Archaic Christianity

As I said the other day, I'm trying to end April with a bang. I've given you a gallery of readers, started and finished a series on how I think readers should work, and I am now giving you part three of my shibang.

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.

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

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.

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).

Now that I can setup series properly on the blog, it is time to begin this series again in earnest. I have no intention of making this series last all year :)

We continue our discussion of Ignatius' epistle to the Ephesians with our fourth installment today. For a little context, see the last post, part 3 in the series.

I've been hoping to continue my series on Ignatius' epistle to the Ephesians, but a Greek construction has me me tripped up. What do you make of ως + infinitive in IgnEph 2:1? The translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers series translates it "as...shall also refresh". More recently Holmes translated it "may the Father...refresh him..." and his last edition had the same. The first step to figuring out what is the best translation here is to figure out what all the options are. Here are the resources I used that I found useful on this:

I finished reading a short book this morning called Calvin and the Biblical Languages by John D. Currid. The book is an enjoyable read if you are into either Calvin or biblical language study. It is only about a hundred pages, so it can be read in a very short time.

When you are collating (the process of comparing and annotating differences between a manuscript and a base text) handwritten manuscripts, one thing you have to have a plan for is how to deal with ligatures. In the world of Greek manuscripts this is especially true for minuscules, though even uncials like Sinaiticus can have ligatures.

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:

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:

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.

I recently had a birthday. My first and favorite gift was the new edition of the Apostolic Fathers. Buy it. Read it. Love it. Everybody else in the blogosphere or the B-Greek list seem to love it as well. Important texts very nicely printed and bound.