Links around the Web

Meade and I have been up to our necks in final prep for the Sacred Words conference this weekend which has meant I haven’t had time for blogging. Instead, here are some TC-related links and news from the past few weeks.

Events

Speaking of conferences, Pete, Dirk, and Kim Philips will be speaking in Frisco, TX April 2–4, 2020. Don’t miss it if you’re in the area. Details at bibleconference.legacyca.com. Also in April, Dan Wallace will be giving two lectures at TEDS on textual criticism. See here.

“Hebrew Manuscripts: Journeys of the Written Word” exhibition at the BL March 19–August 2, 2020. Watch the promo video and get more at bl.uk/events/hebrew-manuscripts.

News and Publications

Geoffrey Khan has just published a new two-volume book on The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Both are open access. Ben Outhwaite says, “These volumes represent the highest level of scholarship on what is arguably the most important tradition of Biblical Hebrew.”

John Meade has completed his 10-years-in-the-making edition of the Hexeplaric fragments! Here’s an interview with the seminary about it.

PS: Do the hexaplaric readings of Job affect our English Bibles? JM: In short, yes. The hexaplaric readings usually agree with the Hebrew text upon which our English translations are based. But in some cases, they differ and preserve an older text. I’ll limit myself to two examples where the ESV has based its translation of Job on Hexaplaric versions, but you may not have known it...

Hixson on the ending of Mark – Hixson has written a nice, accessible article on the ending of Mark’s Gospel for the Gospel Coalition.

Uncertainty here makes us uncomfortable, but we lose nothing of our faith if Mark ends at 16:8, and God often calls us to trust him in the face of uncertainty. Without faith it’s impossible to please him, after all. Since faith is the assurance of things hoped for (Heb. 11:1), and seen hope is not real hope (Rom. 8:24), it wouldn’t be walking by faith if God answered all of our questions. That would be walking by sight. With or without Mark 16:9–20, the tomb is empty, Jesus has purchased our pardon, and we can be certain of that.

Jongkind on how Greek improves understanding of the text at the Crossway blog

In conclusion, do we need Greek in order to appreciate the examples discussed above? It certainly helps. It puts us in a position where we can “Come and see,” where we listen directly. Reading Greek (and likewise the Hebrew of the Old Testament) helps us to develop a sensitivity to the beauty of the language that is difficult to appreciate otherwise. And it is not just about beauty; it is also about meaning. Thankfully, we can explain all this in modern English. But for those who can, the blessing of approaching Scripture in the original is a great privilege.

Myths and Mistakes is the runner-up in NT for the Biblical Foundations Book Award. I’m not entirely clear on what the criteria were, but Tom Schreiner nicely says, “Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism breaks new ground, and although it eschews simplistic solutions, gives us new confidence that the Bible is the word of God.” 

News: IGNTP Releases 350 Transcriptions of Manuscripts

Here is a pressrelease from the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP) announcing that 350 transcriptions can be downloaded and are freely available for re-use:

Open Data Release by the International Greek New Testament Project

The International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP), established in 1948, is working towards major new editions of the Gospel according to John and the Pauline Epistles using the latest digital tools.

In a move towards making its data openly available, the IGNTP has now released 350 of its transcriptions of Greek New Testament manuscripts under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, meaning that these files are freely available for re-use.

Dr P.J. Williams, chair of the IGNTP committee, said, “A huge amount of work has gone into these transcriptions, both from research projects funded by the British Academy and Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the work of volunteers from across the world. We are keen that the results of this pioneering effort to make full-text searchable transcriptions of New Testament manuscripts should be as freely available for re-use as possible, enabling others to carry out new research on the textual evidence for the New Testament in addition to our own work on the Editio Critica Maior.”

The transcriptions of John are available to view and download at the website www.iohannes.org/transcriptions. A companion site for the Pauline Epistles is at www.epistulae.org. In addition, further information and links to download multiple files are provided on the IGNTP’s own website at www.igntp.org. The transcriptions are encoded in XML and conform to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative.

8th December 2017

Phoenix: A New Hotbed of Textual Criticism

Manuscripts love the heat—and so will you

The Gurry family has just landed in the blazing sun of Phoenix, Arizona where I will be teaching New Testament in the fall. By my count, this means that the number of Biblical text-critics in the city has just doubled—amazing! (For those who don’t know, my colleague and sometime fellow-blogger, John Meade, is expert in all things OTTC with special emphasis on the Syro-hexapla.) So, if you want to study textual criticism, come to Phoenix Seminary. I can promise lots more sun than Cambridge or Oxford.

Publications and Other News

I’ve been busy lately with a cross-Atlantic move. So here are some things I’ve come across the last month or so but haven’t been able to blog about. Let me know if I missed anything.

Manuscripts

• Ethiopian Manuscripts donated to Catholic University of America
  “The Catholic University of America is now home to one of North America’s most important collections of Ethiopian religious manuscripts, thanks to a generous donation from Chicago collectors Gerald and Barbara Weiner.”
• Christopher de Hamel on the BBC
  The librarian of the beautiful and wonderfully endowed Parker Library in Cambridge talks to Andrew Marr about “the oldest non-archaeological artefact in England, which is the oldest surviving illustrated Latin Gospel in the world...” If you do not have a copy of de Hamel’s new book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, sell whatever you got for Christmas and go get it. If I had a book of the year, this would be it. I read my wife parts of it and her response was, “I didn’t know there were other people in the world like you!”
• New Dead Sea Scrolls
  
  Haaretz reports “New fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been found in the Cave of the Skulls by the Dead Sea in Israel, in a salvage excavation by Israeli authorities. The pieces are small and the writing on them is too faded to make out without advanced analysis. At this stage the archaeologists aren’t even sure if they’re written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic or another language.”

Articles

• Elijah Hixson on “Forty Excerpts from the Greek Old Testament in Codex Rossanensis (Rossano, Museo Diocesano, S.N.), a Sixth-Century Gospels Manuscript” in JTS
  For more from Elijah on the Codex Rossanensis, see here.
• Peter Malik on “A Fresh Look at P.Beatty III (P47): Towards an Integrative Study of an Early Christian Codex” in APF
  Read this for a sneak peek at Pete’s forthcoming monograph on P47. In this article he samples his work on scribal habits and scribal re-inking.
• Peter Gurry on “How Your Greek NT Is Changing: A Simple Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM)” in JETS
  The keyword here is simple. This is some of the first fruits of my own dissertation. 
• Garrick Allen on “The Apocalypse in Codex Alexandrinus: Exegetical Reasoning and Singular Readings in New Testament Greek Manuscripts” in JBL
• DSH has a special section on “Social Digital Scholarly Editing” edited by Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson. It includes essays by Paul Eggert and Peter Shillingsburg. But I haven’t had time to read any of them yet.
• J. K. Elliott on the Apocrypha in TLS
  I managed to read this in print before leaving England and it was a good intro: “The narratives that make up the bulk of the New Testament apocrypha shed light on our understanding of popular and widespread religious practices and beliefs, enlarge our grasp of doctrine and history, and offer insights into how the Christian story was developed, received and embellished.”

News

• Congrats to Hugh Houghton!
  “At the SBL Annual Meeting in San Antonio last month, the Deputy Director of ITSEE, Dr Hugh Houghton, was elected as Executive Editor of the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP), with responsibility for the Pauline Epistles.... The position is open-ended, and involves overseeing the preparation of editions of the Greek text of the Pauline Epistles which are expected to appear in the Novum Testamentum Graecum Editio Critica Maior (ECM), published by the German Bible Society.” If you missed, it we interviewed Hugh on the blog: part 1 and part 2.

Handwriting Analysis and Dating the Bible

Ostraca from Arad dating ca. 600 B.C. (source)

There’s currently a story making the rounds on the major news sites (NY Times, Guardian, etc.). The headlines are, as headlines often are, “exciting”:

• “New Evidence on When Bible Was Written: Ancient Shopping Lists”
• “The Bible Is Really Old, Handwriting Analysis Reveals”
• “Parts of Bible may have been written earlier than expected, archaeologists say”

The study these stories are referencing was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What the article actually does is try to show that there were at least six literate people at the desert fortress of Arad ca. 600 B.C. It takes a bit more work to get from there to an earlier-than-expected date for the Bible obviously. Here is how the paper summarizes its own significance:

Scholars debate whether the first major phase of compilation of biblical texts took place before or after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Proliferation of literacy is considered a precondition for the creation of such texts. Ancient inscriptions provide important evidence of the proliferation of literacy. This paper focuses on 16 ink inscriptions found in the desert fortress of Arad, written ca. 600 BCE. By using novel image processing and machine learning algorithms we deduce the presence of at least six authors in this corpus. This indicates a high degree of literacy in the Judahite administrative apparatus and provides a possible stage setting for compilation of biblical texts. After the kingdom’s demise, a similar literacy level reemerges only ca. 200 BCE.

I’m certainly not qualified to comment on ancient Israelite literacy rates so I will leave that to others. But what’s much more interesting about this paper, in my opinion, is the use of computer handwriting analysis to detect multiple scribes at work on ostraca. Here’s the description of the method:

Our algorithmic sequence consisted of three consecutive stages, operating on digital images of the ostraca (see Supporting Information). All of the stages are fully automatic, with the exception of the first, which is a semiautomatic step.

1. Restoring characters
2. Extraction of characters’ features, describing their different aspects (e.g., angles between strokes and character profiles), and measuring the similarity (“distances”) between the characters’ feature vectors.
3. Testing the null hypothesis H₀ (for each pair of ostraca), that two given inscriptions were written by the same author. A corresponding P value (P) is deduced, leveraging the data from the previous step. If P ≤ 0.2, we reject H₀ and accept the competing hypothesis of two different authors; otherwise, we remain undecided. [Note the assumption favoring different hands.]

 The important thing is that the computer software has to have “binary” images in step two. This seems to mean that the computer needs a crisp black and white image with just the letter and nothing else. But that means reconstructing letters from pottery that’s worn, dirty, scraped, etc. (see photo below). That’s the stage I have some doubt about since the handwriting algorithms work by measuring distances between vectors (see step 2 above). Depending on how sensitive those measurements are, the reconstruction process could make a big difference.

Visual representation of the process of restoring lost letters.

The authors did test the method on 18 modern Hebrew writers and it worked in about 98% of the cases. That’s impressive. But then they didn’t have to reconstruct their handwriting either since they had nice, clean scans of alphabets the 18 people wrote for them.

In the end, the analysis found at least six different hands at work in the 16 inscriptions used in the study. Thus (a) literacy rates were high and thus (b) the Old Testament was compiled in the 7th rather than the 2nd century B.C. That at least explains the headlines. The article actually doesn’t spend much time getting us from a to b. (Remember, it is a science journal.)

Still, I did find the handwriting analysis itself most interesting. I’d like to see the method applied to something like the correctors in Sinaiticus and see what it comes up with.