Archaic Christianity

A number of years ago some friends and I started a company and produced an interactive software tutorial for learning to diagram in Greek. Tonight we are putting this software out for free for personal use. You can download it off of the Lexel Software website. I hope you find it useful.

And, of course, stay tuned for other useful Greek resources!

It is hard to beat this sage advice.

I am finally back at home. While at SBL I missed my family and my study. While in SE Texas I missed my study. It is so nice to be able to sit in my super-groovy study room in my super-comfy recliner. So nice.

It is also nice to be back from the land of dial-up internet. Having to wait 15 seconds for web pages to come up is just horrible! It's like going back into the stone ages. But since I was not preoccupied with the niceties of the internet I did get some good reading done. More on that soon. Tonight my time will be spent hangin' with the wife and preparing for Sunday School tomorrow.

The other day I said I was going to be coding like a maniac and not posting too much this week. That has turned out to be true. But, like I said, I was working on something that you, dear reader, would find interesting. So what is it?

It has been a while since I've posted on ULF. It's time to get back on the wagon and finish this up, don't you think?

The following question occurred to me just now: on average, if you take a manuscript and compare it to a modern Greek New Testament, what will be the degree of difference? Will it be 1%? 5%? I am sure 10% is way too high.

I was reading in Irenaeus' Against Heresies last night and ran across this interesting little tidbit (you can read the text in context here):

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.

I received an email this morning from someone whom I do not know who was asking for help with a claim she heard about the number of the beast and Greek manuscripts. Most of us who are familiar with New Testament textual criticism are familiar with the rather famous textual problem in Rev 13:18. But then I was a little surprised when her question went another way. I have spent time with Muslims before and though sometimes they are quite sane, sometimes they come up with the oddest historical perspectives, which is a nice way of saying that they are frequently distorting the facts. This is definitely one of those instances.

My little Greek reading group here in Dallas is going to start meeting again tomorrow, Lord willing. Tonight I am finishing up the material we will cover tomorrow night. We are going to start reading Mark 1. I don't expect us to finish. I am preparing the reader now. I've got my text ready; I'm just adding vocabulary and syntax notes for them to help them out. Of course I'll be there to help them tomorrow night, but these notes will be with them during the week when I'm not. When I am done with it, I will post it here for everyone to use.

Finished with my first reading of Τοις Εγκεκλεισμενοις Επισκοποις, "To the Imprisoned Bishops". I didn't find much of it difficult. It did take a while, however, simply because I was not familiar with much of the vocabulary.

Continuing on in our discussion of a uncatalogued lectionary fragment (which I am calling ULF, though not to be confused with the friendly alien), today we'll chat about the lection covering John 6:48-54. There are several noteworthy things with this one.

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.

For the last few posts in my series on Greek handwriting and manuscripts I've been looking at a manuscript I'm calling ULF, short for uncatalogued lectionary fragment. Two correctors have been identified, and in this post we're going to try to figure out if one of them came first and if the first one was the original scribe.

There's more to say about the corrector of ULF. Or should I say correctors?

As I said just the other day, there is a new manuscript posted on the CSNTM website. This manuscript is uncatalogued, so we don't have a nice Gregory-Aland number to refer to. So, I'm going to call it ULF for "Uncatalogued Lectionary Fragment".

Just in case you have the desire to do some reading in the Greek New Testament manuscript labeled GA 676, I have a few tips for you. You can find the images on the CSNTM website. All snippets below with one exception are found on image 234.

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.

This post is for all of you who found the earlier long-winded posts too...well...long-winded. The following are the guidelines we've discussed so far:

Though the content is most important, the physical characteristics of the reader can make a reader better or worse. If you are putting a reader up on the web you don't have to worry about the physical aspects of the book, and many of those will probably be decided by your publisher (I imagine...I've never worked with one). But here we're discussing more than the physicality of the codex form; we're also discussing page layout, font, etc.

So I've been blogging on types of readers and vocabulary considerations for readers. Now we're on to other potential aids for students that you can consider putting into your reader.

Sidenote on "Student"

I forgot to mention this earlier, so I'm making a sidenote here. I'm trying to use the word "reader" to consistently refer to the annotated text and "student" to refer to the person using this annotated text. Though "reader" would be perfectly appropriate for both, I figured that would be confusing. No promises on consistency though!

And I also want to point out that by "student" I mean anyone who is still working on learning the language...which I think includes just about anyone who wants to use a reader. I certainly include myself. So this is not meant to refer to someone in school...just someone who is learning. Now, without further ado...

There are several different types of readers. If you are writing one, not only do you need to decide up front who your audience is, you should probably go ahead and be clear about it. Different types of readers will require different skill sets, from you and them.

I have a great fondness for Greek readers, i.e., editions of Greek texts with notes that allow you to read them with greater ease. Those with text-critical notes are great, but the things that really help are notes on vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and idiom. Soon after I first started Greek I remember seeing Perschbacher's Refresh Your Greek and thinking, "Gee, I wish there was more of that around." Actually, I don't say "Gee" in normal speech. Regardless, this out-of-print work was great. Of course now you can get the Reader's Greek New Testament. Is it as good? Well, it's better than nothing at all, for sure, but it's not ideal. I don't own it yet and I'm not planning on buying one for general use as I love my NET/NA27 diglot. I'm just writing vocab in the margin that one as I feel the need.

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.

So I have a question for all of you. If you have learned a language (living or dead) and gotten to the point were you feel comfortable with it (yes, that is very vague), how long did that take you? Can you think of something that would have sped that up (other than just studying more)? Can you think of anything that you think slowed you down?

Here are Archaic Christianity it is και ligature day. Yes, this is a holiday practiced by scribes throughout all of time. This holiday post is dedicated to Brett. Here, Brett, are more examples of funky και ligatures.

This is part n of my never-ending series on Greek handwriting. Here is another ligature:

I think I found another writer to add to my list of readings for April and May. I may need to wait to decide since I'm already unsure I'll hit my target. Anybody read him (in Greek) before? Thoughts? Fun? Boring? Easy? Hard?

Okay, you may not find this significant, but I do. Significant for me at the very least. I have read portions of works that I had not read previously in English. I have read small papyri that I had not read previously in English. I have never read an ancient work completely for the first time in Greek. At least, not until last night! Woohoo! I think I'll celebrate. Maybe I need to buy me a book.

Now that I've worked through it without help from English translations, I'm going to spend some time looking at others' attempts. Need to see if I miss something.

I did it. Last night at around 11:45 I read the closing of the gospel. I would have blogged it last night, but as it was I had already posted four times yesterday, and two were quite lengthy. I needed something to post today anyway.

Doug, over at his blog on Metacatholic, just made a comment about my recent post on pragmatic concerns of learning Greek or Hebrew. I'm going to respond to that in a moment, but a few thoughts/questions first.

I've made quite a bit of progress since my report on chapters 16, 17, and 18. I expect to finish up reading the entire thing today. This document is a very quick read. The Greek is definitely on the easy side of the spectrum.

Should you learn Greek or Hebrew, the languages in which the Scriptures were originally written? (Yes, Aramaic is in there too, but not much, and everything I say about Hebrew would apply to Aramaic as well as they are related) I bet this is a question that many a Christian ask. As someone who has learned biblical Greek and some Hebrew and Aramaic, indeed as someone who teaches the former, I am going to give you my perspective. The answer is not straightforward (even though part of me wants to tell you all to learn them), and there are a number of questions you have to ask yourself. And no, I am not going to try to word these questions in such a way that a definite "yes" seems like the only appropriate answer. My intention here is to give you practical advice on considering learning a biblical language.

In my last (substantive) post I discussed a few things from the Protoevangelium of James 16, 17, and 18. I must give props to Nathan Stitt for linking τὸ ὕδωρ τῆς ἐλέγξεως κυρίου, "the water of the conviction of the Lord", with Numbers 5:11-31. I think you're right. Note this quote from that passage:

So last night and this morning I read through three more chapters of the Protoevangelium of James. Some thoughts:

This morning I read through the 14th and 15th chapters of the Protoevangelium of James (abbreviated Prot. Jas. by the SBL Handbook of Style, btw...). There was one difficulty and I found a few interesting things. For context, chapter 14 is Joseph's inner dialogue on what he's going to do about the mysteriously pregnant Mary. Chapter 15 is Annas the scribe's discovery of a big (ὀγκωμένην) Mary and the scandal that brings up.

Nathan is learning Greek. Good for him. I recommend it highly myself! He's been pondering the best course for a while, and just posted again about how he's thinking of moving forward. He's considering Athenaze, and I think that is a grand idea if you want to learn to read the New Testament. On the surface this doesn't make any sense as Athenaze is for learning Classical Greek. But it is, and here's why.

I've decided to set some Greek reading goals for myself for the next two months. If anyone wants to keep up, I'll share my texts. Let me know. For this round I'm going to focus on narrative or narrative-like (the Shepherd of Hermas is apocalypse, but it and Revelation read like narratives sometimes, do they not?) texts.

Where will you get your textual variants? April DeConick over at the Forbidden Gospels Blog was musing on the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament and how it doesn't give you all of the information that is out there. She's right and it is worth a read. There's also a follow-up post. However, among the commentators I think there is a little confusion about some of the resources (for example, that Swanson's work is not an attempt to be exhaustive, which Chuck Grantham, a frequent comment guy here pointed out). In my continuous attempt to not be completely useless, I am going to contribute a little.

Here's another ligature, comin' at ya fast! This one is from Codex Hierosolymitanus. Here are ye ligatures of the day.

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"?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

This morning I was reading Mark 1 and was staring at verse 4 in a printout I had of the text based on Tauber's MorphGNT (which doesn't have any textual variants or punctuation), thinking "that is an unusual bit of syntax." Before our morning study class at church I was looking at it again, but this time in my NA27. I noticed that the first article in the verse was in brackets, showing that the reading was very debatable. So then I looked through the variants and realized that I wasn't the only one who found the wording to be a little unexpected. I figured this might be an interesting thing to ponder for some, because a) this is a good example of an intentional scribal change to the text, b) is one that affects how you translate this verse and, c) is one that involves both Textual Criticism and Greek syntax. Here are the readings:

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 :)

Ever been to ancientfaith.com? It is an interesting site. My friend Edward pointed it out to me a few weeks ago. Thanks Edward! It is Eastern Orthodox in content, so if you are curious about them, it is a good place to visit. I enjoy some of the podcasts, though I haven't read much on the site.

So I downloaded Michael's free software bundle. I have only tried the Greek package, but here are my thoughts on that one.

I just finished reading this today:

I decided a bit ago to go ahead and read Greek texts that people stick into their blog. Gegreptai sometimes does it. Nick posted a really interesting one yesterday. Others do it as well at times. I just wanted you guys to know that someone does actually read what you are posting. And I really appreciate it when you post text from outside the New Testament. That's when it gets much more challenging. So if you have some quoting of an ancient Greek dude to do, don't just post a translation! Be like Jim; post and spend time in the original. In his immortal words, "If you can’t read the originals and you call yourself a scholar you’re a poo head".

Now, this is not a call for you to start posting tons of Greek on your blog just to take up all my time. I have my own reading goals, you know!

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 found Tauber's presentation on his approach to a graded reader very interesting. You can view a presentation like what he did at Bibletech 2008 here.

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 was thinking about Greek tense and mood stats yesterday evening. I've actually been thinking for some time that infinitives need to be moved up in the traditional Greek curriculum. Looking at the numbers, along with a few other factors, confirmed this. First, some numbers (based off of MorphGNT...hope I didn't parse your data wrong Tauber...):

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.

So I decided to put the dictionary and parsing software Kalos to the test. I've known about it for a while, but a recent posting by a blogger refreshed my memory. I am very sorry to say that I don't remember who mentioned it recently. If you speak up, I'll link to you :).

Well, I am glad an announcement has finally been made. I've mentioned a few times on this blog and my other blog that I have been spending time in some manuscripts that were discovered that could not net be announced. Well, that is no longer true...

A friend just pointed out an article on an altar that predates Zeus. It is irrelevant for the study of ancient Christianity, but you Greek geeks out there might find it interesting.

I know you have missed it. It has been a while since Greek Handwriting 3, so here is our next exciting installment!

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.

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.

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...

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.

Since it was New Year's Eve, I did what everybody else does on this great holiday. I went to the library (at DTS) and did some research. I was looking at the new books (I always do) and saw a new volume of the Oxyrhynchus papyri had been published. I took a gander and saw that it had four new papyri in it. Major cool...

All four papyri are from the gospel of John. Images can be viewed here. The manuscripts are as follows:

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.