On the textualcriticism discussionlist, Arie Dirkzwager draws the attention to Young Kyu Kim's article "Palaeographical Dating of p46 to the Later First Century" which is available online here.
Arie asked for comments on the article. For some reason my reply to the discussionlist is bouncing back so I have to reply offlist to Arie. Anyway, Kim's article (and the dating of P46) was discussed on the old TC-list, and the particular thread was started by no other than the founder of the new textualcriticism discussionlist, Wieland Willker:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tc-list/message/6123
... followed by several other messages in the thread.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Hurtado on the Staurogram
While writing a review for New Testament Manuscripts: Their Texts and Their World, I discovered that Prof. Larry Hurtado has made his chapter available online, with permission from the publisher, here. The chapter is a reworking of a chapter in The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Old ETC posts on this book are here and here.
Romans 7.25a: 'I give thanks to God ...'
The text of the first few words of Romans 7.25 seems pretty unsettled. It occured to me today during a supervision that there are two other readings with better ancient support than the NA27 reading (XARIS DE TW QEW - the earliest proper manuscript support for this is ninth century!); and that the best attested reading was probably EUXARISTW TW QEW (01; 02; 1739; 1881; Maj. syr.; probably also Marcion). If we accept this reading on the basis of the manuscript support, then there is no interjection in 7.25a; but the EGW continues to speak throughout (indeed perhaps until 8.2). Textual criticism and exegesis are hand-in-glove.
Here is a picture of Sinaiticus (01) for this part of the verse (including the later correction):
Here is a picture of Alexandrinus (02) for this verse:
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
New Book: Bible Manuscripts
Scot McKendrick & Kathleen Doyle, Bible Manuscripts: 1400 Years of Scribes and Scripture (London: British Library, 2007) available here
From the Blurb: 'Spanning the entire manuscript era, from the 2nd to 16th centuries, this lavishly illustrated history traces the evolution of Bible manuscripts - from the first Greek fragments unearthed in Roman Egypt to some of the last vernacular Bible produced in Renaissance Europe before the total dominance of printing.'
After a brief and helpful introduction (by SM), the book consists of 142 lovely full colour photographs of manuscripts held in the British Library. "Bible Manuscripts" means actually "Christian Bible Manuscripts" (since Hebrew Manuscripts have their own book in the series). Of Greek New Testament ones there are some fairly predictable majuscules (e.g. P5, P18, 01, 03) and a few minuscules (699, 640, 113). The vast majority of manuscripts offered (reflecting something of the weight of material in the West and hence in the British Library) are Latin (although Old English, Old Saxon, Syriac, French, Serbian, English, Dutch, German, Catalan, and Church Slavonic are all represented, as is the Harley Trilingual Psalter in Greek, Latin and Arabic), and the majority of the photographs, as is common in these sorts of collections, are of pages with decorations, canon tables, portraits etc. and not always a lot of text. So the collection is more useful and interesting for thinking about the history of the influence and interpretation of the Bible than about the text itself.
Two things I learned (among others):
From the Blurb: 'Spanning the entire manuscript era, from the 2nd to 16th centuries, this lavishly illustrated history traces the evolution of Bible manuscripts - from the first Greek fragments unearthed in Roman Egypt to some of the last vernacular Bible produced in Renaissance Europe before the total dominance of printing.'
After a brief and helpful introduction (by SM), the book consists of 142 lovely full colour photographs of manuscripts held in the British Library. "Bible Manuscripts" means actually "Christian Bible Manuscripts" (since Hebrew Manuscripts have their own book in the series). Of Greek New Testament ones there are some fairly predictable majuscules (e.g. P5, P18, 01, 03) and a few minuscules (699, 640, 113). The vast majority of manuscripts offered (reflecting something of the weight of material in the West and hence in the British Library) are Latin (although Old English, Old Saxon, Syriac, French, Serbian, English, Dutch, German, Catalan, and Church Slavonic are all represented, as is the Harley Trilingual Psalter in Greek, Latin and Arabic), and the majority of the photographs, as is common in these sorts of collections, are of pages with decorations, canon tables, portraits etc. and not always a lot of text. So the collection is more useful and interesting for thinking about the history of the influence and interpretation of the Bible than about the text itself.
Two things I learned (among others):
- the Apocalypse produced a high proportion of interesting illustrations (certainly compared to the proportion of Greek manuscripts, since here it is the least well represented portion of the New Testament - perhaps the situation in relation to the Apocalypse in Latin manuscripts and Latin lectionaries is different [does anybody know?]).
- London, British Library, Add. MS 5111 contains two leaves of 'an extraordinary deluxe manuscript of the Four Gospels' - perhaps 6th century, gold ink, beautiful decorations etc. But this manuscript has never been used in any edition of the Greek NT and is not listed in any normal list of NT manuscripts. I never knew it existed until now. And the reason for such careless neglect?
The book is published as one aspect of the current British Library exhibit on Sacred Texts from Christianity, Judaism and Islam: "Sacred: Discover what we share", which is an interesting (!) angle to take. I am not quite sure why "Sacred: Discover the differences" wasn't chosen.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Collating for Dummies
Tony Chartrand-Burke offers a wonderful little booklet, Collating for Dummies, which is a step-by-step guide for collating MSS. (The focus is on apocryphal/patristic texts but many things are useful for collators of NT MSS.) Tony prepared this guide when he was working on his dissertation—an edition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—as a PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. The dissertation "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The Text, its Origins, and its Transmission" is available here.
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