Archaic Christianity

Nick, I would say this is a tip for Nathan as well, but his looks pretty good. Oh, by the way, since you both posted the same thing at the same time, doesn't that mean one of you needs to say "jynx"?

Decoding Early Christianity: Truth and Legend in the Early Church is a book I was able to pick up off of the new books shelf at DTS. It looked interesting enough, had a cool cover (even if a bit odd for the subject matter), a great title, was short, and fell within my reading interests, so I decided to check it out. In summary, it is a book of inconsistent quality, and will not be the book I end up recommending for a good introduction to early Christianity (despite its cool name).

So I found out that the scribe for codex Hierosolymitanus actually has a name. This is nice because I can get rid of the name I gave him, TSWAMEMBPOULLACP. It was a good name, obfuscatory as the scribe himself. This post is going to focus on Leo and his writing of the letter κ, "kappa". Can you make out these words? All of them are found in the first chapter of 2 Clement.

This weeks has been rather unpleasant. Working 14 hours on Wed, 12 on Thurs, and spending last night (mostly awake throughout) and today dealing with a tooth infection. But now I have drugs, so the pain should be manageable until the infection heals. However, other than the post the other day about the CSNTM press release, there has been one more bright spot on this otherwise dismal and boring week.

Long day. 14 hours at work. But, I do have some good news for you! Yes, I always bring you the best. This time it is about manuscripts.

So yesterday there was a bigger press release about CSNTM's recent trip to Albania where they found a number of unknown New Testament Greek manuscripts. You can find a copy of this press release on Dan Wallace's blog.

I also just uploaded a more detailed description of the trip to the CSNTM site. If you want to read it, you can find a link to it in the "What's New" section on the home page.

Enjoy.

I have commented once or twice on the Reclaiming the Mind blogs. I have never signed up for a mailing list with them. Yet, in one day, last week I received nine emails about supporting their ministry, or some newsletter, or blah blah blah.

Here is another piece from codex Hierosolymitanus. Question: Is this one of its Nomina Sacra or is it a ligature?

Yes, I'm sure you've missed the series. I have as well. How about starting out with a small word?

As many in the biblioblogosphere are aware, Jim West's blog was deleted maliciously a little while back. I found some software that Jim should install so this doesn't happen again.

Since Jim hates cats so much, I bet you the cause of this was a cat. I bet one broke into his house, logged on to his computer, and deleted the blog. What Jim needed to prevent this was PawSense.

So what will reading the Epistle to Diognetus (hereafter Diogn as is recommended in the SBL Handbook of Style) tell us about the views of the Apostolic Fathers on authority, revelation, Scripture, etc.? Let's find out.

As I mentioned in a recent post on Ignatius, I am beginning a new series. This series discusses how the Apostolic Fathers viewed viewed authority, revelation, the New and Old Testament documents, tradition, and other related important things. This is ultimately to bring this data, along with the witness of the New and Old Testament writings, in for a discussion of church authority and Scripture in modern Christianity.

It is an interesting story, but the title of it is really quite wrong. This hit a few of the blogs recently and just got posted to the biblicalist, in both places debunked. "The Independent" last month put out an article entitled "Found at Last: The World's Oldest Missing Page." The article is interesting, so give it a read.

We continue with chapter 6 of Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians. The text below is from CCEL, with a couple corrections.

The other day I put out a query about distance education for ancient Greek. All I got was crickets, but that is what I expected since I don't have a massive blog readership among classicists (or anybody really...). But I did make a few emails, and got several recommendations to drop a message off to the Classics-L list. So I did. Crickets...for a few days. And then I got a couple answers.

So I read another chapter of the Protoevangelium of James, chapter 10. I ran into two words in the chapter that I had to go to LSJ for, which is rare for this document. Both were verbs, and this is a good reason why all you Greek-geeks out there need to learn your rules for verb formation. When a word doesn't show up in a Bibleworks search, you're stuck, unless you can crack that nut with your brain.

This one doesn't strike me as a joke, Michael. Here's my attempt. Thus saith Lucillius:

Because you can never get enough Ignatius, here we go again. This time we are on chapter 5 of Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians. As is the norm, this text is from CCEL's digitization of Lake's text.

So I'm looking for any online or distance education in ancient Greek. After all, I spend so much time on it, why not :). If anyone knows of any universities that are doing this sort of thing, please drop me a note (you can get my email address on my about page) or leave a comment here. I would greatly appreciate any help!

Well, he had a σκέπαρνον ("axe") anyway. So I read only one more chapter (#9) in the Protoevangelium of James today. My cold/flu/crud pretty much kept me down today.

Some of the most common search hits for my blog come from searches about Constantine, and they usually land on my review of Constantine's Bible. Apparently Constantine is all the rage. Sometimes the search terms are pretty normal like "constantine and the bible" or "constantine's influence on christianity". These are very worthy topics of study. Other times I get queries by people who have been told some really silly stuff about Constantine and how he supposedly created Christianity. Here are two. And now I'll answer them here so the next person who searches can get a straight answer.

I stayed home from work yesterday due to illness and continue to do the same today. I managed to keep busy, but only with activities that involved sitting. On top of some (English) reading yesterday I was able to make it through three more chapters of the Protoevangelium of James. I'll begin my chapter 9 reading this morning.

There's a few things that have popped up this month that I thought were particularly cool/interesting/thought provoking:

So I took a break today (though technically I guess that was yesterday...it is just past midnight) from reading the Protoevangelium of James to read some in the Reading Greek books (by the JACT) for learning Classical Greek. I've owned them for a while so I thought I would give them a spin.

The text is reading intensive, and I like that. However, I find its explanation a little terse and I found myself thinking that there needed to be more.

Saturday I finished reading through the fifth chapter of the Protoevangelium of James. Just in case you are not familiar with it, it is an apocryphal gospel probably written sometime in the middle to late 2nd century. "Proto" means "first" or "early" and "evangelium" means gospel. "Of James" means..."of James"...obviously. The title given does not claim it is the first written but a reference to the fact that it is a gospel of the birth of Jesus. It actually begins with the birth of Mary.

I've blogged ever-so-briefly on this before, but more news is starting to come out on one of CSNTM's recent manuscript trips. I'm pretty sure more press releases are to come...

I just wanted to point out a few resources that I have found useful for study of lectionary Greek manuscripts. One of them I have not yet read since reading German texts is still a little slow for me, but it looks useful.

The letters in and alphabet are not always easy to distinguish. Take the u and v in English. A "u" with an only slightly rounded bottom can look quite a bit like a "v" with a slightly rounded bottom. And when you get into cursive, it can become even harder.

In Greek writing there are certain letter patterns that lend themselves to confusion like this. In uncial handwriting a commonly confusing couple of letters are α and λ. For example, look at this image from Alexandrinus:

So I have Lightfoot's edition of the Apostolic Fathers here at home, checked out from the DTS library. This was originally published towards the end of the 19th century, so it it well out of copyright. The great thing about this edition is that there are photographs of one of the two manuscripts of 1 and 2 Clement in the second volume.

However, what I am looking at is a 1981 reprint, not one of the original volumes. So here is my question. If I were to take digital photographs of the images of the manuscript in the back and post them on the web, would I be in violation of copyright? As far as I know these images aren't on the web anywhere, so this would be really nice for all of those out there who wanted access. Anybody know?

So here is another bit about scribal practices in Greek manuscripts. Here is the snippet. As always, click to view a larger version.

And we continue in our series working through the text of Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians. The title is built on the starting imagery, "running with the bishop". When I read that tonight I thought of those really bad "Sweatin' To The Oldies" Richard Simmons tapes. If you need a little nostalgia, you can see an anniversary video on youtube. He has such great hair. Anyway, we are in chapter 4. Here is the text. The text is from CCEL's digitization of Lake's text (with fixes).