Wallace on Blomberg's new book

Dan Wallace has a helpful interaction with Craig Blomberg's new book on believing the Bible, especially in relation to the chapter on textual criticism of the NT (which mostly seems to focus on Bart Ehrman). Dan is positive about the book, but the nine errors he notices in chapter one are unfortunate, and they are also suggest that Craig B. is a bit out of his comfort zone with this material. I sometimes wonder how much thorough accuracy really matters in apologetics?

Off to Oklahoma for a conference

Tomorrow I am heading for Oklahoma City for a conference on Dating Early Papyri and Manuscripts with the Green Scholars Initiative. In addition to my academic paper on some obscure subject connected with the palaeography of the early papyri and meeting up with some old academic friends (and making new ones), and speaking in a church for the father of one of my students; I shall also be checking some things for our Codex Climaci Rescriptus project. While I'm there I'm hoping to get to the Banjo Museum, the Cowboy Museum, and I'll be looking for Route 66 and the way to Amarillo. Here is clip from the previous conference:

A guest post

Ed Andrew Edmondson, working on a PhD in beautiful Birmingham, sent in the following:

John 12:15 quotes Zechariah 9:9: “Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt!”. Most of the manuscripts read ο βασιλευς σου (your king), but a small number read ο βασιλευ σου - or is that ο βασιλευς ου since there are no word boundaries?
Surely it isn't intended to read “the king is not coming” (ο βασιλευς ου) - so is “ο βασιλευ σου” a legitimate alternative?

Consider John 12:15 in manuscript 1014, for example, which seems a clear case of a single sigma:


Perhaps the scribe missed out one sigma, either by design or error. Or perhaps this could be an unexpected use of the vocative... Now consider Matthew 21:5 in the same manuscript, which contains the same quote from Zechariah:


That has two sigmas... so it doesn't seem that this scribe would habitually miss one out. So was it just a mistake in his copying of John?

Interestingly, considering the same two places in manuscript 382 we find only one sigma in each place. So perhaps that scribe did deliberately write this with only one sigma. A few words earlier in John 12 he did write ο βασιλευσ του ιηλ (the king of Israel) – so he wasn't against the form βασιλευσ.

So why do we find this reading? Is it merely phonetic and/or just a different way of writing the same variant? Or is it a genuine variant using the vocative (or even the negative)?

And so should it be regularised away, or left in the critical apparatus? We were trying to answer this question in ITSEE today...

Witnesses to this variant: 036, 295, 382, 579, 732, 1014, 1029, 1344, 1546, 2411, 2585, 2615, L425, L1075

More Codex Sinaiticus Images Online

The British Library have announced that images of the British Library portions of Codex Sinaiticus are available through their Digitised Manuscripts collection. A quick look here suggests that they are the same images as used for the Codex Sinaiticus Project, so I'm interested in whether this additional resource will be helpful in ways that the CSP is not (feel free to comment on this, I don't have time right now to check such things). There is a helpful bibliography and other information, including reference to a forthcoming volume: From Parchment to Pixel, ed. by S. McKendrick and D. C. Parker, London (forthcoming) - this is presumably the publication of the papers of the Sinaiticus conference in 2009.

J.K. Elliott reviews Trobisch's User's Guide

JTS have published J. K. Elliott's review of

A User’s Guide to the Nestle–Aland 28 Greek New Testament. By David Trobisch.

The pdf is (also?) available here. J Theol Studies published 22 March 2014, 10.1093/jts/flu045

 

Elliott is pretty critical (cf. Dirk's comments here), with some good detail which will help teachers using the Guide with their students. 

 

Another interesting article

Another recent interesting article to add to Peter's recent list; apologies for not posting it when it appeared in January:

Juan Hernández, Jr., "The Creation of a Fourth-Century Witness to the Andreas Text-Type: A Misreading in the Apocalypse's Textual History," New Testament Studies 60 (2014), 106 – 120.

 Abstract: "The publication of Josef Schmid's landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid's claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid's reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh-century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text do not exist. Schmid's widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's "Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus."