Sister of Leningrad Codex Discovered!

Congratulations to Kim Phillips, Tyndale House Research Associate, for discovering a manuscript of the Former Prophets by Samuel ben Jacob the scribe of the Leningrad Codex. This should make a significant difference to our understanding of the main manuscript used for the study of the Hebrew Bible today.

The Tyndale House notice is here. The original article is online freely in the Tyndale Bulletin.

Tyndale House Workshop in Greek Prepositions

From Will Ross and Steve Runge, a conference modeled after the well-done Greek verb conference from a few years back:

Students and scholars of Greek have long wrestled with understanding the meaning of prepositions. This challenge is partly the result of the centuries-old tradition in Greek lexicography of providing glosses (or translation equivalents) in the target language that fail to capture the meaning of a lexical item. 

Moreover, the semantics of Greek and English prepositions do not isometrically overlap, giving the misleading appearance of polysemy. In an effort to address these challenges, this Workshop aims to approach semantic description of Koine prepositions from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and prototype theory.  

Following the work of Silvia Luraghi (2003) and Pietro Bortone (2010) on Greek prepositions, there is growing consensus among scholars of Greek that the cognitive linguistic approach to meaning is the most promising way forward.  

Yet to date no concerted effort has been made towards applying this cognitive approach in a form that is accessible to non-specialists, which provides the occasion and motivation for our Workshop.  

This Workshop will be cross-disciplinary, bringing together classicists, biblical scholars, linguists, and theologians.

Speakers include

• Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven
• Richard A. Rhodes, U.C. Berkeley
• Jonathan A. Pennington, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Patrick James, University of Cambridge
• Steven Runge, Logos Bible Software
• Randall Buth, Biblical Language Center

June 30-July 1, 2017. Registration opens March 1. No call for papers is forthcoming. More info at greekprepositionworkshop.org. Background on the conference at Will’s blog. It sounds fun. I wish I could be there for it.

Inaugural meeting of editorial committee

Yesterday felt like a historic occasion when the editorial committee of the Tyndale House Edition of the Greek New Testament (THEGNT) had its first meeting to review the Pauline corpus. Tyndale House plans to release the electronic text of THEGNT freely in late 2013 to accompany its forthcoming interlinears of the Scripture Tools for Every Person (STEP) programme. At first the text, and only the text, will be available electronically. We are hoping to release the text in hard copy with apparatus and commentary in 2016.

THEGNT presents a revised text based on the edition of Tregelles and following documentary principles. The meaning of this phrase will be expounded later. Dirk Jongkind is primarily responsible for the initial revision and his editorial decisions are then being reviewed by Peter Head and Peter Williams. The three of us form the editorial committee.

One of the exciting features of THEGNT will be the presence of words not found in Greek dictionaries, concordances, or grammars. One could be provocative and say that this is because these sources have spelled them wrongly, but one might perhaps say that the standards of spelling used in the earliest manuscripts sometimes consistently differ from those used by modern editors, and that the documentary evidence suggests that the ‘non-standard’ spellings are not scribal innovations.

Whatever else one may say, sitting down to discuss the text of the New Testament with learned colleagues is incredibly enjoyable. I look forward to next month’s meeting.

Tyndale House and Bible and Church Conference

This week I was contacted by the librarian at Tyndale House. The Tyndale House Library wanted to purchase my commentary on Hebrews in Swedish! I have understood that the aim of this amazing library is to acquire all academic books about the Bible in all languages! This is no modest goal, but in order to achieve it, the Tyndale House ministry needs all support it can get.

Several of our blogmembers are affiliated to Tyndale House but they very seldom tell us about all the wonderful things that are going on all the time at Tyndale House, probably out of modesty. I for one would like to know more. Okay, not everything is immediately related to textual criticism, but I think practically all our readers have a general interest in Biblical Studies.

In any case, in the recent Tyndale House Newsletter we get to know about the plans for the next steps: the future expansion of the library and the increase to the ministry of Tyndale House. Central to these steps is to make the work more widely known, and therefore the Newsletter needs to be more widely distributed. So go here to subscribe. There you can also subscribe to the monthly e-News updates (latest eNews from March here). On the same page you can also read the latest issue (and earlier) of the Newsletter. There are nice pictures of our two Peters, Head and Williams. We are also reminded of the thirty minute documentary on "The Jesus Accounts" featuring Peter Head.

Another approaching major event organized by Tyndale House is the Bible and Church conference. This year, on Saturday June 12th, the three speakers (and ETC bloggers) Peter Williams, Dirk Jongkind and Simon Gathercole meet up again at St Helen's Bishopsgate in the heart of London to give three lectures: "Evidence of Eyewitnesses," "Evidence of Manuscripts," and "Evidence of History." It would be nice to have a comment or two about last year's conference. How did it go? Was it well attended? I have noted that one can order a DVD of the talks here.