Top 10 Posts in 2016

These are the top ten most read posts for the blog in 2016 according to Google Analytics. Not all of these were written in 2016 of course. For last year’s list, see here.

1. BREAKING NEWS: Archaeologists find Q
2. Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism
3. More on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and Walter Fritz
4. Debunking Silly Statements about the Bible
5. Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus
6. Is the Longer Ending of Mark Inspired? (with Poll)
7. Does Scripture’s Self-Attestation Apply to Textual Criticism?
8. Breaking News on the First-Century (?) Fragment of Mark
9. How Many Variants Make It into Your Greek New Testament?
10. Historic Editions of the Greek New Testament online

Happy new year, everybody!

The Most Read Posts in 2015

As 2015 comes to a close, it’s time for that yearly tradition, the Year in Review. Here at the ETC blog we’ve had over 165 posts and over 172,000 hits in 2015 according to Google Analytics. (Blogger stats are much higher because apparently they count bots and spiders.)

So what have been the most read posts here? People are very interested in the oldest NT manuscript. Bart is always popular, but so are the top ten essential works in NT textual criticism and historic editions of the GNT (probably helped by being on the main navigation).

Rank	Title	Hits
1.	Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism	7,473
2.	Questions about “First Century Mark”	2,814
3.	Breaking News on the First-Century(?) Fragment of Mark	2,272
4.	Historic Editions of the Greek New Testament online	2,096
5.	What is the Oldest Manuscript of the New Testament?	1,743
6.	Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus	1,596
7.	Has anyone seen “First Century Mark”?	1,292
8.	How many books in the New Testament?	983
9.	New NT Papyrus Manuscripts	917
10.	Journal Rankings for New Testament	896

Slightly different, here are the most popular posts written in the last year.

Rank	Title	Hits
1.	Questions about “First Century Mark”	2,814
2.	Historic Editions of the Greek New Testament online	2,096
3.	What is the Oldest Manuscript of the New Testament?	1,743
4.	Has anyone seen “First Century Mark”?	1,292
5.	New NT Papyrus Manuscripts	917
6.	Distribution of New Testament Manuscripts by Century	827
7.	Lunn on the End of Mark. Part 3	798
8.	The Gospel of Jesus Wife and Grondin’s Interlinear	793
9.	A New Papyrus of the Gospel of John	787
10.	How Many Variants Are There in the Greek New Testament?	720

Thanks to all our readers. Happy New Year!

A Dramatic Increase in Blog Traffic

Every once in a while this blog gets an unexpected dramatic increase in the number of readers. For example, in 2008 we had a couple of posts on Codex Gigas - the Devil's Bible here and here , which at the time was highlighted on the National Geographic Channel. A news reporter found our blog and linked to it and suddenly the blog traffic temporarily increased dramatically.

Last week it happened again when a large high tech blog named Slashdot wrote about the news, "80,000 Vatican mss to be digitized!" . Slashdot was mainly interested in the technical aspect of image storage, the choice of file format etc, "Vatican Chooses Open FITS Image Format", and through the link many high tech geeks were directed to this blog for manuscript nerds. One of the Slashdot readers speculates in one of the hundreds of comments:

"Does this mean in the monasteries we are going to have monks transcribing these manuscripts bit by bit? I mean, if you just scan the stuff in what else will they have to do all day. Pray for the boredom to be over..."