2021 Logos: Texts and Manuscripts

Mike Holmes has reminded me that the deadline for the Logos Summer workshop is fast approaching. I participated in earlier iterations of the Logos workshop and it was a great experience. Some of the other students I met there are still good friends. I highly recommend it.

Here’s the description:

Logos is a workshop dedicated to equipping graduate students with the tools and knowledge needed to further Biblical studies, ancient texts and manuscripts research, museum studies, education programmes and other similar disciplines. The 2021 workshop is hosted by Scholarship & Christianity in Oxford (SCIO) and will be held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, from 31st May to 11th June. For more information, please visit the SCIO website at scio-uk.org/research/logos.

I would also note that Logos is for graduate students, and prior participation in a Scholars Initiative activity is not required.

Logos Conference in Washington (June 2020)

Logos in Washington, DC

Apply to Logos 2020! Click here to access the application.

Please note that the deadline to submit an application is 11:59 pm GMT (British time) on Sunday, 16 February 2020.

• What: A summer workshop on museums, biblical texts, vocation, and the Christian mind that is offered by SCIO with funding provided by Steve and Jackie Green
• Where: Held at Museum of the Bible, Washington, DC
• When: Programme dates: 31 May – 13 June 2020
• Enquiries: please email  logos@scio-uk.org

The workshop: It is primarily intended for graduate students (including graduating seniors who will begin advanced studies in Autumn 2020) and Logos alumni who have completed their education. Applicants should be working in Biblical-related studies with a special focus on ancient texts and manuscripts, museum studies and education programmes, history of the Bible, reception history, ancient languages, and related disciplines. Applicants should be considering a vocation in one of these academic fields.

We are delighted that the Museum of the Bible will be hosting the Logos 2020 Workshop. Logos 2020 will make use of the Museum’s holdings, curatorial staff, classroom space, and laboratories. Subsequent Logos Workshops will alternate each year between Washington, DC and Oxford (Logos 2021 to be held in Oxford).

Logos offers an opportunity to be taught by experts in the fields of curation, text preservation, history, theology, textual studies, and museum studies and education programmes more broadly.

The lecture series for Logos in Washington, DC, are as follows:

• Lecture series: Current issues in textual studies
• Lecture series: Oxford, scholarship, and the Christian mind
• Lecture series: The vocation of Christian scholars in the modern university
• Text seminars on studying manuscripts in ancient languages: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic (languages offered are dependent on successful applicants preferences).

For more information, see: http://www.scio-uk.org/logos-workshop/

Logos in Oxford, 29 May–12 June 2019

Our friends at SCIO are planning another Logos conference in Oxford this summer:

Logos in Oxford

A summer workshop on biblical texts, vocation, and the Christian mind

Offered by SCIO with funding provided by Steve and Jackie Green

To be held at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
Programme dates: 29 May–12 June 2019

This workshop is primarily intended for graduate students (including graduating seniors who will begin advanced studies in Autumn 2019) working in Biblical-related studies with a special focus on ancient texts and manuscripts, history of the Bible, reception history, ancient languages (with a Biblical focus), and related disciplines. Working on Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative projects is no longer a prerequisite, though students working on Scholars Initiative Projects are particularly encouraged to apply.

Logos in Oxford offers an opportunity to be taught by academic experts in the fields of history, theology, and textual studies.

The award of a place at Logos in Oxford 2019 will cover travel to and from Oxford (including air travel), as well as board and lodging during the workshop. In addition, participants will receive a generous stipend. Up to thirty places are available in 2019.

Fore more information and application forms click here:  Logos Conference

Dead Sea Scroll Forgeries in Your Favorite Bible Software?

Dead Sea Scrolls in Accordance

Over at the Lying Pen of Scribes blog, Årstein Justnes has posted a list of forged Dead Sea Scrolls that have made their way into modules for Accordance, BibleWorks, and Logos. Among other problems, Årstein points out that their inclusion in this software “has statistical implications.”

Now before you go and toss your PC out the window (if you have a Mac, go right ahead), Martin Abegg adds some important context in the comments:

Good. This is a necessary step in the process. But allow me to make a couple of comments.

• First, my mandate when constructing Dead Sea Concordances 1-3 was to include all of the documents in Emanuel Tov’s “Lists.”
• Second, we have a bit of guilt by association at foot in this list—3 are marked “forgery” the rest are painted with the same pollution brush although marked probable forgery or unprovenanced—but assuming for the sake of argument that they are ALL forgeries, these fragments account for 0.17% of the morphological forms in the biblical data and 0.02% of the non-biblical. Or in other words, 179 of 103,383 and 32 of 174,917 morph forms respectively. Certainly we would hope for 0 elements of “pollution,” but this hardly amounts to the possibility of “major statistical implications” as suggested in the post. I have no doubt that misreadings in the editions is at least as problematic as outright fraud.
• Finally, my procedure from this point on: my past position has been that I add nothing to the data until I have a peer-reviewed publication in hand. I have had to modify this position as a result of the recent debate: I will for the present allow everything in Tov’s list to remain but I will add nothing of the new publications (not even my own Nehemiah fragment!) until a peer-reviewed debate brings some degree of assurance as to what to remove and what to add.

Årstein thinks all the fragments he lists are forgeries adding in the comments that “most of them are just as problematic as the unfamous Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” He also clarifies that the statistical implications are mostly to do with how many DSS manuscripts we have for various Biblical books.

Certainly something to be aware of if you use these modules.

Just How Much Longer Is Codex Bezae’s Text in Acts?

Acts 1 in Bezae. (Photo)

It’s frequently reported that the text of Acts is longer in the Western text than in the Alexandrian. But just how much longer is it? The most commonly cited number is 8.5%. You’ll find this in Metzger’s Textual Commentary (p. 223 n. 3).

This number comes from F. G. Kenyon’s The Western Text in the Gospels and Acts published in 1939. But, interestingly, this number is not taken from comparing two manuscripts but rather two modern editions. Kenyon compared the text of WH in Acts with that of A. C. Clark. The former is taken as representative of the Alexandrian text and the latter of the Western.

One other comparison I found was in Pete Head’s article on the text of Acts. He compared the text of Codex Bezae with the NA26/UBS3 and found the former to have 800 more words than the latter.

Neither of these comparisons completely satisfied me though. In both cases, the comparison is made with a modern edition. I thought it would be better to compare manuscript with manuscript. To do that, I used two of the leading representatives of the Western and Alexandrian text: Bezae and Sinaiticus. I compared the text of their first hands in all places in Acts where Bezae is extant. (Bezae has lacunae in Acts 8.29–10.14; 21.2–10, 16-18; 22:10–20; 22:29–28.31) It turns out that the difference is minimal and Kenyon’s figures are about the same as mine.

I found that Bezae is about 7.9% longer than Sinaiticus in Acts. The raw numbers are Bezae: 71,872 characters; Sinaiticus: 66,594 characters.

One point about my method: I compared letters rather than words for reasons I’ll explain. The comparison is pretty straightforward. I took the transcriptions of both Sinaiticus and Bezae that are available for free in Logos Bible Software. These in turn come from INTF/ITSEE/IGNTP transcriptions which means their format is very similar. There’s clearly a lot of work behind both so a big thank you to those responsible.

I copied the text from Logos into Word and stripped out extra content like verse numbers, punctuation, quire numbers, running titles, parentheses, ellipses, nomina sacra lines (because Word counted those as characters), etc. Basically, I cut everything out but the letters.

The reason I counted characters is because these transcriptions are on the diplomatic end of the spectrum and that means that many individual words in Sinaiticus are split between lines. Putting all these back together did not seem like a good use of time. So instead I counted characters without spaces. I checked the count with charactercounttool.com.

It’s nice to know that Kenyon’s method didn’t put us far off the mark.

Holmes' SBLGNT on Facebook!

Logos Bible Software has just started a Facebook comment thread here to invite questions about the new SBL Greek New Testament edition that Michael Holmes announced on the ETC blog recently (don't forget to read the comments). A few days later, Stephen Carlson shared his initial impression of the edition here. And of course Rick Brannan working for Logos shared his thoughts.

Now you have the chance of discussing it again with Mike. He will be watching the Facebook thread for questions all week and post detailed replies on Tuesday the 16th at 10 a.m. PT. So go ahead and post your questions, to make sure that there is room and time for Mike to give thorough replies (I hope Mike has done all his SBL preparations...)