham and this is, I think, the first published fruits of his research (I am hoping there will be much more). This article offers a helpful introduction to P46 and also takes up the challenge which I issued on this blog in 2009: ‘I think it would be a good study to look at the use of space for ‘pauses in sense’ in P46, but there would be quite a few method issues to think through.’ (see here: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/significant-spaces-in-p46.html; referenced on p. 131). This whole issue (along with the previous one) of The Bible Translator is in honour of Roger Omanson, and includes other essays of interest (see here and here).

New ETC Blogger: John Meade

The ETC blog team proudly presents a new blog team member:

John Meade

Meade is a candidate for the PhD (ABD) at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky in the department of Old Testament. His dissertation is “A Critical Edition of the Fragments of Origen’s Hexapla of Job: 22-42,” which is also being compiled for the Hexapla Institute, of which he is a part (www.hexapla.org).

He has many interests in the area of biblical textual criticism including Hebrew Bible, LXX, Hexapla, NT, and the study of the ancient versions for their interpretation of the text.

The ETC team is particularly happy to strengthen its competency in the field of Septuagint studies, and we look forward to many interesting blogposts by John.

Welcome!

ETC Blog Five Year Anniversary

Hooray!

Now in October, this blog has been around for five years. Actually, the founding father, Peter Williams, wrote the first blogpost on 14 Oct 2005, "What this blog is about".

A few days later Peter Head, now my co-editor of the blog, wrote his first main post on 26 October. However, he was present from the very beginning posting the first comment to the first post, in his characteristic way:

I think a white background would be more appropriate for an evangelical blog:
a) more echoes of positive biblical symbolism;
b) better approximation to brightness of original manuscripts (both parchment and papyrus);
c) better reflection of the history of the Bible as a published book;
d) I could probably read it without squinting.

Note, that this blog had a different lay-out in the beginning (hence, Peter's remarks), first briefly with a black background, but then with old burgundy and white letters (a combination which caused problems to some readers). You can see how it looked in the good old days here in the way back machine. As one can see, we were already in November, one month after the launch, a group of 11 ETC contributors.

In the end of 2006, blogmeister Williams was appointed the new warden of Tyndale House, and from about that time he handed over the main responsibility for the blog to Peter Head and myself, although we managed to persuade Pete to stay on the blogteam, which we are still very happy about.

Last year we made some serious updates and experiments with colors and design: here, here, here, and here. Most ETC bloggers and readers who expressed their opinions agreed that we should somehow keep the old burgundy, which gave this blog a distinct characteristic, and so it is still there in the header and the letters.

Over these years we have posted 1510 posts on various topics in textual criticism (and occasionally some other stuff). There have been discussions of manuscripts, passages, reviews, announcements of books, conference reports, quizzes, annual achievement awards, and many other things, not least a good deal of humour. Our circle of readers has steadily increased.

What are your own favourite ETC-blogposts? You can browse through the archives in the right sidebar to refresh your memory.

Follow This Blog on Twitter

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Comment Moderation on This Blog

For the information of our readers it may be of interest to know why comments are sometimes moderated on this blog; normally they are not, but moderation may occur in these three cases:

1. Comments on posts older than 28 days (don't ask me why it is 28 days, it has been like this since the blog started I think). The comment must then be accept or rejected by the blogeditors. This is good because very often we get comment spam, and it is also good for us to notice the comment to the old post. On the other hand, the person who wrote the comment may try several times and think something is wrong. But he or she must be patient until we have had time to read and accept the comment and that may sometime take days.

2. Comments which are published in realtime but are found to be completely irrelevant (spam and the like) or offensive (e.g. ad hominem remarks). This is sometimes difficult to judge. Personally I am perhaps oversensitive as editor (except perhaps in the case of teasing co-editor Peter; but that is mutual).

Update:
3. Individuals can also moderate (i.e. delete) their own comments.

New ETC Blog Record: Over 100 Comments!

As frequent readers of this blog know, it makes us, especially Peter Head, feel good when a post gets fifty comments (see comment 42 here). A few days ago the post "Is 1 Cor 14:34-35 an Interpolation?", featuring a new document available for download (see TC Files) in which Phil Payne replies to questions on this blog concerning 1 Cor 14:34-35 passed over 100 comments! And guess who made the 100th comment?