Blogdinner speech by Tommy Wasserman The ETC blog celebrates its 20th year anniversary! And I have attended all the blogdinners through the years except for last year (was there a blogdinner last year?).
Founding father Peter Williams published the first blogpost on October 14, 2005 titled “What this blog is about”. Essentially, he said, “what I’m wanting to do is to create a blog for those who wish to discuss textual criticism of the Old or New Testament from an evangelical perspective. There are many textual critics out there who are evangelicals and here I am trying to create a forum for us to discuss ideas together.”
What an excellent idea! We have of course returned to the question what is evangelical textual criticism, but this has remained the foundation … we are a bunch of qualified textual critics who are evangelicals and we are discussing ideas together. I will not try to define what evangelical is – the label has many connotations these days, but, let’s say we have room for many different evangelicals, who have in common a high view of Scripture, inspired by God. At the same time, we acknowledge that the Bible did not fall down from the sky in the blessed year of 1611, but it was penned by authors on parchment and papyri and copied through generations by fallible scribes – as Peter Head once remarked, “It is because many scribes did their job well that we are able to study those who did not.” And, as I tell my students, each individual biblical manuscript, in all its fragility, is a witness to the word and we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses.
What actually sparked Peter Williams to start the blog, does anyone remember? It was the publication of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, a book that really made Peter angry and he reviewed it in December that first year and for long it was our most read blogpost. It was the most read when we celebrated our 10 year anniversary in Atlanta.
Peter Head wrote his first blogpost on 26 Oct, although he had already made these 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.”
I personally joined the blog in 2006. I was asked to join the team and Pete actually phoned me from Aberdeen to interview me before I was admitted. In the end of 2006, blogfather 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.
In October 2014, Peter Gurry, then PhD student in Cambridge, joined the blog and helped us give it the current nice new look.
For many years I was very active, and could post long summaries in several parts of entire SBL sessions, and all sorts of stuff. As I got older and more busy, and as new and younger blogmembers like Peter Gurry, Elijah Hixson, Peter Malik, and now recently Peter Montoro, came on board, I took a step back and lost some pace, but I like to post occasionally.
And I am also happy to note that my own post on the Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament textual criticism is back on the top; in particular because for quite some time Peter William’s April Fools Joke that archaeologists had found Q was on the top). The blog, in general, has lost pace and so has many biblioblogs, many have been discontinued, but we are still out there.
So far this year we have posted 36 blogposts with 216,844 views. In 2006, we would have posted nearly ten times as many posts, but 36 are better than none. Nowadays, more people read our blog. When we celebrated our 10th anniversary, we had had 2.7 million pageviews. The last time I held a speech at a blogdinner, a few years ago, we had 4.8 million views, so we have nearly tripled since then. Now, the blog has had over 12 million views and over 23,000 comments on blogposts.
The blog was for many years, especially when blogs were the big thing, a great venue for me personally to contribute to the discipline of biblical studies in general and textual criticism in particular, and in some ways, it helped my academic career for which I am thankful.
In any case what I appreciate most with the ETC blog is actually the relationship with the fellow bloggers, and by extension our followers and fans (you all here)! This month Oxford University Press published my Oxford Handbook of Textual Criticism of the Bible and seven ETC bloggers have chapters in that handbook and two more bloggers were offered to write chapters…
Finally, when I think back on my most memorable blogposts they are closely related to my dear friend Peter Head who is not here today, and his alternative career as an athlete (you can go ahead and read about that yourself on the blog, just type in “Britain’s new hope in racewalking” in the Google search box.
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