Archaic Christianity

I am sorry, but I have to set Jim straight. If he needs proof that I have read some Zwingli, I'll give it to him. Of course, these pictures were in no way staged. My wife likes to randomly take pictures of me in my natural habitat (my study). I am, after all, very studly. And look, I have different shirts on when I read Wright and Zwingli. I'll even prove I have read some Wright. Clearly this is indisputable proof that these pictures were taking at two distinct periods! Here's me reading the latter...

Last time we talked about the text of chapter 1 of Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians. Now we'll talk about the ideas. To stir up your memory, here is the text:

Over at his blog Chris Tilling asked for people to point out their blogs so he could add them to his feed reader if he found the blog interesting. So Chris, here is why you should read my blog religiously:

There are a number of things one must do to become a great Christian thinker. One must study, be godly, and be able to communicate. But those criteria are easy to come up with, despite being hard to fulfill. Another criterion, much less appreciated, is the ability to insult the idiots those of inferior thinking that you may be dealing with at the moment.

We began our discussion of Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians the other day. Despite the fact that we only got through the introduction, we nevertheless saw some interesting material. Now we will actually get on to the body of the letter. Here is the text of the salutation (in my rather unidiomatic translation) followed by the text of chapter 1:

Along with the nomina sacra, there are a number of other shorthand marks in Greek manuscripts. One very common one is the nu bar. Here it is in Sinaiticus:

If you have spent any time in Codex Sinaiticus, you will notice the plethora of itacisms (spelling variations caused by the similar pronunciation of various vowels and diphthongs). You will also see them in Vaticanus and Alexandrinus, but they seem to occur more often in Sinaiticus in my growing but limited experience.

I updated the site and added a few things. First, I'm starting now to put collations of ancient texts up here on the site. You can find them on my collations page. I have a number of other chapters collated but I have not yet converted them to the proper format. Some were from the class projects I mentioned before, though I can't include any of the collations of the newly discovered manuscripts themselves...which I still can't talk about. When that info is released to the public I will certainly let you know, faithful readers. Since I am collating new stuff as well you can't use the existence of these collations as proof for what kind of manuscripts we were looking at...so haha! Feel free to guess, though I will neither confirm nor deny anything you have to say. I will give you a hint, however: they were not the autographs :)

Following up on a previous post, I am going to write briefly here about the issue of the destination of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians. Hopefully this will be a decent introduction to those of you who are not familiar with the issue. For those who have access to commentaries and academic books, I found the discussions in the commentaries of Best, Foulkes, and Lincoln to all be pretty good. Bruce's discussion was not as good. Also the discussion in Metzger's Textual Commentary was sufficient for its point, but not as full as the commentaries' discussion. The NET Bible's study note on this is concise but very good. But for those who do not have these things, or for those who do and like looking at pictures, here you go...

Ignatius was one of the bishops of the early church and he lived around the time the changeover from the first century to the second. It is generally assumed he was martyred in the first quarter of the second century. He supposedly wrote a number of letters that made it into the collection of writings now known as the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. These fellows made up the first generation of church leadership after the apostles had died. One of his letters, the one to the Ephesians, is very interesting, so we're going to spend some time walking through it. All translations of the Greek text used are my own. Here is the text of the introduction.

Our second installment on Greek handwriting is a good follow-up for the first.

We just uploaded a new manuscript to the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts site. It is a 10th-12th century minuscule manuscript of Luke, and you can view the images of this manuscript here.

These "Greek Handwriting" posts are about letter forms and ligatures found in Greek manuscripts.

I am a big believer in buying good books when you get the opportunity, even if you may not get around to reading them quickly. There are many reasons for this, like having them on your bookshelf makes you look smarter, greater book smell in your study, etc. The main reason is that there may come a time when you want to read that book, and waiting a few weeks for Amazon to get it to you (assuming you use the free shipping to save on cash) is just too slow.

I have sanctified this mostly paganized and commercialized holiday by expanding my book collection. Here's the books I bought with Christmas money in no particular order:

Because two just isn't enough, we had our third child yesterday. Samuel is our second man-child. So far he's been the most quiet of the kiddos. Hopefully this means he will be the contemplative type!

Libraries much have a special deal going with the Egypt Exploration Society. The newest volume of the Oxyrhynchus papyri (which has four new NT papyri) is available only for pre-order on both Amazon and EES's bookseller's site the David Brown Book Company. So according to these guys it hasn't been published, yet it sitting in the DTS library. Maybe they ship directly libraries once something has been printed. You can find a number of the Oxyrhynchus volumes for pretty cheap on the David Brown Book Company website, but this one is not. It's $130. Ouch!

This may surprise you, but "Oxyrhynchus" is not in the built-in spell-checker for Firefox :)