Archaic Christianity

A lot of things, really. For example, they are all men. They all also created carbon dioxide, which is useful for plants. But beyond that, and perhaps more relevant, I received books by all of them in the mail today.

A friend of mine is an avid fan of The Teaching Company and recently sent me a link to one of their current free lectures: The Search for What Killed The Dinosaurs. Thanks Edward!

While I was in hurricane land, I did take some time to read. After all, you have to put down the chainsaw every once in a while. I finished Whose Bible Is It? by Jaroslav Pelikan. At first I was a little disappointed, but then I realized that it was aimed more at the beginner, so I settled in and enjoyed the book. I did learn some things, so it was worth reading. This is also the first book by Pelikan that I have read, and I may just have to read another one some day. If you are interested in how the Old Testament/Tanakh and the New Testament were formed, including how both were read and used, you may find it interesting.

I've been reading it in spurts for quite some time, but I finally finished Ehrman's Lost Christianities. If you haven't noticed, sometime I have a hard time focusing :). I will be posting the review of it tonight or tomorrow. My own thoughts are pretty well set at this point, but I'm going to take the time to read some other reviews, something I don't normally do. I will, of course, let you know when I have it posted.

I was poking around on Google books this morning (as I have been doing a lot lately) and found the 1885 edition of Westcott and Hort's New Testament. I don't own a copy of that edition, but I do own a student's edition from 1948. I compared the two and the only difference was my student edition has a lexicon in the back by W.J. Hickie (a most unfortunate name).

So this got me thinking: what was the first edition of the Greek New Testament to include a lexicon for the large mass of people like myself who don't like carrying around BDAG? Anybody know?

Random stuff post ahead!

As I am sure most of you who read this blog already know, codex Sinaiticus will be going online this week here: http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/. Thanks to Wieland for pointing out the link.

Perhaps this has hit the blogs today, but I haven't checked my feed reader yet, so I don't know. I got a comment for a fella named Kent on my post entitled "On Migne The Great". He alerts us of a pre-pub for a portion of Migne for Logos. You can see the pre-pub information here. Thanks for the note.

I do not have a huge amount to say about the book, but I have posted a review of Grant's The Emperor Constantine. Though brief, I hope you find it useful.

This post is for all of you who have not actually seen a physical copy of Migne's Latin and Greek works. It is a sight to see.

I visited the library at DTS today to take some pictures of a volume, as I mentioned yesterday that I would. Since I had my camera I figured I would take some pics of the set of Migne that DTS owns. It's hard to realize how much Migne published without seeing the actual output. Following is a view of the bookshelf from the right (and look on the right-hand bookshelf), then from the left (look on the left-hand bookshelf). The black volumes are his set of Latin printings, the red are his Greek.

So I am not sure what book I want to read next. I've got several of them picked out that I want to read soon. Instead of deciding for myself, I think I'll let my faithful readers decide. Whatever I end up reading I will summarize and review for you when I'm finished. So if you're curious about any of these books, please leave a comment.

It's really nice to come home from work and to have your son state rather strongly that he wants to go to the bookstore later that night. It was a real sacrifice for me, but we took the grueling two-or-so-mile trip to Half Price Books.

I mentioned recently that I had been reading a biography of Erasmus. I finished it just now. The printing I have is not available at Amazon proper, though you can get it through their resellers fairly cheaply. A more recent and much more expensive copy is available on Amazon, however.

Biographies of great men are very important. They can inspire us lesser mortals to do greater things; in the very least, if done well, they can inform us historically and we can be less ignorant of the history we have inherited.

Every time I drop by DTS I have to stop by the new books shelf in the library. They had one up today that I thought was an interesting volume, The Gospel According to John in the Byzantine Tradition . That link is to Eisenbrauns, who has it on sale for $11 cheaper than Amazon ($54 currently).

So I was poking around on Google books today and found two gems that might be of interest to those of you out there who are text-critically minded.

Today I finished a very useful book entitled Greek Papyri: An Introduction by E. G. Turner. I do not have the background to review its contents, but I found the book pretty enjoyable and informative. To read it you should know Greek (though you often don't need it to know what is going on) and it would be beneficial to you if you are familiar at all with classical studies (I am not very familiar myself though that is changing) or textual criticism, but it is not necessary. You should have a good grasp of the basic time-line of history of the Hellenistic period.

So I finally finished finished Theodore P. Letis' The Ecclesiastical Text, which I commented on a bit ago. As I reported before, I loved the first two chapters of the book. The book is worth a good bit with just those chapters, nevermind the rest of the material (and I only paid $5.98 at Half Price Books!). The rest of the book was generally worth reading, but not as useful as the first two chapters.

A few weeks ago I picked up a volume entitled The Ecclesiastical Text: Text Criticism, Biblical Authority and the Popular Mind. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it is available at either Eisenbrauns or Amazon. I had no idea if it would be good, but after reading the first two chapters I must say that it is a gem.

I love reader's versions of ancient texts. I think they are a great thing for learning. So in my continual attempt at not being completely useless, I present to you a gallery of readers for ancient Greek, with a few Latin sprinkled in for good measure (all pulled from my library save one). I'm doing this for a few reasons. First, some of you may not be familiar with these resources though you should be. Second, though some of these are out of print and/or not directly relevant to my perceived audience, I want to give you some samples to spark your thinking. I'll be following up with a post tomorrow, based on this one, with some of my musings on what makes a good reader and where that can fit into one's education.

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).

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.

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.

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 quixotic infidel had a very good visualization for describing the canonical status of various books by various entities in early Christianity.

Michael from Pisteuomen is in a discussion with the author of the blog on the authorship of Hebrews. I happen to agree with Quixie; Paul did not write Hebrews.

I just finished reading this today:

I got something in the mail this week. I'm calling it "my precious". I was as happy when I got it as this guy was when he got his precious:

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.

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...

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:

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 :)

Reicke begins his book The Roots of the Synoptic Gospels with a chapter which briefly details the history of the discussion of synoptic relations. It seemed to be just fine, but the meat of his argument did not begin until chapter two.

My birthday was about two weeks ago, Nov 20th to be exact. For my birthday I asked for money from the fam so I could buy books. Here's what I got.

I have commented on the book Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels here and here. This brief discussion will be my last on this book for a while, I imagine. My reading of the chapter on the Two-Gospel Hypothesis (2GH) is my last in the book as I have already skipped ahead and read the gospel Independence view and the Two-Source/Four-Source/Markan Hypothesis (MH) view.

I discussed before my opinions on the independent view of synoptic gospel composition a couple days ago. I have continued my reading in the book (Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels) and have moved on to the discussion of the Markan hypothesis, the two-source/four-source hypothesis.

Here are my next steps in solving the synoptic problem for myself:

As noted on the Bibleworks Blog, Oxford University Press is having a big sale on Amazon. You can get the Oxford Latin Dictionary or LSJ for as cheap...