Archaic Christianity

Day 7 was indeed a day of epic proportions. It was our first day off, so the roomie (Garrett) and I jumped in our little car and went on a road trip to Cape Sounion, a place I have wanted to go ever since I saw Buist Fanning's pictures of it several years ago (thanks!).

Over at the website for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts we've opened up a new section for notes on individual manuscripts. If you are interested, go read the announcement on the homepage, linked to above.

The first TC Note can be found here, and is about GA 1281.

Enjoy.

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?

Last year CSNTM photographed most of the Greek manuscripts owned by the National Archive of Albania. You can read about the trip here. Last night we posted samples of several of those manuscripts. These are uncatalogued and so have not yet received a GA number. Go have a look!

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 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.

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.

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.

Continuing on the perpetual series on Greek Handwriting, where I chat about scribal practices and whatnot (I need to rename the series to that, I think), let's look at another portion of ULF (see the links to the previous posts on this manuscript below). Today we will limit ourselves to the Lection covering John 6:40-44.

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.

I know nothing about this manuscript other than what they posted on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, but here's a link to Codex Maurocordatianus.

After looking at a few images my initial thought was "man this scribe is really confusing with all of these colors...". Then I realized that it was the intro and the real text hadn't started yet. Ah, well, we learn by trial and error...

An article recently came out on the Christianity Today website about CSNTM and their work in Albania last year. If you're not familiar with CSNTM or that trip, give it a read.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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:

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...

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.

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...

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.

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 :)

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: