New Vetus Latina fragment of Acts

Jean-Louis SIMONET writes: "A new Vetus Latina fragment of the Acts of the Apostles (Ac 4:9-22, 12th Century) will soon appear, in the next issue of "La revue bénédictine". My article (in French) about this fragment will be entitled "Une lecture vieille latine des Actes des Apôtres dans un recueil liturgique de Graz". It includes a description, a transcription of the Latin text, and a discussion of the place of this new fragment in the Latin tradition of the Acts. The same manuscript also includes two fragments (Ac 14;8-17, 14:19-15:14) of the Vulgata, which I collate from the Stuttgart edition."

Relevance of Greek Discourse Studies to Exegesis and Textual Criticism

Stephen Carlson (Hypotyoseis) draws the attention to Stephen H. Levinsohn's online article, “The Relevance of Greek Discourse Studies to Exegesis," Journal of Translation 2 (2006) 11-21. In particular the article treats three discourse-related areas which, according to the writer, tend to be handled unsatisfactorily in exegesis: the order of constituents in the clause and sentence, the presence versus absence of the article with nouns, and the significance of the conjunctions used. Stephen Carlson rightly points out that these areas are of great significance for textual criticism as well.

Two years ago I had a fine student, Annika Ralston, who is acquinted personally with Levinsohn as she has been involved in work with Summer Institute of Linguistics. Anyway, she wrote an essay under my supervision: "Discourse Analysis and Interpretation: A Test Case in Matthew 24–25," and it is available here.

Accordance Users Conference and Textual Studies Sale

Accordance will host a users conference with "nationwide invitation" (although I assume it is a worldwide invitation since I received it). This is the first "Users Conference" and it will be held in the Dallas, TX area in September 24-25, 2010. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Martin Abegg, leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar.

See the full announcement here.

Further, during April to May 9, Accordance offers a 20% discount off their usual price on textual studies modules:

Critical editions and tools
* CNTTS Apparatus (whole NT), $80
* Tischendorf's 8th edition, $40
* The Mac Bibel Studienbibel including the GNT NA 27 apparatus and the BHS apparatus, $119
* LXX Swete Apparatus with text (when complete will cover the whole LXX), $88
LXX Cambridge Apparatus, more in depth but never completed, $48
"LXX Apparatus add-on" including both Swete and Cambridge, $120

Göttingen Text and Apparatus: Torah and Ruth to be released soon (not on sale).

Textual commentaries and notes:

* Comfort's Textual Commentary, $36
* Metzger's Textual Commentary, $28
* NET Notes (available with the NET Group), $30.
* MT-LXX Parallel aligns the Greek and Hebrew texts word for word, $80

Unfortunately, the digital versions of Bezae, Vaticanus, Washingtoniensis and the GNT Papyrus module are not on sale.

More details about the Textual Studies Sale here.

New Commentary on Hebrews

Finally, my new commentary on Hebrews is out (in Swedish), With Eyes Fixed on Jesus: The Epistle to the Hebrews. Tomorrow we will have a release party at Örebro Theological Seminary, when I will present the commentary, be interviewed, and hopefully sign some copies.

The commentary is the fifth in the Swedish commentary series Nya testamentets budskap (The Message of the New Testament). I would characterize it as an intermediate level commentary.

For Scandinavian readers who want to order the book, go here (Sweden); here (Norway); here (Denmark); here (Finland).

Greek NT MSS from the Gruber Rare Books Collection on-line

I was meaning to post on The Gruber Rare Books Collection at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago a long time ago, but now is the perfect time, because Jeff Hargis announced the other day on W. Willker's textual criticism discussion-list that the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) have posted images of fourteen Greek New Testament manuscripts in the collection:

CSNTM is pleased to announce the posting of fourteen Greek New Testament manuscripts from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, as well as a single leaf held by a private owner in Chicago. The manuscripts were photographed in March 2010 by a team from the Center and include GA 1424, an important late 9th or early 10th century manuscript that includes the entire New Testament. The manuscripts are posted on the “Manuscripts” section of the website. CSNTM is grateful to Dr. Ralph Klein, curator of the Rare Books Collection of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and to Dr. Edgar Krentz, for permission to post these images.

The Gruber Collection was mainly assembled by L. Franklin Gruber (1870-1941), President of Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, Maywood, Illinois. The MSS dates from the 9th to the 13th centuries. The most well-known, as apparent from Hargis' announcement is Greg.-Aland 1424. One of the interesting features of this MS is the so-called TO IOUDAIKON scholia found in few GNT MSS (incidentally, one other is in Sweden, so I have prepared an article including a brief treatment of the scholia and its suggested connection to the Jerusalem colophon).

As we have reported earlier on this blog, here, Dr. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann is cataloguing the Greek Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in collections in the United States.

In March last year, she was at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Chicago. She then found that the MSS had been studied very little by Seymour De Ricci and Kenneth Clark who had put together earler catalogues, and there were some erroneous information. For example, Kenneth Clark had dated one the MS to the latter 12th century, but Kavrus-Hoffman found palaeographic evidence that suggested a later date, and also the style of the miniatures confirmed her judgment.

In another MS there were notes in the margins about a solar eclips which helped her to establish the date and location of the scribe when he wrote the note.

Read the whole story here. I will come back with more news about Kavrus-Hoffmann's work.

An overview of the Greek New Testament MSS in the Gruber collection is found here.

The images of the MSS are found at CSNTM here.

Textual criticism of the ETC blog

We found many words here in one exemplar of the ETC blog, but these words could not be found in the manuscript corrected by Pamphilus the Martyr. We have therefore removed them.