Over at the Text & Canon Institute website, Clark Bates has put together a helpful list of resources for dealing with Greek abbreviations, contractions, and ligatures. It should be especially useful to students just getting started reading manuscripts. Along with Amy Anderson's article on the benefits of reading Greek manuscripts, it would be great for introducing students to manuscripts.
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| Ligatures galore in GA 1969, f. 125r! |
I’m happy to report that registration for our 2024 TCI Colloquium at Yarnton Manor is now open. The fee is $100/person and includes lunch both days. I hope to see some of our readers there. You can register at textandcanon.org/events/text-types/
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I’m happy to share a project I’ve been working on for some time here at the Text & Canon Institute. Some readers may remember that back in 2021 John Meade hosted our first colloquium on Origen as Philologist. As the papers for that near publication, we are pleased to announce our second colloquium will be this July on the topic of NT text-types. The event will be hosted at Lanier Theological Library’s beautiful Yarnton Manor just outside Oxford, England on July 18–19. We hope to open registration for attendees in the coming weeks. For now, here are the details of the speakers.
Held just outside Oxford, England, the Text & Canon Institute’s second colloquium will bring together an international group of textual scholars to take stock of the current debate, present fresh avenues of understanding, and discuss the implications for New Testament studies. You can find more details at the conference page.
Titles are subject to change of course
silvia castelli
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
The Origin and Early History of Text-Types
peter j. gurry
Phoenix Seminary
What Are Text-Types For?
klaus wachtel
Institute for New Testament Textual Research
The Text-Type Theory in Light of the CBGM
andrew edmondson
University of Birmingham
The Contribution of Phylogenetics
peter m. head
University of Oxford
The Alexandrian Text
peter lorenz
University of Münster
The Western Text
maurice a. robinson
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (Emeritus)
The Byzantine Text
stephen c. carlson
Australian Catholic University
The Caesarean Text
dirk jongkind
Tyndale House, Cambridge
In Defense of Text-Types
peter malik & darius müller
Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal/Bethel
Text-Types in the Book of Revelation
h. a. g. houghton
University of Birmingham
Text-Types in the Latin Tradition
Recently, I learned from Tim Berg that the 1602 Bishops’ Bible believed to have the handwritten edits of the KJV translators has been fully digitized and put online by the Bodleian Library. (It has also been recatalogued from BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1 to Arch. A b. 18.) I have added a link to it on my page of historic English Bibles online.
This is very good news as this may be one of, if not the, most important sources we have for understanding the translators’ work. This particular copy has consistent edits throughout the Old Testament, the Synoptics, and some chapters in John.
Besides marking where they wanted to change the Bishops’ text, there are also notations marking the source of some of those edits as the Geneva Bible among others. This copy also provides insight into the translators textual decisions.
But for that, and much else, you’ll have to read Tim Berg’s excellent article at the Text & Canon Institute: “A Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James Version.”
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Over at the Text & Canon Institute, we’ve been working for most of 2021 on a new website to help people understand how we got the Bible. I’m happy to say that this week it went live. It’s aimed primarily at laypeople, students, and pastors and we designed it very intentionally with these groups in mind. To help them find what fits their particular needs and interests, all the content can be easily filtered by category, reading level, and author. The topics cover everything from text to canon to translation and some things in between. At launch, we have 15 articles with hopes of publishing about two a month. If you want to get those when they’re published, be sure to subscribe.
One question I’ve had this week is how the new site compares to this great blog. Personally, I plan to keep writing for both and see them as different venues. At ETC I can get right down in the weeds, be less polished, and can assume a lot more knowledge on the part of the reader. The TCI website, on the other hand, is a place to help the uninitiated understand why TC (among others things) matters and answer their questions without assuming much prior knowledge (for example).
Let me highlight one article in particular for this audience. Maurice Robinson presented on the Spirit’s role in TC a few years back at ETS and we have published a revised version of it here. In it, he argues that a discussion of God’s activity is absent from most modern discussions about TC even though it used to be fairly common. He wants to bring it back into the discussion and argues that we should avoid the extreme of abandoning scientific textual criticism on the one hand and excluding God’s role altogether on the other hand.
Since we don’t have a comments feature on the new site, maybe we could open a discussion of MAR’s article here.
P.S. I hope you find my favorite page on the new site.
The latest issue of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology is devoted to textual criticism and bibliology. The main essays are published versions of the Text & Canon Institute’s inaugural conference from 2020 with some intro essays by Steve Wellum, John Meade, and myself. We’re glad to see this material reach a new audience and thankful to SBJT for hosting it. Don’t mind the 2020 date; it’s a COVID thing. It’s all open access, by the way.
Editorial: Defending Biblical Authority on the Textual Front
STEPHEN J. WELLUM
Discipleship and the History of the Bible
JOHN D. MEADE
Some Missteps in Narrating the Bible’s History
JOHN D. MEADE AND PETER J. GURRY
From a Smoking Canon to Burning Hearts: The Making of the Hebrew Bible
STEPHEN G. DEMPSTER
Chaos Theory and the Text of the Old Testament
PETER J. GENTRY
Where Inspiration is Found: Putting the New Testament Autographs in Context
TIMOTHY N. MITCHELL
Listening to the Dead Sea Scrolls
ANTHONY M. FERGUSON
What Do James, Peter, John, and Jude Have in Common? Arguing for the Canonical Collection of the Catholic Epistles
DARIAN R. LOCKETT
ETC readers may know that Dr. Meade and I direct the recently-founded Text & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary. Our mission is to produce academic research and church resources that illuminate the origin of the Bible. We do this through publications, mentoring, academic colloquia, church conferences, and digital resources.
Today, we are pleased to share that we have made a strategic hire that will help us fulfill that mission. Dr. Peter J. Gentry, whose work needs no introduction here, was already a member of our board of advisors but he will now be joining us as our first Senior Research Fellow. He also been appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Old Testament at the seminary. These positions provide continued teaching opportunity for Dr. Gentry while providing more time for his ongoing research on the text of the Old Testament.
Dr. Gentry will teach courses at both the MDiv and ThM level at Phoenix Seminary. As a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute, he will be especially involved with our TCI Fellows. If you are a student who is interested in a PhD in textual criticism or canon studies or just want to shore up those areas before doing ancillary work, let me encourage you to consider our TCI Fellowship. Applications are open through December 31. Where else can you study with two PJGs?
You can read the official announcement here or watch the video.
We’ve uploaded two more videos to our TCI YouTube channel from my ThM TC course. You can find all the guest lecture videos here (not all are recorded).
The first new video is from Joey McCollum on identifying textual clusters and is based on his recent AUSS article on the same topic. The second is by Clark Bates on the origin of Greek minuscule. Clark is soon headed off to Birmingham and we wish him and his family well, especially as they adjust to life with no sun and temps below 110°F. Thanks to both for sharing their research with us.
As I now look toward my PhD program, I am able to reflect on this year and recognize that were it not for the TCI, Phoenix Seminary’s ThM program, and especially Drs. Meade and Gurry, I would not be as prepared as I am today. I am able to make a contribution to the field of biblical studies. I have the knowledge necessary to engage the conversation, the necessary research skills, the language skills to engage international scholarship, and the confidence to promote my research. I cannot recommend Phoenix Seminary, and especially the Text & Canon Institute, more highly. I hope always to be connected with their work and to spread the word of its mission everywhere I go. Anyone desiring to work in the fields of Old or New Testament Textual Criticism and/or the reception history of the Bible, should absolutely consider the TCI for their future endeavors.
The Bible is the best-selling book of all time and its influence on Western culture beyond compare. But how did this group of ancient books written and then copied over millennia become the Bible we now know?The Text & Canon Institute seeks to foster academic study of the Bible and to serve the church and impact the culture by providing expertise and instruction on the history of the Bible. The Sacred Words conference brings this expertise directly to the church and wider culture.
Join us for the Text & Canon Institute’s inaugural conference and learn from internationally known speakers about how the Bible has been copied, collected, and confessed as God’s sacred words.
