Erasmus, Opera Omnia, Amsterdam edition

In November 2009, I posted on the older Basel and Leiden editions of Erasmus’ Opera Omnia.

As I recently found out, most volumes of the vast and ongoing project of the Amsterdam edition are now online as well, in open access, and as PDF with OCR text. The latter is not perfect, but it still facilitates research enormously, of course.

For New Testament scholars, most important are the sixth “ordo”, with Erasmus’ NT texts and annotations (five volumes available, out of six published so far; two more volumes are to be published shortly), and the seventh, with the “paraphrases” (only one volume so far). Also the ninth “ordo”, with Erasmus’ “apologiae” etc. is important for a good impression of his New Testament scholarship.

But why not see for yourself the real critical Latin edition of the Praise of Folly, or of the Dialogue on the correct pronunciation of Latin and Greek? I could go on, but I won’t, this time.

For more information on the ASD edition, readers are referred to the site of the Huygens Institute.

Finally, most volumes of Allen’s edition of Erasmus’ letters are available at the Internet Archive. This is actualy the third “ordo” of Erasmus’ works, not repeated in the Amsterdam edition.

Zur Kultur einer Religionsgeschichte

Deliberations for future projects ...

From October 4-7 took place in Halle the conference titled “Zur Kultur einer Religionsgeschichte”. The international meeting was organized by Manfred Lang of the Theological Faculty of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, and Jos Verheyden (Catholic University, Leuven), with the assistance of Bastian Lemitz, within the project “Aufklärung durch Philologie” (Enlightenment by means of Philology), promoting the publication of Johann Jakob Wettstein’s Corpus Hellenisticum. Different aspects of the 18th-century culture in which Wettstein lived and with which the scholar was confronted have been discussed: intellectual history (Friedemann Stengel and Claudia Drese, Halle), reception history of Wettstein’s 1751-1752 New Testament edition (Christoph Schmitt-Maaß, Halle; Detlev Dormeyer, Dortmund), exegesis of the book of Acts (Niels Neumann, Kassel), Wettstein’s textual criticism (Jan Krans and Silvia Castelli, Amsterdam), Wettstein’s Corpus Hellenisticum (Jos Verheyden), Wettstein’s Dissertatio (Bastian Lemniz, Halle), ancient epigraphy (Imre Peres, Debrecen), and the concept of history of religion (Manfred Lang, Halle).

The Halle conference will be followed by a second one next year, and by a volume of its proceedings.

See you in Athens?

If you happen to be around, don't miss it:

26 Οκτωβρίου, 7.00 μ.μ.
Διάλεξη του Δρ. Jan Krans (Πανεπιστήμιο Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), "Erasmus’ New Testament (1516) and the Revival of Greek Learning in Western Europe"

That is, a lecture by me, on the 26th of October 2011, at the Netherlands Institute in Athens. In English (my modern Greek is not good enough yet).

Wettstein's Novum Testamentum Graecum online

Last week I discovered that the Philipps Universität Marburg has put Johann Jakob Wettstein's famous Novum Testamentum Graecum (Amsterdam, 1751-1752) online, apparently last year already.

The first volume contains the Gospels.

The second volume the rest of the New Testament, as well as two letters in Clement in Syriac.

The volumes can be viewed online (click on "Seitenansicht" or on the thumbnail image of the title page); one can also download a PDF file (warning: very large files).

Two more reviews in TC

TC 16 (2011) just published two more reviews, over the five published a few weeks ago:

• Daniel Marguerat, Reception of Paulinism in Acts / Réception du paulinisme dans les Actes des Apôtres (Régis Burnet, reviewer) [in French]

• Dirk K. Human and Gert J. Steyn (eds.), Psalms and Hebrews: Studies in Reception (Wolfgang Kraus, reviewer) [in German]

If the above links don’t work (any more), remember that the permanent link for TC is http://purl.org/TC.

New Articles and Reviews at TC

Just out: the first articles and reviews of TC vol. 16.
No less than three articles and five reviews, actually, with more to come.

It took us some time to get things going, but it seems to work all together now.

Theology Interviews of VU University on iTunes U

The Faculty of Theology of VU University Amsterdam just posted some "Theology Interviews" on iTunes U. You can find them here.

For the moment, there are three interviews of about 15 minutes each, one on "Film and Religion", one on "Justice and Peace", and finally one on (New Testament) "Textual Criticism".

A Treasure in Teyler’s Archives!

By Bart Kamphuis

That’s about what I shouted when I came home last Thursday. My wife looked at me full of expectation, about the way Sophia must have looked at Schliemann when he told her about Priam’s treasure. Unfortunately, I had to disappoint her. We (Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, Jan Krans and Bart Kamphuis) didn’t find any gold in the archives of Teyler’s Foundation. But still, what we found we regard as a scholarly treasure.

In our investigation into the Dutch movement of New Testament conjectural criticism (1845-1906), we came to realize that the competition held by Teyler’s Theological Society in 1877 was of crucial importance for this movement. This society invited scholars to write about the history, necessity and main outcomes of New Testament conjectural criticism. Four scholars submitted a treatise. The first prize was granted to two of them, Van Manen and Van de Sande Bakhuyzen. Their works were published and gave a final impetus to conjectural criticism in Holland. But who were the other two scholars, whose work was found wanting? That’s what we wanted to know. But since the society employed (and still employs!) a strict policy of authorial anonymity, the only way we might get to know something, was to dig into the archives.

Jan Krans and Bart Kamphuis at Teyler’s Archives, Haarlem

When we visited the archives last Thursday, we actually expected that the two manuscripts of the losing authors would have been destructed. But we found them both! One of the authors had send a letter to the society after he lost the competition, which was kept in the archives as well. That’s why we even know the identity of one of the scholars. And we are determined to discover the identity of the other scholar, even if it would involve the analysis of handwriting!

Who wrote this? [from Teyler’s Archives 1257]

We found a lot more in the archives. For us it really felt like digging for treasures. Maybe that’s the beauty of historical research: once you get fascinated by a certain historical phenomenon, every historical relic connected to it becomes glittering gold and sparkling gems ...

SBL International 2011 and the London Tube

Four members of our VU University project group on New Testament Conjectural Emendation were present in London last week; let me promise that I will blog on Silvia Castelli’s presentation and on mine. For now, however, something less serious.

One of the great pleasures of having such a project group is the frequent discussions on all matters textual and often non-textual. Thus, just after the conference, and after a nice dinner in a restaurant near Covent Garden, we were on the metro to our hotel, still discussing – don’t ask me to remember it all exactly – the importance of textual certainty and the striking differences between catholics and protestants, scholars and non-scholars alike. And how deep-felt the attachment to a specific text and tradition can be.
At that point in our lively conversation, someone sitting next to us weighed in. He elaborated on the emotional aspect and started telling how important these matters were to him. Regrettably, our group had to switch lines at South Kensington, which ended the exchange.

The punch-line none of us had seen coming was the final question of our interlocutor: “Which movie have you been to?” Right before the door closed, I managed to answer: “We are just some biblical scholars”. Mind the gap.

The Comma Johanneum in GA 177 (BSB Cod. Graec. 211)

Today, I found out that yet another New Testament Greek manuscript has gone online, min. 177. It is found at the Digitale Bibliothek of the Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum.
The shelf mark of the manuscript is (BSB) Cod. Graec. 211.
Interestingly, this is the manuscript Daniel Wallace wrote about in July last year, because he found a version of the Comma Johanneum (the spurious expansion to 1 John 5:8) in the top margin of the manuscript when he consulted it in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in München. His report (‘The Comma Johanneum in an Overlooked Manuscript’) had no image of the page, but now I can give you one:

There are other Greek manuscripts in the BSB collection; perhaps someone at the Evangelical Textual Criticism weblog (there is of course no such thing as “evangelical” textual criticism different from ”textual criticism” proper, but that does not matter) can put together a nice listing of these? 

Arie Zwiep on Sola Scriptura

Those of you, dear readers, who are interested in Arie Zwiep's views on the Sola Scriptura principle can now read a report in one of our national newspapers, the Reformatisch Dagblad. The article is in Dutch, but perhaps Google Translate gives some acceptable results. There are at least some nice picture's, of Arie in his study (recognize any of the books?) and at the meeting.