The Text of the Pauline Corpus Articles

Having

Paul deciding whether 
to write ἔχομεν or ἔχωμεν

just finished a dictionary article on the text of Paul, I thought I should note two more-in-depth articles on the same topic from my co-bloggers. 

• Jongkind, Dirk. “The Text of the Pauline Corpus.” Pages 216–231 in The Blackwell Companion to Paul. Edited by Stephen Westerholm. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
• Holmes, Michael W. “The Text of the Pauline Corpus.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies. Edited by Matthew V. Novenson and R. Barry Matlock. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.

The second of these is not even in print yet, I don’t think. But it is already available free online. 

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.

Two New Titles in the ANTF Series

Two new titles are announced by De Gruyter as forthcoming this year in the series Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung (ISSN 0570-5509) (via ITSEE).

The Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) is responsible for the series. Besides the director of the INTF, Holger Strutwolf, David Parker of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) is co-editor of the series - yet another sign of the fruitful cooperation of these two institutes in recent years.

David C. Parker, Manuscripts, Texts, Theology. Collected Papers 1977-2007
23 x 15.5 cm. Approx. XII, 375 pages. Hardcover. RRP Euro [D] 99.95 / for USA, Canada, Mexico US$ 140.00. *
ISBN 978-3-11-021193-1
Series: Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung 40
Languages: English
Type of Publication: Collection
to be published June 2009
Also available as an eBook

About this Title
David C. Parker is one of the world’s foremost specialists in the study of the New Testament text and of Greek and Latin manuscripts. In addition to editions, monographs and more popular writings, he has published many articles on different aspects of textual criticism. This volume brings together twentyfive of them in a revised and updated version.
The collection is divided into three topics. The first deals with manuscript studies. As well as three very different studies of Codex Bezae, there are articles and reports on individual manuscripts and classes of manuscripts and reports on visits to libraries. The second section has the theme of textual criticism. It includes broader studies dealing with the theory of the discipline and more detailed discussions of particular problems, including translations into Latin, techniques for grouping Greek manuscripts, and the comparison of modern editions. The third section contains papers in which Parker has discussed the often overlooked relationship between textual criticism and theology. These studies explore particular textual problems and their wider significance, and cover topics as varied as “Jesus and Textual Criticism”, “Calvin’s Biblical Text” and “The Early Tradition of Jesus’ Sayings on Divorce”.

Louis Charles Willard, A Critical Study of the Euthalian Apparatus
23 x 15.5 cm. Approx. 200 pages. Hardcover. RRP Euro [D] 79.95 / for USA, Canada, Mexico US$ 112.00. *
ISBN 978-3-11-021567-0 Series: Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung 41
Languages: English
Type of Publication: Monograph
to be published September 2009
Also available as an eBook

About this Title
Manuscripts of the New Testament frequently contain, in addition to the text, supplementary information such as excerpts from the Fathers, chapter lists, quotation lists, introductions to sections, for example, the Pauline letters, and to individual books. The „Euthalian apparatus“ is the name given to one such collection of helps to the reader. Unfortunately, the relationship of the various parts, the identity of the author, the time of the writing, and the provenance remain uncertain. This work collects, summarizes, and analyzes the sometimes disparate published scholarship on the apparatus through 1970. The bibliography updates the original bibliography through 2007 and includes newly identified, earlier bibliographic references.

Postscript: In the abstract of Klaus Wachtel's upcoming SBL presentation in New Orleans he mentions "a research project at the Münster Institute for New Testament Textual Research" involving "full collations of 38 synoptic pericopes in 156 manuscripts." I have long been waiting for the publication of the results of this project, and I wonder when this fine tool will appear in the ANTF series.

The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus

Now available from Brill in the New Testament Tools Studies and Documents series:

Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (NTTSD 38; Leiden: Brill, 2009). ISBN 978 90 04 17394 1

Cover: Hardback
Number of pages: xvi, 350 pp
List price: € 114.00 / US$ 169.00

Table of Contents
Foreword (Helen K. Bond)
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Most Popular Story in the Gospels
Chapter One: A History of Research on John 8.6, 8
Chapter Two: Speaking of Writing: καταγράφω and γράφω in Hellenistic, Jewish, and New Testament Contexts
Chapter Three: Writing and Gradations of Literacy
Chapter Four: Scribal Literacy in the New Testament World: The Scribes (and Pharisees) as Text-Brokers
Chapter Five: The Pericope Adulterae at John 7.53–8.11: The Location
Chapter Six: The Pericope Adulterae at John 7.53–8.11: The Preceding Context of John 7
Chapter Seven: The Pericope Adulterae at John 7.53–8.11: The Narrative
Chapter Eight: The Pericope Adulterae at John 7.53–8.11: The (Divine) Grapho-Literacy of Jesus
Chapter Nine: The Historical Context for the Insertion of the Pericope Adulterae into the Gospel of John: A Proposal
Conclusion: The Pericope Adulterae in the Early Church
Bibliography

Abstract:
"Although consistently overlooked or dismissed, John 8.6, 8 in the Pericope Adulterae is the only place in canonical or non-canonical Jesus tradition that portrays Jesus as writing. After establishing that John 8.6, 8 is indeed a claim that Jesus could write, this book offers a new interpretation and transmission history of the Pericope Adulterae. Not only did the pericope’s interpolator place the story in John’s Gospel in order to highlight the claim that Jesus could write, but he did so at John 7.53–8.11 as a result of carefully reading the Johannine narrative. The final chapter of the book proposes a plausible socio-historical context for the insertion of the story."

Chris tells me that a modified version of chapter five on the location of the pericope will appear in Novum Testamentum later this year. Congratulations Chris!