Lanier on UBS6

Over on his new YouTube channel, Greg Lanier has posted a long, 45-minute review of UBS6. I haven’t watched it all yet, but what I did watch was in-depth and thorough. Overall, he seems to like it but recognizes that it will not supplement the NA edition the way it has in the past given the reduction in the apparatus. My own review is forthcoming in Themelios, and I’ll post it here when it's out. Until then, give Lanier’s video a watch.

Video Look at the New ECM of Revelation

Greg Paulson has recorded a short video on YouTube giving an overview of the new four-volume (!) Editio Critica Maior edition of Revelation. One whole volume is dedicated to punctuation and “textual structure.”

Some highlights: 

• The textual commentary is the longest yet
• 84 changes to the initial text; 106 split lines; 95 changes in orthography
• The edition gives a list of singular readings
• There is a new punctuation apparatus with paratextual data too
• Nomina sacra are marked in the main text (I wonder how these were decided on)
• This is the first ECM completed outside Münster

Congratulations to the team!

SBL Presentation on the Future of Text-Types

At SBL last fall I gave a paper on the future of text-types for the session on the IGNTP anniversary. Hugh Houghton kindly asked if I would record it for the IGNTP YouTube channel and the videographers at my school kindly lent their time and talents to record it. (If it looks like I had the paper memorized, I did not. It’s just a camera trick and a teleprompter.) The outline of the paper is as follows:

1. Intro
2. Text-types as a solution (2:00)
3. Text-types as a problem (5:25)
4. Suggestions for progress (13:50)
1. Define “texts” (14:02)
2. Clarify their purpose (16:02)
3. Specify their relationship (17:08)
5. Conclusion (18:12)
6. Postscript (19:30)

Besides giving an overview of where I think the discussion on text-types is (and needs to go), this video explains why we are centering our TCI colloquium this summer on this question.

IGNTP Videos on YouTube

Today at SBL, I will be giving a paper in a special section on the 75th anniversary of The International Greek New Testament Project. Revisiting their website reminded me that the IGNTP set up a YouTube channel not long ago and it is full of videos. Today seemed like a good day to remind our readers of this great resource. Go check it out.

Video Interviews with Text Critics

Dwayne Green is a pastor up in Canada who’s been putting out a steady stream of video interviews on textual criticism and Bible translation lately. As a pastor, he’s especially interested in theology and methodology and likes the KJV himself but isn’t KJV-only. He seems genuinely open to views he doesn’t hold and has a lighthearted style about his videos. He’s been nothing but a nice chap in all my interactions with him. So far he’s interviewed Hixson and myself, Dirk Jongkind, Maurice Robinson, Mark Ward, Timothy Berg, Jeff Riddle, James Snapp, and several others. Go check out his YouTube channel. I especially recommend the most recent one with Maurice Robinson if you’ve ever wondered who the Pierpont in Robinson-Pierpont was.

Two Interviews with Peter Head

Ferdie Mulder recently sat down with Peter Head for a recorded interview and he has now posted the video. The geese get a bit excited at points, but don’t let that spoil it for you. The second video is more focused on textual criticism and papyrology, but do not miss the point in the first video where there is a soft giggle at the suggestion that Dr. Head has supervised some excellent PhD students. Aside from that, I quite enjoyed these. Thanks, Ferdie!

Part 1 Part 2

Watch Matthew’s Nativity (and More) in Koine

Ben Kantor and the team at koinegreek.com has produced another stellar video of the Gospels in koine. Before they did Mark and this time they’ve done all of Matthew with a twist—the dubbing is all from the text of Codex Vaticanus. Even the closed captions are in majuscule-ish! This means you can now watch and listen to the Christmas story in koine Greek! You can learn more here. Congrats to the entire team who did this. Their plan is to release these up until Easter, one chapter at a time.

In the spirit of Christmas time, KoineGreek.com is releasing Matthew Chapter 1 right now, so that students and scholars of Greek everywhere can appreciate the story of the nativity in the original language of the New Testament. Later this week—by Christmas Eve—KoineGreek.com plans to release Matthew Chapter 2. After this, the plan is to release one or two chapters per week until the week of Palm Sunday, Passover, and Resurrection Sunday (or Easter), during which the plan is to release more or less one chapter per day, beginning with Matthew 21 on Palm Sunday and concluding with Matthew 28 on Resurrection Sunday.

You can watch Matthew 1 here.

Last Two Videos on NT Textual Criticism and Askeland on GJW

I’ve now uploaded the last two guest lectures from my Fall TC course. The first is from James Snapp on Mark 16 and the second is Richard Brash on whether Cornelius Van Til’s theology leads to KJV-onlyism or its kin.

By way of commentary, I should note that James and I had a good Q&A after his talk but Zoom was unfortunately a bit out of sync. Personally, I was surprised to hear James say that he does not think Mark 16.9–20 is Mark’s originally intended ending. In other words, both he and I agree that we do not have Mark’s intended ending. Where we differ is that he thinks that vv. 9–20 are still from Mark and were in the first published copy. By his definition, then, they are original. I’m guessing that if that was news to me, it may be news to some of James’s followers too. But James can chime in if he wants to clarify/correct me here.

Finally, apologies to Christian Askeland whose video on Coptic translations I forgot to download in time from Zoom and is now gone forever. As a consolation, you can go read Christian’s new article on lessons from the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife at the TCI website.

Thanks to all my guests this semester!

God rest ye merry Gentlemen

 

I should think that some textual critics will enjoy this short musical interlude.

More NT Textual Criticism Guest Lecture Videos

I’m teaching NTTC again at the seminary and that means having guest lecturers visit to share their work. The first two videos are now up at the TCI YouTube channel. If you subscribe there, you’ll get new videos when they’re posted. Thanks to Mike and Edgar for letting me share these.

Ebojo on P46 and the Pastoral Epistles

 

Holmes on Editing and Translating the NT for Church and Academy

Twelfth Birmingham Colloquium Videos

For those not aware, the presentations for this year’s Birmingham Colloquium on NT Textual Criticism have been online and are being put on YouTube here.

When Art (Forgery) Imitates Textual Criticism

Over the weekend I watched a documentary called Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art. It’s about the case of $80m in fake art that was sold by the famed Knoedler Art Gallery in NYC. Knoedler was the oldest gallery in the U.S. and the scandal ended its storied history; they shut their doors in 2011.

The ARTnews review gives a good summary of what happened.

The film starts in the 1990s, when Freedman meets a woman that no one in the art world had ever heard of before named Glafira Rosales, who claims to have a trove of previously unknown paintings by the greats of postwar contemporary art, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn, and more. Avrich’s interviewees claim there were numerous red flags that Freedman should have spotted—Rosales’s story of how and from whom her secretive client, Mr. X, came to acquire the works seemed suspicious, and there was no documentation of the work’s provenance. Freedman claims otherwise: “It was credible, to me. I believed what I was told. There was mystery, but there’s often mystery in provenance. I hoped to solve that mystery as time went on.”

Don’t worry, the ETC blog is not getting into art criticism. I mention the documentary because there are so many parallels with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife fiasco: a con artist targets a major institution that buys the con, lending its enormous credibility to the fakes; the con artist gives just enough info about provenance to satisfy the initial questions; when red flags do pop up, the con artist leaks a few more details about provenance to keep the ruse going; the experts who note problems are dismissed or silenced by the institution at the center; etc.

A fake Rothko on display at a museum.

At one point, a wealthy family that bought a fake talks about how they “fell in love” with it immediately. They were smitten. But it becomes clear that they didn’t just love the painting, they loved the idea of owning a previously unknown painting by a famous artist. They loved the exclusivity of it all. And this gets to the heart of the issue. Like with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, the key players believed the con because they wanted to; they believed because they loved the idea. There are other lessons, but those are the ones that jumped out.

Sometimes, seeing a problem in another field can help you recognize it in your own. I recommend the movie if you can catch it. It’s on Netflix now.

Final Video: Shah on the Goalpost of New Testament Textual Criticism

The last video from my TC class is now up at YouTube. In it, Dr. Abidan Paul Shah introduces his new book Changing the Goalpost of New Testament Textual Criticism (2020). Despite the trend among some scholars, he argues that we can and should pursue the original text as our goal in textual criticism. Thanks to Abidan for joining us. Again, remember to subscribe for new videos.

More videos: Anderson on Family 1, Hixson on the Tyndale Textual Commentary

Two more videos from my ThM class on textual criticism are now live. In the first, Dr. Amy Anderson gives an overview and update of her work on the textual history of Family 1 in the Gospels. She also gives a helpful overview of the state of the discipline at the start. In the second, Dr. Elijah Hixson introduces the textual commentary being written to accompany the Greek New Testament Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge.

Amy Anderson

Elijah Hixson

Thanks to both my guests for joining my class. You can find all the videos in this series at the Text & Canon Institute YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe if you’re into that sort of thing.

More Guest Lectures on TC

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.

Joey McCollum

Clark Bates

Video from SIL Textual Criticism and Translation Webinar

Meade and I recently participated in a live webinar with Drew Maust of SIL on the importance and role of textual criticism for Bible translation. It was a good time with great questions from Drew and the participants. You can now watch the video on Vimeo here.