the Amsterdam NT Weblog

SBL International, Amsterdam 2012: papers accepted

2012-01-30T16:52:00.000+01:00

Members of our research group will present some important papers at the coming SBL International meeting in Amsterdam, in July.

Silvia Castelli will present on Wettstein’s Greek New Testament:

Beyond the Received Text? Discerning Patterns in Wettstein’s Textual Decisions
In his Novum Testamentum Graecum 1751-1752, Johann Jakob Wettstein reprints the received text, yet indicating very clearly his proposed omissions, additions, and substitutions. Are there patterns to be discerned in Wettstein’s decision in favour of certain variant readings? And does he somehow motivate his choices? Through a systematic analysis of Wettstein’s changes to the received text, some answers to these questions will be provided.

Bart Kamphuis will present on conjectural emendation proper (beware: rather long abstract ahead):

Problems and Causes: A Classification of New Testament Conjectures
The reflection upon conjectural emendation of the text of the New Testament has generally been limited to the question to which degree this emendation is allowed. Little attention has been paid, by contrast, to the corpus of literally thousands of conjectures that were actually made since Origen. This gap is currently being filled in Amsterdam by the VU University research project ‘New Testament Conjectural Emendation: A Comprehensive Enquiry’. In any research into a large set of data, attempts are undertaken to classify the data for the purpose of analysis. Since such a classification does not yet exist for the conjectures on the New Testament, nor has, to our knowledge, been developed for classical studies, we deemed it necessary to develop this classification ourselves. My inductive analysis of the conjectures discussed and made in Holland from 1846 to 1906 (what I call the Dutch Movement of Conjectural Criticism) led to the classification proposed in this paper. The key to this classification is the idea that, in principle, the reasoning behind every conjecture concerns both the problem as perceived in the transmitted text and the cause of the supposed textual corruption. It turns out that all problems and causes mentioned in the analysed argumentations can be classified into a limited amount of types. The classification of conjectures can thus be seen as a two-dimensional table, with types of problems on the one axis, and types of causes on the other. Every sufficiently substantiated conjecture occupies at least one cell in this table. This classification makes it possible to discern patterns in the conjectural criticism of particular scholars and even in the history of New Testament conjectural criticism in general.

If this all does not convince you that you should come to Amsterdam and visit the “Working with Biblical Manuscripts” sessions, or even submit a proposal yourself, while you still can (today, January 30, and tomorrow), I throw my hands up in despair.

Or perhaps one final presentation can tip the scales for you. Even though the 2012 SBL International meeting will be in my hometown, and I did not really have to submit a paper in order to justify my presence (financially, that is), I could not refrain from the following proposal, which – to my great relief – my co-chair Tommy Wasserman accepted without much ado.

Who coined the name “Ambrosiaster”?
Traditionally, the coinage of the name “Ambrosiaster” for the author of an important commentary on the Pauline epistles has been attributed to Erasmus. (“Ambst” is mentioned more than 400 times in the current Nestle-Aland apparatus.) As demonstrated by René Hoven in 1969 already, the attribution to Erasmus cannot be sustained. A recent attempt by Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe (2007) mentions the 1686–90 edition of Ambrose’s works by the Benedictines of St Maur, but their use of the name “Ambrosiaster” can be shown to depend on earlier sources. This paper will establish that Jülicher, in 1894, was pointing in the right direction when he mentioned “around 1600” for the first use of the name “Ambrosiaster”, and solve the riddle of its coinage once and for all.

See you in Amsterdam!

Erasmus, Opera Omnia, Amsterdam edition

2011-11-02T00:04:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-10T10:15:00.002+02:00

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?

2011-10-10T02:21:00.002+02:00

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

2011-10-08T19:14:00.001+02:00

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

2011-09-15T10:09:00.000+02:00

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

2011-09-03T12:47:00.000+02:00

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

2011-07-22T15:13:00.000+02:00

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!

2011-07-18T14:03:00.000+02:00

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

2011-07-11T16:24:00.001+02:00

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)

2011-03-31T18:39:00.000+02:00

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

2011-02-09T18:16:00.000+01:00

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.

TC’s second coming

2010-12-22T15:59:00.000+01:00

It tooks us quite some time and effort to get things going, but today, finally, we officially relaunch TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism.

In the 15th Volume (2010), four articles are found. The first one is by Larry Hurtado on Eldon Epp - and there is more on Eldon Epp to come! -, and the other three are by members of the editorial team, Tim Finney, Tommy Wasserman, and me. It is, in a sense, our way to present ourselves. The volume also has two important book reviews that might have been published earlier but are still very welcome, in particular for their contributions to on-going debates.

In coming years we hope to publish articles and reviews on a regular basis and thus make the journal once again into an important platform of scholarly biblical textual criticism. For the book reviews, we are glad to have the assistance of Thomas Kraus and Heike Braun, as book editor and assistant book editor, respectively.

For the next volume (16 (2011)), some articles are already in the pipe-line. Of course, submissions, also/especially on OT textual criticism, are very welcome. Details are found on the journal’s website. There as well, it is explained how to contact the editors for any question or suggestion you might have.

Erasmus’ 1516 edition online

2010-11-24T12:51:00.000+01:00

The Swiss e-rara.ch project just put Erasmus’ Novum Instrumentum omne of 1516 online, with the annotationes.

Navigation is easy, and the site’s table of contents is extensive (though not as exhaustive as to contain each NT book or even chapter). The quality of the images is good. The only drawback I can see for now is that one cannot download a PDF of the entire book, as is possible with the digital collections of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

[Update 25 November 2010: from the contents page, one can however download PDF files of parts of the book.]

Let us hope the other editions will follow soon!

Update 21 January 2011: Erasmus’ fourth edition of 1527, with the annotationes, is now available as well at e-rara..

Update 3 February 2011: Erasmus’ third edition of 1522, with the annotationes, is now available as well at e-rara.

Update 1 October 2011: Erasmus’ second edition of 1519 is now available as well, with the annotationes, though not at e-rara, but at the University of Jena; it seems it cannot yet be downloaded as PDF; links to specific page views can be made: take a look at Erasmus’ conjecture φθονεῖτε at Jas 4:2, for example (and his annotation on the reading).

Finally, Erasmus’ 1535 edition can be found at the Erasmus Centre for Early Modern Studies, but only the New Testament text, not the annotationes, and only in DjVU format.

New Book

2010-11-16T08:32:00.003+01:00

Dear all,
A brief note to inform you that a new book of mine has been published at Mohr Siebeck:

Christ, the Spirit and the Community of God: Essays on the Acts of the Apostles
(WUNT 2/293; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) xviii-237pp. ISBN 978-3-16-150675-8.

This volume collects text-critical, exegetical and biblical theological essays on the Acts of the Apostles, dealing primarily with the opening chapters of Acts in the wider context of first-century Christianity and its Umwelt. The articles include treatments of the ascension and exaltation of Jesus in its early Jewish and early Christian context, the death and replacement of Judas Iscariot and the varying traditions of his death, the role of Judas and the Jews in the history of anti-semitism, Luke's understanding of Pentecost and the outpouring of the Spirit, early Christian community life in Acts, the function of the early resurrection and exaltation Christology in Peter's Pentecost discourse, and Luke's special treatment of Paul in relation to the Twelve apostles in Jerusalem. The book not only contains some previously published material (all thoroughly updated and revised), but also some articles appearing for the first time in English and two brand new essays.

With (more or less) sincere apologies for the delay of publication of volume two of my Tussen tekst en lezer.

For more information see my homepage or the editor's website (www.mohr.de)

Just out: Paulus en de rest

2010-11-11T08:31:00.000+01:00

Yesterday (Nov. 10th, 2010), Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte’s new book was presented: Paulus en de rest. Van Farizeeër tot profeet van Jezus.

The book, as you will have noticed, is in Dutch. More information (and the possibility to order your personal copy) at the publisher's site. Any English publisher out there, interested in a translation?

British Library Digitised Manuscripts - Greek NT

2010-09-27T13:10:00.000+02:00

Just launched: the British Library Digitsed Manuscripts website, with almost 300 Greek manuscripts already (and a printed GNT with marginal notes [Add MS 12080]).

So far, I noticed the following Gregory-Aland entries:

uncials
011 (G) (Harley MS 5684)
027 (R) (Add MS 17211)

minuscules:
65 (Harley MS 5776)
72 (Harley MS 5647)
81 (Add MS 20003)
104 (Harley MS 5537)
113 (Harley MS 1810) (the GA number is not indicated on the browse page)
114 (Harley MS 5540) (GA number not indicated)
115 (Harley MS 5559)
116 (Harley MS 5567)
201 (Add MS 11837)
202 (Add MS 14774)
272 (Add MS 15581)
312 (Add MS 5115/5116)
321 (Harley MS 5557) (GA number not indicated)
385 (Harley MS 5613)
478 (Add MS 11300)
490 (Add MS 7141)
491 (Add MS 11836)
492 (Add MS 11838)
493 (Add MS 11839)
495 (Add MS 16183)
496 (Add MS 16184)
497 (Add MS 16943)
498 (Add MS 17469)
499 (Add MS 17741)
500 (Add MS 17982)
501 (Add MS 18211)
503 (Add MS 19389)
504 (Add MS 17470)
505 (Harley MS 5538)
640 (Add MS 19392A)
641 (Add MS 22734)
644 (Add MS 19388)
645 (Add MS 22506)
686 (Add MS 5468)
687 (Add MS 11868B)
688 (Add MS 22736)
689 (Add MS 22737)
690 (Add MS 22738)
691 (Add MS 22739)
692 (Add MS 22740)
693 (Add MS 22741)
1268 (Add MS 19386)
1274a (Add MS 11859) (indicated as GA 1274)
1274a (Add MS 11860) (part) (indicated as GA 1274 and 1274b)
1956 (Add MS 7142)
2822 (Add MS 11860) (part)
2823 (Add MS 11860) (part)

lectionaries:
l25a (Harley MS 5650)
l152 (Harley MS 5787)
l188 (Add MS 5153A/5153B)
l189 (Add MS 11840)
l190 (Add MS 17370)
l191 (Add MS 18212)
l192 (Add MS 19460)
l193 (Add MS 19993)
l318 (Add MS 19737)
l319 (Add MS 21260)
l321 (Add MS 22735)
l322 (Add MS 22742)
l323 (Add MS 22743)
l324 (Add MS 22744)
l930 (Add MS 19459)
l1053 (Add MS 19392B)

further
selections from OT and NT (Add MS 10968)
facsimile transcriptions from Codex Alexandrinus (Add MS 18278)

This all is really impressive, and a big step forward for NT textual criticism!

Nevertheless, anyone who consults the Liste (e.g. at the Münster Virtual Manuscript Room) will notice that not all GNT manuscripts of the BL are there. The Liste gives 228 numbers. The future looks bright.

Who needs conjectural emendation?

2010-09-20T19:43:00.000+02:00

I do. Right now, actually, because I am editing a text by Bill Petersen, and just came across a sentence that is simply wrong. Bill writes:

Strutwolf went on to say that the Nestle-Aland text cannot and does not attempt to reconstruct an earlier (that is, pre-180) text, for that text was pluriform, and might called a “school-text,” under for teaching and preaching, but which was not ﬁxed (hence the Alands’ description of the pre-180 text as “freischwebend”).

A nice citation, but that is not the point. Let us correct ‘might called’ to ‘might be called’. That one is easy enough. But what about ‘under for teaching and preaching’? Something went wrong here, but just what? Should I leave ‘under’ out? Should I write ‘used’? Or ‘undertaken’? All suggestions are welcome, especially good ones.

Meeting in Leuven (Sept. 1st)

2010-09-10T14:36:00.002+02:00

On Sept. 1st Silvia Castelli, Jan Krans and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte met with colleagues from Leuven (Jos Verheyden) and Halle (Manfred Lang, Bastian Lemitz). Thus, the New Testament Conjectural Emendation programme was brought in touch with the Leuven-Halle programme on the Corpus Hellenisticum. After the characteristics of both programmes had been discussed, Jan Krans gave a presentation on Textual Criticism in the Making: Johann Jakob Wettstein. In this presentation he pointed out the extreme interest of papers and manuscript notes by Wettstein that are kept in Amsterdam University Library (UBA). Manfred Lang and Bastian Lemitz updated the group on the publication of Der neue Wettstein, which is presently working on the volume of Acts. The Halle-Leuven and the Amsterdam group have taken several common projects into consideration. Although at present, further details cannot be mentioned yet, it is clear that a shared interest in the scholarly giant Johann Jakob Wettstein and his work will lead to further cooperation in the future. For that reason, it may be expected that this report will be continued…

Conjectural Emendation Quiz

2010-07-27T22:09:00.208+02:00

In collaboration with Evangelical Textual Criticism, a small quotation quiz was organized. Here are the answers in chronological order, with some remarks.

#2 is indeed by Scrivener, in 1861:

It is now agreed among competent judges that Conjectural Emendation must never be resorted to, even in passages of acknowledged difficulty, ...

Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students, Cambridge etc.: Deighton, Bell, and Co etc., ¹1861, 369.

Note the typical term ‘resorting to’. In later editions the quotation continues as follows:

... difficulty; the absence of proof that a reading proposed to be substituted for the common one is actually supported by some trustworthy document being of itself a fatal objection to our receiving it.

Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students, 2 vols, London etc.: Bell, ⁴1894, II p. 244 (already ²1874, p. 433).

This complex sentence - to me at least - seems to mean that conjectures are unacceptable because they are conjectures. The interesting point is that Scrivener maintains all this, knowing about William Linwood’s support of conjectural emendation of the New Testament. By implication, Linwood would not belong to the select class of ‘competent judges’.

#1 is indeed by Eb. Nestle, in 1901, at least in the English translation:

Not long ago philologists evinced such a fondness for conjectural emendation that the question might not unreasonably be asked why they did not rather themselves write the text that they took in hand to explain.

Eberhard Nestle, Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament. London: Williams and Norgate, 1901, p. 167.

The German original is from 1899, and sounds even better:

Für’s Konjekturen-machen hatten viele Philologen vor noch nicht langer Zeit eine so grosse Vorliebe, dass man nicht ohne Grund fragen konnte, warum sie die Texte, die sie zu erklären vorgaben, nicht lieber selbst schrieben; ...

Eberhard Nestle, Einführung in das Griechische Neue Testament. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, ²1899, p. 134 (not in ¹1897). (The title of the English translation makes explicit what Nestle took for granted ...)

The Nestle quotation continues, however, on a more positive note:

At the same time, the aversion to this method of criticism which till recently prevailed and still to some extent prevails, especially in the matter of the New Testament text, is just as unreasonable.

In German:

... ebenso unbegründet aber war und ist die Abneigung, die namentlich auf dem Gebiet der nt.lichen Textkritik bis in die jüngste Zeit gegen sie herrschte, zum Teil noch herrscht.

Perhaps ‘unfounded’ would have been a better translation of ‘unbegründet’ than ‘unreasonable’, but the idea is clear. Did Nestle have Scrivener (et al.) in mind? In any case, Nestle himself is known for a number of conjectures on the NT text.

#5 is by Kenyon:

No authority could be attached to words which rested upon conjecture; and a critic who should devote himself to editing the Scriptures on conjectural lines would be merely wasting his time.

Frederic G. Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. London: Macmillan¹1901, 15 (²1926), p. 17.

Kenyon’s position becomes even clearer if the quotation is taken a bit larger:

It is universally agreed ... that the sphere of conjecture in the case of the New Testament is infinitesimal; and it may further be added that for practical purposes it must be treated as non-existent. No authority could be attached to words which rested upon conjecture; and a critic who should devote himself to editing the Scriptures on conjectural lines would be merely wasting his time. Where nothing but questions of literary style are involved, we may be willing to accept a reading upon conjecture, if no better evidence is to be had; but where it is a question of the Word of Life, some surer foundation is required.

The same agreement, now even universal, as found with Scrivener. To me, Kenyon exemplifies two aspects: (1) the opinion that the wealth of evidence in manuscripts, versions, and citations, almost precludes conjectural emendation, and (2) a theology-driven protest against it; hence ‘authority’, and the need of ‘some surer foundation’.
BTW, the particular use of the semicolon in Kenyon’s prose was once common even in British English, but has been abolished from civilised writing ever since; presumably it survives in certain areas of Australia only.

#3 is indeed by me (thanks Christian), in 2006:

Knowledge of authors should precede judgement of their conjectures.

Jan Krans, Beyond What Is Written. Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament (NTTS 35), Leiden etc.: Brill, 2006, p. 3 (cf. p. 333).

It is my short formula for the ‘historical turn’ in the study of NT conjectural emendation. HT to Hort, of course; he was the one who was ‘clever with words’ (PH).

#4 is by Georg Luck, in 2009:

It is a sobering experience to observe what flights of fancy Biblical scholars indulge in order to discredit a conjecture.

Georg Luck, ‘Conjectural Emendation in the Greek New Testament’. In Verae Lectiones. Estudios de Crítica Textual y Edición de Textos Griegos. Eds. M. Sanz Morales and M. Librán Moreno. Cáceres: Huelva, 2009, 169-202, 183.

The entire article is not (yet) very well known, but it nicely shows a current-day classical scholar’s take on NT conjectural emendation. For members of the Textual Criticism Group, a scan of it is available under ‘files’.
The context of this remark is actually Kilpatrick’s defence of the transmitted reading ὑσσώπῳ (‘on hyssop’) against the conjecture ὑσσῷ (‘on a javelin’) in John 19:29.
Peter Head (in the comments on the ETC post) deduced an 18th-century date for the quotation, because it reflects a period in which biblical scholars were still remembered to discuss (and reject) specific conjectures, instead of them simply rejecting conjectural emendation in principle. Perhaps then, in the eyes of Luck, Kilpatrick becomes a biblical scholar instead of a textual critic, just because he deals with conjectures the way he does.

This concludes the quiz; there could easily be made a second one, with quotations just as interesting. Maybe next year.

Greek NT Lectionary 154 online

2010-07-09T08:34:00.000+02:00

The digital library of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek keeps growing. This morning I noticed the addition of a Greek New Testament lectionary, Hss Cod. graec. 326. This turns out to be the 13th-century l 154.

Larry Hurtado in Amsterdam

2010-06-11T10:57:00.001+02:00

In a previous post, Arie Zwiep announced the one-day symposium with Larry Hurtado at our university. I could do some live blogging, for Larry is speaking as I am typing this.
More importantly, however, we had a nice session of our Amsterdam New Testament Colloquium yesterday, where we were able to discuss with Larry his Lord Jesus Christ in a cordial and relaxed manner.
The discussion focussed (partly) on the category of ‘religious experience’, as Larry uses a taxonomy of it and more notably the special category of ‘revelatory religious experience’ as part of his historical explanation of early devotion to Christ. What kind of explanation is it? How does it square with current research on ‘religious experience’? Can such an explanation be verified or falsified? It turned out, at least, that further research and discussion is still possible.
The photograph below shows the group after the discussion, or, to be entirely correct, between the official part of it and its less official continuation at another, even more spirited location.

From left to right: Bas van Os, Cees van der Ziel, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, Jan Krans, Arie Zwiep, Larry Hurtado, Martin de Boer. The painting between Larry and Martin shows Tjitze Baarda, as former dean of our faculty.

Symposium with Larry Hurtado

2010-06-03T16:53:00.005+02:00

Dear all,

You are all cordially invited to a research symposium with Larry Hurtado (University of Edinburgh) on 11 June 2010 at VU University Amsterdam.

See for details: http://www.cert-amsterdam.nl/en-events.htm

Arie Zwiep

Syriac Alphabet

2010-06-03T12:15:00.001+02:00

As (1) I found no easy cheat sheet on the Internet for Syriac, and (2) I am still struggling with the Serto alphabet, I decided to make a hopefully nice table myself. You can download a PDF version from the public part of the NTCE website.

It is version 1.0; if you spot any errors or want to suggest an improvement, please do so in the comments. The fonts used are Meltho OpenType.
Update 3 June 2010: some errors corrected; the PDF link now brings you to version 1.1.

The scribal blunder in the Codex Corsendoncensis (min. 3)

2010-05-12T23:28:00.001+02:00

As I was given access to the expert mode of the INTF Virtual Manuscript Room (thanks Martin), I decided to finally see for myself what the famous scribal blunder in min. 3 (VMR no. 30003) looks like. The example was discussed briefly last year on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

Minuscule 3 (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Suppl. gr. 52) contains the entire Greek New Testament except Revelation. It is named Codex Corsendoncensis , because it was one of two manuscripts from Corsendonk used by Erasmus when he was working on the second edition of his New Testament (published in 1519). Its date is given as twelfth-century. [The other Corsendonk manuscript is a Latin Gospel manuscript, now in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek (Ms. theol. lat. qu. 4)].

The manuscript has not yet been indexed for the VMR (any volunteers?), so it took me some time to find the correct page. It turns out to be f. 376^v; the VMR number is 8110.

The blunder itself concerns 2 Cor 8:4. The normal Greek text of 2 Cor 8:4-5a runs as follows: ... ⁴ μετὰ πολλῆς παρακλήσεως δεόμενοι ἡμῶν, τὴν χάριν καὶ τὴν κοινωνίαν τῆς διακονίας τῆς εἰς τοὺς ἁγίους· ⁵ καὶ οὐ καθὼς ἠλπίσαμεν, ... (‘... ⁴ begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints -- ⁵ and this, not as we expected, ... - RSV, taking τὴν χάριν καὶ τὴν κοινωνίαν together). As indicated in NA²⁷, some manuscripts add δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς at the end of verse 4, thereby having an AcI depending from δεόμενοι: ‘that we accept the favor and the community ...’
Min. 3 also has this addition. Its text, however, is as follows: ... ⁴ μετὰ πολλῆς παρακλήσεως δεόμενοι ἡμῶν τὴν χάριν καὶ τὴν κοινωνίαν τῆς εἰς τοὺς ἁγίους, δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς ἐν πολλοῖς τῶν ἀντιφράφων οὕτως εὕρηται ⁵ καὶ οὐ καθὼς ἠλπίσαμεν, ...
Note the omission of τῆς διακονίας after τὴν κοινωνίαν, which could already qualify as a scribal blunder (due to homoeoarchton), for the following τῆς can no longer be understood. The real blunder, however, is found in the words just after δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς: ἐν πολλοῖς τῶν ἀντιφράφων οὕτως εὕρηται (‘thus it is found in many copies’). This simply has to be a marginal note, mistaken for a correction, and put into the text by a scribe who was apparently thinking of quite other matters than the relief of the saints.
One can surmise that the original note included (began with) δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς. Thus, the scribe’s exemplar signalled the variant reading δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς and even added some information on it.

With the kind permission of the VMR team, I can now show the image on this blog (taken from the VMR jpg, which represents the INTF microfilm; slightly enhanced for b/w contrast; f. 376^v; VMR no. 8110). As can be seen, someone marked the blunder in the text and even put a mark in the left margin to draw attention to it.

The reception history of the scribal blunder itself is interesting as well. It was mentioned for the first time by none other than Erasmus. In his 1519 edition, he added a long note to his annotation on these verses. The example must have been very welcome to him, for it is clear proof that even the sacred texts are not free from ridiculous scribal errors and that textual criticism is necessary, whatever theologians may say. He concluded the note by saying that ‘we found innumerable places corrupted for this same cause'. Even before the 1519 edition, he had already mentioned the case in his apology against Faber Stapulensis. There, the point made was somewhat more specific. He warned his colleague to not naively trust (Greek) manuscripts. Keep thinking critically.

I would not be surprised if Erasmus were the one responsible for the underlining and marginal note in the manuscript. However the microfilm image cannot be conclusive in this respect. What we do know is that Erasmus did not hesitate to put a personal note in the manuscript he used. In this case, he did so even twice, once in Latin, on f. 1^r (VMR no. 80), and once in Greek, on f. 181^v (VMR no. 3970). Let me show you an enhanced image of the latter:

Well, at least he wanted the manuscript to be kept safe ...

In subsequent centuries, the blunder was frequently mentioned in text-critical books. Bengel, in his 1734 Greek New Testament, refers to Erasmus. Metzger also mentions the case in his Text of the New Testament (3-1992, p. 194; see also Metzger/Ehrman 4-2005, pp. 258-259), referring to Bengel. Perhaps in a future edition, Erasmus himself could be mentioned as well.

The example itself may indeed have some importance for text-critical reasoning in general and conjectural emendation in particular. It shows that marginal annotations which were mistakenly adopted into the text did occur. The question remains, however, how widespread the phenomenon actually is, and how it can be demonstrated in cases that are less clear than the one in min. 3.

Sacred Scriptures as Trash

2010-04-29T07:26:00.000+02:00

Just published: a very interesting article by one of our former VU University students, AnneMarie Luijendijk: ‘Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus’, in Vigiliae Christianae 64 (2010), pp. 217-254.

The abstract:
Most New Testament papyri with a known provenance were found at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, or more precisely: on that city's rubbish mounds. The fact that sacred scriptures were discarded as garbage is surprising in view of the holiness of Christian biblical manuscripts, intrinsically and physically. Yet the trash aspect of provenance has never been adequately problematized or studied. Taking a social-historical and garbological approach, this article demonstrates that at Oxyrhynchus in antiquity entire manuscripts with biblical writings were deliberately discarded by Christians themselves, unrelated to persecution and issues of canonicity.

In the Latest Issue of Novum Testamentum

2010-03-31T06:45:00.000+02:00

Since min. 2427 is still cited in our Nestle-Aland edition (638 times in the apparatus on Mark’s gospel), everyone should know by now that it actually stands (more or less) for Buttmann's 19th-century edition. And for an interesting forgery story, the lastest research report on which is found in the new issue of Novum Testamentum: Margaret M. Mitchell, Joseph G. Barabe and Abigail B. Quandt, ‘Chicago's "Archaic Mark" (ms 2427) II. Microscopic, Chemical and Codicological Analyses Confirm Modern Production’, in Novum Testamentum 52 (2010), pp. 101-133. (Joseph Barabe writes on the ‘McCrone Analysis’; Abigail Quandt on the ‘Reconstruction of the Forger’s Technique’; Margaret Mitchell on ‘The Forger’s Textual Dependence’.)

Two PhD Positions in New Testament Textual Criticism

2010-03-22T22:51:00.000+01:00

It took some time, but the descriptions for the two PhD positions in the New Testament Conjectural Emendation project (on which I blogged earlier) are available now. Ample information can be found at the public part of the team website. For the application, see especially this official PDF file. Feel free to pass on this information, or to ask for more. Applications must be sent before April 12th.

Breaking News: NWO Grant Approved

2009-12-24T09:04:00.000+01:00

Colleagues in the textual critical field will surely forgive us the all too general title and tag line of the following press release, and retain the good news: serious work will be done in the coming years on the important and intricate topic of New Testament conjectural emendation. In the first months of 2010, two PhD positions will become available, so keep posted.

Do we have the original text of the New Testament?
NWO grant for restoring the text of the New Testament

The search for the original text of the New Testament often involves solving intricate puzzles. Which textual reading from the manuscripts seems to be the most authentic, is the oldest, or has the best witnesses in its favour? When the manuscripts do not offer a solution, scholars sometimes conjecture a reading. This step, involving conjectural criticism, is not undisputed, for it seems to involve tampering with a text many regard as sacred. All the same, conjectural criticism has had a long and fruitful history beginning with Erasmus and its value has been proven repeatedly. Conjectural criticism demands a multidisciplinary approach, interfacing with sacred texts and their reception history, church history and cultural studies, as well as scholarly editing. The need for a comprehensive mapping of the field of conjectural criticism of the New Testament text has been felt for decades.

The Humanities Division of NWO approved a 600,000 Euro research proposal called New Testament Conjectural Emendation: A Comprehensive Enquiry, submitted by Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte and Jan Krans. Both scholars are employed at the Faculty of Theology, VU University Amsterdam and affiliated with VISOR (VU Institute for the Study of Culture, Religion and Society) and the ACNTS (Amsterdam Centre for New Testament Studies). The research project, which runs from 2010 to 2014, will be carried out in collaboration with the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) of the Münster University and the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) of the University of Birmingham.

Two PhD students will participate in the project. The first will investigate the second half of the eighteenth century, when the problem of the New Testament text becomes fully visible for the first time. The second will investigate the second half of the nineteenth century, during which many radical proposals for textual emendations were made, especially in the Netherlands. A post-doc researcher will write a general history of New Testament conjectures and conjectural criticism. A database of thoroughly documented important conjectures will be connected to the standard edition of the Greek New Testament (Editio Critica Maior) which is currently being prepared in Münster and Birmingham.

For more information, please contact Jan Krans (jlh.krans [at] th.vu.nl), or Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte (lj.lietaert_peerbolte [at] th.vu.nl].

The Dutch version of this press release is found here on the VU University website and here on the VISOR website.

The Basel and Leiden editions of Erasmus' Opera omnia online

2009-11-20T00:00:00.000+01:00

The Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies, an initiative of the Erasmus University Rotterdam and Rotterdam City Library, has an impressive website, which is gradually expanding. An important element is ‘Erasmus online’ (EOL) a full database of the Erasmus collection in Rotterdam.

I recently found out that the complete Basel edition of Erasmus’ works (edited by Beatus Rhenanus; published in 1540; some 9500 pages!), as well as the Leiden edition (LB; edited by Clericus; published 1703-1706; more than 6000 large pages!), are available (in DjVU format).

Of course, for those volumes that are available, scholarly work has to be done on the basis of the Amsterdam edition (ASD) and the Toronto Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE). Still, these resources are very welcome, and, as far as I can see, very well done.
Finally, a tip for querying the database: select an author (e.g. Erasmus) by using the index and choose facsimiles only. And perhaps it is not a very good idea to try downloading these massive works ...

Yet again: Codex Boreelianus

2009-11-17T23:26:00.000+01:00

Today, in the Utrecht University Library, a special book was presented: Bijzonder onderzoek. Een ontdekkingsreis door de Bijzondere Collecties van de Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht (‘Special Research [or: Extraordinary Exploration(s)]. A Voyage of Discovery through the Special Collections of the Utrecht University Library’). Celebrating its 425 years (even though the University itself is more recent), 36 authors write about their favorite objects in the Library’s special collections.

An impression of the special treatment inflicted on the Codex Boreelianus

(photo Peter Rothengatter)

To readers of this blog it will probably not come as a surprise that I was asked to write the story of Codex Boreelianus. Even the very few who do not read Dutch will appreciate the beautiful images made by the photographers (not only in this article, but throughout the volume).
Perhaps not everybody is willing to invest the bagatel of 30 euros in such a book; in that case, the chapters can be found as PDF files on a special website. The PDF with the chapter on Boreelianus can be downloaded directly.
One day perhaps, an English version of the book will be published as well.

A book on gospel lectionary 351

2009-11-07T15:22:00.000+01:00

Those who think that only large uncial NT manuscripts such as the Sinaiticus or Codex Bezae deserve the honour of having an entire book (or even more) devoted to them may be surprised to learn that text-critically perhaps less important minuscule lectionaries, not even mentioned in Nestle-Aland²⁷ can become just as happy, if the circumstances are right.
John Lowden, The Jaharis Gospel Lectionary. The Story of a Byzantine Book, New Haven etc., Yale University Press etc., 2009.

It took me some close reading (i.e. note 9 on p. 121) to find out that this "Jaharis Gospel Lectionary" is l 351 in the Gregory-Aland numbering. In the Kurzgefasste Liste, the manuscript is still located in Paris, at the Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, shelf mark Ms. 206. That should thus become The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession number 2007.286 (which BTW one looks for in vain in the book).
The manuscript is now named after Mary and Michael Jaharis, thanks to whom the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art could acquire it (see also the museum's webpage on the ms.).
The book itself, written by a professor of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, is an interesting read, and in a way a good introduction on these Byzantine lectionaries as well (see also Appendix 1 on the Menologion Rubrics etc.). There are many (beautiful) images, of course, also of other manuscripts, for instance New York Pierpont Morgan Library Ms. 639 (l 381 for NT textual critics) (figs. 58; 89-90 in the book) and Sinai, St. Catherine's Monastery Gr. 204 (l 300) (figs. 21-22).

The second Elzeviers’ edition of the Greek New Testament

2009-09-25T18:46:00.000+02:00

At Google Books, I just found a copy of the 1633 edition of the textus receptus, famous for the fact that Heinsius' preface contains the words 'textum ... receptum' (f. 2v). It is one of the many valuable additions thanks to the Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire of Lausanne, where numerous old books are "google-ised" ("googelisés" is the French word).

History, Orality, and Collective Memory

2009-09-25T17:50:00.000+02:00

The Amsterdam Center for New Testament Studies of the VU University Amsterdam organizes on October 15th a one-day International Conference on "History, Orality, and Collective Memory", with the obvious question attached to it: "A New Paradigm for the History of Early Christianity?" Speakers will be Samuel Byrskog (Lund) and Michael Labahn (Halle).
For more information, you can visit the Centre's website, especially the PDF document (in Dutch) with all the information. Perhaps a nice occasion to visit Amsterdam, as beautiful in autumn as in every other season ...

A selection of text-critical articles and reviews from The Bible Translator (1950-2000)

2009-09-09T01:15:00.000+02:00

Selection composed by J.L.H. Krans, VU University Amsterdam in 2003-2004, and updated in September 2009. Formerly, the links referred to the TC Ebind project, but they have now been updated to refer to the resources site of the United Bible Societies.
1 (1950)
‘Proposed Publication of the Manuscript Evidence for the Text of the Greek New Testament’, in BT 1 (1950), pp. 169-171. [Announcement of IGNTP]
2 (1951)
Erwin Nestle, ‘How to use a Greek New Testament’, in BT 2 (1951), pp. 49-55.
Frederick C. Grant, ‘The Greek Text of the New Testament’, in BT 2 (1951), pp. 117-121. [On the Greek text underlying RSV]
4 (1953)
W.R. Hutton, ‘Textual Emendation in the Old Testament’, in BT 4 (1953), pp. 13-14.
A.W. Argyle, ‘The Elements of New Testament Textual Criticism’, in BT 4 (1953), pp. 118-125.
5 (1954)
William A. Irwin, ‘Textual Criticism and Old Testament Translation’, in BT 5 (1954), pp. 54-58.
7 (1956)
G. Ch. Aalders, ‘Translator or Textual Critic?’, in BT 7 (1956), pp. 15-16. [OT TC]
William L. Wonderly, ‘What About Italics?’, in BT 7 (1956), pp. 114-116. [On the use of italics in translations]
8 (1957)
A.F.J. Klijn, ‘The Value of the Versions for the Textual Criticism of the New Testament’, in BT 8 (1957), pp. 127-130.
J. Ramsey Michaels, ‘Some Notable Readings of Papyrus Bodmer II’, in BT 8 (1957), pp. 150-154. [On P66]
9 (1958)
G.D. Kilpatrick, ‘The Transmission of the New Testament and its Reliability’, in BT 9 (1958), pp. 127-136.
Kenneth Grayston, review of Kilpatrick, A New Edition of the Nestle Greek New Testament, in BT 9 (1958), pp. 185-189.
10 (1959)
‘A New Edition of the Greek New Testament’, in BT 10 (1959), pp. 29-34. [Announcement/Program of UBSGNT1]
13 (1962)
Wilbur Aulie, ‘The Textual Basis of Some Spanish Versions of the New Testament’, in BT 13 (1962), pp. 212-218.
15 (1964)
Wilfred J. Bradnock, review of Metzger, The Text of the New Testament ..., in BT 15 (1964), pp. 201-203.
16 (1965)
Ian A. Moir, review of Tasker, The Greek New Testament, being ... New English Bible, in BT 16 (1965), pp. 49-51. [With an interesting editorial note, p. 51]
Tom Gaumer, ‘An Examination of Some Western Textual Variants Adopted in the Greek Text of the New English Bible’, in BT 16 (1965), pp. 184-189.
17 (1966)
Robert P. Markham, ‘The Bible Societies’ Greek Testament: the End of a Decade or Beginning of an Era?’, in BT 17 (1966), pp. 106-113. [On UBSGNT1]
18 (1967)
Robert P. Markham, ‘The Bible Societies’ Greek Testament: A Symposium: A. The Critical Apparatus’, in BT 18 (1967), pp. 3-11. [On UBSGNT1]
Stephen C. Neill, ‘The Bible Societies’ Greek Testament: A Symposium: B. Review’, in BT 18 (1967), pp. 12-15. [On UBSGNT1]
Harold K. Moulton, ‘The Bible Societies’ Greek Testament: A Symposium: C. The Punctuation Apparatus’, in BT 18 (1967), pp. 16-19. [On UBSGNT1]
Robert G. Bratcher, ‘The T.E.V. New Testament and the Greek Text’, in BT 18 (1967), pp. 167-174.
24 (1973)
Ian A. Moir, review of Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, in BT 24 (1973), pp. 329-333. [On the first edition 1971]
25 (1974)
Carlo M. Martini, review of Aune (ed.), Studies in New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Essays in Honor of Allen P. Wikgren, in BT 25 (1974), pp. 150-152. [Wikgren FS]
26 (1975)
J. Keith Elliott, ‘A Second Look at the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament’, in BT 26 (1975), pp. 325-332.
28 (1977)
Matthew Black, ‘The United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament Evaluated - A Reply’, in BT 28 (1977), pp. 116-120. [Reply to Elliott]
Elizabeth G. Edwards, ‘On Using the Textual Apparatus of the UBS Greek New Testament’, in BT 28 (1977), pp. 121-143.
Jan Slomp, ‘Are the Words "Son of God" in Mark 1.1 Original?’, in BT 28 (1977), pp. 143-150. [Answer: better not]
J.K. Elliott, ‘John 1.14 and the New Testament’s Use of plèrès’, in BT 28 (1977), pp. 151-153.
29 (1978)
Klaus Junack, ‘The Reliability of the New Testament Text from the Perspective of Textual Criticism’, in BT 29 (1978), pp. 128-140.
30 (1979)
J.K. Elliott. ‘The United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament: A Short Examination of the Third Edition’, in BT 30 (1979), pp. 135-138.
31 (1980)
Gordon D. Fee, ‘The Majority Text and the Original Text of the New Testament’, in BT 31 (1980), pp. 107-118.
John Ellington, ‘The Use and Limitations of Interlinear Editions’, in BT 31 (1980), pp. 212-219.
Erroll Rhodes, review of D.A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism, in BT 31 (1980), pp. 337-338.
P.E. [Paul Ellingworth], review of Ernest Best and R. McL. Wilson (eds.), Text and Interpretation, in BT 31 (1980), pp. 341-342. [Matthew Black FS]
32 (1981)
Eugene A. Nida, ‘The "Harder Reading" in Textual Criticism: An Application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’, in BT 32 (1981), pp. 101-107.
33 (1982)
J.M. Ross, ‘The "Harder Reading" in Textual Criticism’, in BT 33 (1982), pp. 138-139.
P.E. [Paul Ellingworth], review of Bruce M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible, in BT 33 (1982), p. 341.
Barclay M. Newman Jr, ‘Some Hints on Solving Textual Problems’, in BT 33 (1982), pp. 430-435.
34 (1983)
Rogel L. Omanson, ‘A Perspective on the Study of the New Testament Text’, BT 34 (1983), pp. 107-122.
J.K. Elliott on Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad (eds), The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, in BT 34 (1983), pp. 342-344.
J. Karavidopoulos on Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, Der Text des Neuen Testaments, in BT 34 (1983), pp. 344-345.
F.F. Bruce, review of Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible, in BT 34 (1983), pp. 347-348.
36 (1985)
Ian A. Moir, ‘A Mini-Guide to New Testament Textual Criticism’, in BT 36 (1985), pp. 122-129.
Harold P. Scanlin, ‘The Majority Text Debate: Recent Developments’, in BT 36 (1985), pp. 136-140.
J.K. Elliott, review of Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, in BT 36 (1985), pp. 143-144.
37 (1986)
H.J. de Jonge, ‘Erasmus’ Method of Translation in his Version of the New Testament’, in BT 37 (1986), pp. 135-138.
Notice of Selected Technical Articles Related to Translation (START), in BT 37 (1986), p. 347.
38 (1987)
Per Block, ‘Translating the Apocrypha in Sweden: With Special Reference to the Textual Problems’, in BT 38 (1987), pp. 315-327.
39 (1988)
P.E. [Paul Ellingworth], review of J.H. Petzer and P.J. Hartin, A South African Perspective on the New Testament, in BT 39 (1988), pp. 139-140. [Metzger FS (Petzer)]
Harold P. Scanlin, ‘Bible Translation as a Means of Communicating New Testament Textual Criticism to the Public’, in BT 39 (1988), pp. 101-113. [Chart on p. 113]
J. Neville Birdsall, review of Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, in BT 39 (1988), pp. 338-342.
40 (1989)
Philip Comfort, ‘the Pericope of the Adulteress’, in BT 40 (1989), pp. 145-147.
Roger L. Omanson, ‘Must Our Readers be Mindreaders?’, in BT 40 (1989), pp. 432-433. [On blunders in MSS. and (printed) translations]
42 (1991)
J.K. Elliott, review of Philip W. Comfort, Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations of the New Testament, in BT 42 (1991), pp. 343-345.
44 (1993)
P.E. [Paul Ellingworth], review of Metgzer, The Text of the New Testament ..., Third ... edition, in BT 44 (1993), pp. 146-147.
45 (1994)
Harald P. Scanlin, introduction to the Review Symposium of GNT4, in BT 45 (1994), pp. 348-349.
Moises Silva, review of GNT4, in BT 45 (1994), pp. 349-353.
Tjitze Baarda, review of GNT4 (‘The Textual Apparatus in the Fourth Edition’), in BT 45 (1994), pp. 353-356.
46 (1995)
Paul Ellingworth, ‘Theological Reflections on the Textual Criticism of the Bible’, in BT 46 (1995), pp. 119-125.
47 (1996)
Roger L. Omanson, review of Arthur G. Patzia, The Making of the New Testament, in BT 47 (1996), pp. 154-156.
Paul Ellingworth, review of Keith Elliott and Ian Moir, Manuscripts and the Text of the New Testament, in BT 47 (1996), pp. 352-353.
48 (1997)
Roger L. Omanson, review of Aland and Delobel (eds.), New Testament Textual Criticism and Ehrman and Holmes (eds.), The Text of the New Testament ..., in BT 48 (1997), pp. 350-352.
49 (1998)
Paul Ellingworth, review of David Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, in BT 49 (1998), pp. 154-155.
Roger L. Omanson, ‘A Critical Appraisal of the Apparatus Criticus’, in BT 49 (1998), pp. 301-323. [On the choice of variants in UBSGNT4]
Roger L. Omanson, review of Charles Landon, A Text-Critical Study of the Epistle of Jude, in BT 49 (1998), pp. 353-354.
50 (1999)
Mikael Parsons, review of Kent D. Clark, Textual Optimism: A Critique of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, in BT 50 (1999), pp. 346-350.
51 (2000)
Iver Larsen, ‘Variant Readings in 2 Corinthians’, in BT 51 (2000), pp. 342-348.

Teaching Greek in Athens

2009-07-20T19:26:00.000+02:00

After Rome (see also Kent Richard’s report and my mysterious pizza) and London comes Athens, this year. Thanks to the Netherlands Institute in Athens, I am within a stone's throw of the Acropolis, together with four Dutch students of the VU University Amsterdam. During three weeks, they will receive their very first instruction in classical Greek. Needless to say, we will be able to see some cultural heritage as well. Not to mention the Greek cuisine.
We also maintain a weblog - in Dutch - for our stay.

Lionel North's article on negatives and NTTC (with an addendum on Beza and Mk 16:2)

2009-04-17T18:12:00.002+02:00

A few months ago, I could (not) suppress a smile when I read that something had gone wrong with the so-called ‘Advance Access’ (dated 11 Feb. 2009): ’The originally published version of this paper was incorrect. A corrected version will be uploaded soon.’ Anyhow, the final version is available now:

James Lionel North, ‘"Thou Shalt Commit Adultery" (EXOD. 20:14, AV 1631): A First Survey of Alteration Involving Negatives in the Transmission of the Greek New Testament and of Early Church Responses to it’, in JTS 60 (2009), pp. 22-69 (doi:10.1093/jts/fln150).

The article explores an intriguing class of text-critical cases, namely those in which a negative is involved, not only by it being added or omitted, but through more complicated processes as well. Besides extensive discussion of texts such as 1 Cor 15:51, the article contains 13 pages of lists which exemplify the possibilities.

Addendum on Beza and Mark 16:2

By his own admission, Lionel North mentions ‘very few modern conjectures’ (p. 47 n. 42). It could be interesting to analyse the fifty or so examples of these I find in my files. The author does mention a harmonistic conjecture by Beza on Mk 16:2 (p. 25), which for some reason I did not discuss in my monograph on Erasmus and Beza as conjectural critics, even though I still have extensive notes on it. As there are two aspects of Lionel North’s discussion I do not quite understand, let me first introduce Beza’s conjecture itself.

In order to reconcile Mark’s account of the women visiting Jesus’ grave with the other gospels, Beza proposes to read οὐκέτι ἀνατεἰλαντος (‘when the sun had not yet risen’) in Mk 16:2. The conjecture is already found in the 1556 annotations (and retained in later editions), but never adopted in the Greek text or in Beza’s Latin translation. In his 1582 annotations, Beza mentions the reading of Codex Bezae (ἀνατέλλοντος - ‘when the sun was rising’). He notes the nuance in meaning, but still feels the same problem. For those who regard his conjectural emendation as too ‘dangerous’, he now offers a different explanation: the women set out before sunrise (thus Matthew, Luke, and John are correct), but arrived after it (which is what Mark tells us).

Lionel North asks why Beza chose οὐκέτι for his conjecture, and not the simple οὐ(κ). He wonders whether Beza knew the reading ἔτι from Robertus Stephanus’ edition of Eusebius and his famous 1550 NT edition. The answer is affirmative, as can be seen from the same 1556 annotation a few words of which are cited in the article itself; Beza writes: ‘Germanae autem lectionis vestigia adhuc supererant in tertio codice in quo scriptum erat ἔτι ἀνατείλαντος; quo modo etiam citatur hic locus ab Eusebio ...’ (‘the traces of the true reading still remain in the third book (manuscript), in which is written ἔτι ἀνατείλαντος; in the same way this place is cited by Eusebius ...’). Thus the two links are certain. With the ‘tertius codex’, Beza refers to min. 4, found in Stephanus’ 1550 edition under siglum γ΄. Therefore, Lionel North’s doubt is unnecessary, though Beza probably did not use the 1550 edition directly, but had access to one of its sources, the book of collations that had been used for the composition of its (small) marginal apparatus.

What I also do not understand is how Lionel North can connect the note in the 1560 Geneva Bible (‘Or, not risen.’ - not yet found in Whittingham’s 1557 New Testament) to a 1569 (!) edition of Ticonius's Regulae (p. 25 n. 7). It is far easier to assume that the marginal note resumes in a very succinct way Beza’s conjectural solution, as the link between the Geneva New Testament and Beza's edition is well established in other cases.

SBL Paper on Wettstein in the Making

2009-03-25T14:58:00.000+01:00

An email arrived yesterday, confirming that my paper proposal for the SBL conference in November 2009 has been accepted. It will be part of the second session, which is more general and which can contain papers on the history and practice of (New Testament) textual criticism. The proposal was as follows:

Textual Criticism in the Making: Johann Jakob Wettstein

Wettstein’s edition of the Greek New Testament (2 vols., 1751-1752) is a landmark of New Testament textual criticism. Unknown to most present-day scholars, and hitherto unexplored, are Wettstein’s papers, preserved for posterity by the Remonstrant Church, and nowadays kept in the library of the University of Amsterdam. Though some have unfortunately been lost, the papers that remain still give us some surprising and instructive insights into the working conditions of a textual critic in the 18th century, his scholarly circle, and the making of his landmark edition.

So please come to the session; you will be in for some surprises.

7. How many years? - Grotius on Gal 2:1

2009-02-28T16:23:00.001+01:00

We would be far worse informed on Paul’s life without his letter to the Galatians. However the accuracy of some of the details mentioned in the letter is disputed. A nice example is found in Gal 2:1, where Paul writes: ‘Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me’ (RSV). On this verse, the Nestle editions of the Greek New Testament (from N¹³ (1927) to NA²⁷ (1993-...) mention a conjecture by Grotius, according to which the fourteen years are to be reduced to a mere four.
NA²⁷ presents the conjecture as τεσσάρων being read instead of δεκατεσσάρων. But do Greek numerals work that way? And why did Grotius propose the conjecture in the first place? And why is such a conjecture mentioned in the Nestle edition anyway? And what does min. 1241^s add to the picture?
Ad fontes, then.

Grotius (1583-1645)
In the case of conjectures attributed to Grotius, the source is never difficult to guess: one has to consult his Annotationes. There, we read on Gal 2:1 (in my provisional translation):

I accept the manuscripts if there are that have τεσσάρων [four] instead of δεκατεσσάρων. Indeed, as numbers were written with abbreviations, it could easily occur that through error ἰ was added before δ΄; and we pointed out at Lk 4:26 and elsewhere how from one copy of scripture faults often have flown into many others. Moreover, copyists made many errors in numbers, as we have shown for many Old Testament places. I find nothing more plausible than that here the same journey by Paul is recorded as the one mentioned in Acts 15:2, which cannot have been a whole fourteen years after either Paul’s conversion or, if one prefers, the end of his stay in Arabia.¹

I used the 19th-century edition by Petrus Hofstede de Groot; Grotius’ annotations on Acts and the Epistles were first published in 1646, just after his death in 1645. Thus the conjecture can be dated to 1646 (but see below).
The main reason for the conjecture is obvious: if one tries to establish a chronology of Paul’s life by combining somehow Galatians and Acts, and the most obvious option is taken, namely to identify this journey to Jerusalem and Acts 15, then the fourteen years mentioned in Gal 2:1 are bound to become problematic.

H.J. de Jonge takes a rather harsh view of Grotius’ effort here; he writes:

Sometimes ... Grotius’ critical faculty is to be found wanting in his Annotationes. One example of this is that he shares with his contemporaries the deeply-rooted inclination to impose harmony upon the contradictions between parallel reports in the Gospels, and between Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. His conjecture of ‘four’ instead of ‘fourteen’ in Gal. 2:1 is an example of this: it strives to identify the journey mentioned here with that in Acts 15:2.²

Perhaps the example of Gal 2:1 does not entirely support de Jonge’s point. Every scholar of the New Testament will have to answer the question of the relationship between the Paul of the (authentic) letters and the Paul of Acts. There may just be a subtle difference between a genuinely historical approach and potentially bibliolatric harmonisation. In any case, there is more at stake than just the ‘reconciliation’ of two texts.

Cappellus (1585-1658)
Following a lead in Bowyer’s collection of conjectures,³ I discovered that probably Grotius was not the first to propose this conjecture. In 1634, a book was published by Ludovicus Cappellus (Louis Cappel, a French Huguenot theologian), known as Historia Apostolica. It is one of the first thorough efforts to establish once and for all the chronology of early Christianity, especially of Paul’s life and letters. And, of course, the main sources are Paul’s letters and Acts combined.

Its full title is Historia Apostolica illustrata, ex Actis Apostolorum et Epistolis Paulinis, studiose inter se collatis, collecta, ordineque, secundum annorum numerum, accurate digesta, et in compendium contracta, eiusque cum historia exotica connexio certis κριτηρίοις demonstrata. Una cum verae Epistolarum Paulinarum (juxta temporis, quo singulae sunt scriptae, ordinem) seriei historica demonstratione. (‘The apostolic history illustrated on the basis of a diligent comparison of Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline epistles, inferred and accurately arranged according to the order, counted in years, with an abstract, and the demonstration of its connection with the external history according to reliable criteria. Together with a historical demonstration of the true sequence of the Pauline epistles. with the order of time in which the individual epistles were written.’) The advantage of such long titles, of course, is that they serve as introduction as well.

For the conjecture, everyone refers to the ‘appendix’ of the book, but ‘appendix’ is simply the name used for the explanations of the rather short chronological table at its beginning, the commentary being far longer than the table. The discussion can be found on pp. 53-57, especially pp. 56-57.
Cappellus as well identifies Gal 2 and Acts 15, and then offers two explanations of the ‘fourteen years’. The first is that the fourteen years actually count from Easter and Pentecost. The second, which he seems to prefer, is the conjecture. He shows how the computation of the years becomes smooth and easy when one reads ‘four’. Interestingly, his explanation of the origin of ‘fourteen’ differs from Grotius’; he assumes that διά was through error copied as δέκα and then supplied to give διὰ δεκα[τεσσάρων].

Who was first?
The chronology of the conjecture, just as Paul’s own time-keeping, is somewhat complicated. The notes by Grotius and Cappellus do not betray any relation between the two, in either direction, and perhaps Grotius had already worked out the idea far earlier than Cappellus. It can be established, however, that Grotius did not work on parts of the NT other than the Gospels until later in his life; and anyway, in case of doubt, the publication of an idea establishes its primogeniture.

Thus the authorship of the conjecture should be attributed to Cappellus. Why then is Grotius found in the Nestle editions, and not Cappellus? The cause may be found in Baljon’s edition,⁴ in which Cappellus is not mentioned. Or did for some reason (Erwin) Nestle or one of his informers think that Grotius was earlier than Cappellus? In general, though the Nestle editions purport to indicate the first author of a conjecture, the impression prevails that the matter of authorship was not seen as particularly important.

Reception history
The conjecture can only be understood in the context of the chronological study of Paul’s life and letters. As this subject was to be part of all nineteenth-century introductions to the New Testament, the conjecture was intensely discussed (and accepted by many). Baljon, who also accepts the conjecture (though he does not adopt it in the text of his own Greek New Testament), refers to Reiche’s 1859 commentary.⁵ Part of Reiche’s long discussion is indeed an impressive list of (German) scholars who accepted the conjecture since Grotius’ and Cappellus’ days.

The Chronicon Paschale
An interesting but complicated aspect of the discussion, according to Reiche first indicated by Semler, is the so-called Chronicon Paschale, a seventh-century Byzantine chronology. (Indeed, the ‘computation of the years’ is not a (post-)Enlightenment invention, but a far older form of scholarship.) The Chronicon states that the period of fourteen years must be counted from the Jesus’ ascension in order to make sense. But then we read a puzzling sentence: καὶ εἰ μὴ τοῦτο δῶμεν, εὑρεθήσεται ὁ χρόνος ἀφ’ οὗ ἐβαπτίσθη καὶ ἀνέβλεψεν, ὡς περιέχουσιν αἱ Πράξεις, ἔτη δʹ.⁶ (‘If we do not accept that, the time from which he was baptised and regained sight will be found to be, as Acts says, four years.’)
The discussion on this text sometimes turns a little nasty, as to whether or not the Chronicon is, contains, or suggests some kind of attestation of the reading τεσσάρων in Gal 2:1. My impression is that the brevity of the explanation, its lack of context, and the reference to Acts preclude any firm conclusions. It remains interesting, however, that some problem transpires in the number ‘fourteen’, and that in that context the number ‘four’ is mentioned. Intriguing as well is the comparison with Cappellus’ discussion, which betrays a parallel structure. Perhaps Cappellus was inspired by the Chronicon, though he does not mention it (the Chronicon had already been published in his days).

Min. 1241
NA²⁷ mentions 1241^s for the reading τεσσάρων. The supplement of 1241 seems to be rather good, and its having the conjectured reading would mean that the conjecture is anticipated (or confirmed?). Without some more information on the manuscript, however, I prefer not to draw any conclusions. For instance, it can be imagined that it is just an error in the manuscript, which in this case happens to agree with a scholarly conjecture.

Conclusion
As much as I like the fact that the great Dutch scholar Grotius is mentioned in the Nestle apparatus - though H.J. de Jonge rightly points out that this conjecture is not Grotius’ greatest achievement -, Grotius’ name should be replaced by Cappellus’ in future editions, if the conjecture is mentioned at all. In view of its important reception history, it still seems ‘noteworthy’.

Notes
¹Grotius: Annotationes VI, Groningen, Zuidema, 1828), p. 555: ‘Assentior Codicibus si qui pro δεκατεσσάρων habent τεσσάρων [quatuor]. Cum enim numeri per notas scriberentur, facile fieri potuit ut ante δ΄ per errorem ἰ adderetur: et ex uno saepe exemplari scripturae vitia in multa fluxisse alia, ostendimus ad Luc. 4: 26 et alibi. In numeris autem plurimos admissos errores ab exscribentibus apertum fecimus ad multa Veteris Testamenti loca. Nihil autem credibilius reperio quam notari hic illud ipsum Pauli iter cuius mentio Act. 15: 2, quod non potest totis quatuordecim annis posterius fuisse aut conversione Pauli, aut etiam, si quid id malit, fine Arabicae peregrinationis.’
²Henk Jan de Jonge, ‘Grotius as an Interpreter of the Bible, Particularly the New Testament,’ in Robert Feenstra e.a, Hugo Grotius: A Great European 1583-1645. Contributions Concerning his Activities as a Humanist Scholar, Delft, Meinema, 1983, pp. 59-65 (ET of ‘Grotius als uitlegger van de bijbel, speciaal het Nieuwe Testament’, in Het Delfts orakel. Hugo de Groot 1583-1645, Delft, Het Prinsenhof, 1983, pp. 121-128), p. 64.
³Wiliiam Bowyer, Critical Conjectures, ⁴1812, p. 508.
⁴Johannes Marinus Simon Baljon, Novum Testamentum Graece, Groningen, Wolters, 1898.
⁵Johann Georg Reiche, Commentarius Criticus in N.T. quo loca graviora et difficiliora lectionis dubiae accurate recensentur et explicantur. Tomus II. Epistolas Apostoli Pauli minores continens, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck et Ruprecht, 1859, pp. 1-10.
⁶Ludwig Dindorf, Chronicon Paschale ad exemplar Vaticanum recensuit ... (Corpus scriptorum historiae Byzantinae (ed. B.G. Niebuhr)), Vol. I, Bonn, Weber, 1832, p. 436 ll. 16-18.

6. What now? - Cramer on Gal 1:10

2009-02-22T17:00:00.000+01:00

This is the sixth instalment of the series on conjectures in the Nestle editions (see the sidebar).
The current Nestle-Aland edition (NA²⁷) of the Greek New Testament mentions a conjecture by ‘J. Cramer’ on the text of Gal 1:10; according to the apparatus, Cramer proposes to read τί instead of ἄρτι. One understands immediately that the conjecture is more than just the omission of αρ-. The text as it stands is ἄρτι γὰρ ἀνθρώπους πείθω ἢ τὸν θεόν; - ‘Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God?’ (RSV). With the conjecture, the text becomes: τί γάρ; ἀνθρώπους πείθω ἢ τὸν θεόν; - ‘What then? Am I seeking the favor of men, or of God?’
As usual in this series, the source of the conjecture comes first, then the discussion and subsequent history.
The conjecture can be found in a book by the Utrecht professor Jacob Cramer (1833-1895): De brief van Paulus aan de Galatiërs in zijn oorsponkelijken vorm hersteld, en verklaard (‘Paul’s letter to the Galatians restored in its original form, and explained’), Utrecht, Breijer, 1890. The book is actually part VI of the series or journal Nieuwe bijdragen op het gebied van godgeleerdheid en wijsbegeerte (‘New contributions on theology and philosophy’). The conjecture itself is discussed in the commentary on pp. 23-27 and can also be found in the restored text on p. 292 and the Dutch translation on p. 311.
The surprise, almost usual in conjecture studies, is that Cramer’s conjecture on this verse is actually larger than just the change from ἄρτι γάρ ... to τί γάρ; ... Cramer uses ‘thorough-going’ conjectural criticism and rewrites the entire first halve of the verse. In his hands, ἄρτι γὰρ ἀνθρώπους πείθω ἢ τὸν θεόν; ἢ ζητῶ ἀνθρώποις ἀρέσκειν; becomes τί γάρ; εἰ ἀνθρώπους πείθω, μὴ ζητῶ ἀνθρώποις ἀρέσκειν; - ‘For what? If I try to win people [for the gospel], I do not try to please people, do I?’
I will not burden this post with Cramer’s complicated four-step reasoning in support of his conjecture. Instead, let us see how it arrived in the Nestle editions in such a ‘reduced’ form.
What we find in the Nestle apparatus is actually the part of Cramer’s conjecture accepted by Schmiedel, one of the Nestles (father and son) most important advisors. In his article on Galatians in Cheyne and Black’s Encyclopaedia Biblica, Schmiedel writes (Vol. 2 (1901), c. 1618):

In 1 10 the conjectural emendation τί γάρ, with the mark of interrogation instead of the present ἄρτι γάρ, has much to recommend it (as in Rom 3 3; in Gal. ἄρτι occurs immediately before, in 1 9); ...

In this short form, the conjecture was included in the Nestle apparatus, from N¹³ onwards (1927). As it stands there, its most striking aspect to me is a complete lack of context. Cramer, the author who is mentioned, wanted to apply rigorous conjectural criticism in order to maintain the Pauline authorship of Galatians against those ‘hypercritics’ who regard the letter as a bad effort of Pauline letter-writing by someone who knew Romans. Schmiedel, the one responsible for the conjecture in its current form, wanted to do the same, but without assuming, as Cramer apparently did, that Paul expresses himself clearly at all points. Therefore, Schmiedel had far less need of conjectural emendation, but applied it nevertheless. Gal 1:10 provides a nice example of Cramer and Schmiedel’s respective positions.

Remarks:
1. Cramer’s book can nowadays be found on Google Books (yet another reason to learn Dutch), just as Vol. 2 of the Encyclopaedia Biblica. However access to full-text versions may be limited outside the US.

2. As usual, more conjectures addressing the same problem can be found, e.g. by Owen, Baljon, and Naber.

For the Dutch only: four lectures in Utrecht on 6 February 2009

2009-01-28T07:16:00.048+01:00

Four public lectures on the Bible in the Netherlands will be given on 6 February in the University Library in Utrecht. Two of us will participate: Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte on the diversity of modern Dutch Bible translations (the title of his lecture itself is impossible to translate), and Jan Krans on the many wanderings of Codex Boreelianus. The lectures will be in Dutch.

Therefore the full announcement here in Dutch (I do not guarantee good results with Babel Fish):

De Bijbel in Nederland – vier openbare lezingen

Op vrijdag 6 februari 2009 organiseert het departement Godgeleerdheid van de faculteit Geesteswetenschappen een openbare lezingendag over diverse aspecten van de Bijbel in Nederland. De dag staat in het kader van het project De Codex Boreelianus: een verknipt evangelie. Een tentoonstelling met die titel zal diezelfde dag geopend worden in het Universiteitsmuseum.
Tegelijkertijd is er een fototentoonstelling in de Universiteitsbibliotheek, onder de titel De Bijbel: het Woord van God als mensenwerk.

9.45-10.15 koffie en ontvangst in de Boothzaal
10.15-10.30 Bart Jaski: Introductie
10.30-11.15 Jan Krans: Codex Boreelianus. De omzwervingen van een evangelieboek
11.15-12.00 Hermine Pool: De bijbelse tempel. Beeldvorming in het Nederland van de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw
12.00-13.00 lunch op eigen gelegenheid
13.00-13.45 Annette Merz: Ingrijpen in de tekst van het Nieuwe Testament. Meekijken over de schouders van kopiïsten en tekstcritici
13.45-14.30 Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte De uiteengevallen Bijbel. Nederlandse bijbelvertalingen anno 2009
15.30-16.30 In aansluiting op de lezingendag volgt de opening van de tentoonstelling Een verknipt evangelie over de Codex Boreelianus in het Universiteitsmuseum aan de Lange Nieuwstraat, met borrel.

Deelnemers aan de dag hebben gratis toegang. Zie http://www.museum.uu.nl/ voor informatie over het museum.

De Codex Boreelianus is een Grieks evangeliehandschrift uit de tiende eeuw, één van de topstukken van de Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht. Lopend onderzoek naar dit handschrift is de aanleiding voor de lezingendag en de beide tentoonstellingen. De foto toont het – gehavende – begin van het evangelie van Johannes: ‘In het begin was het woord ...’ De eerste letter ε heeft de vorm van een zegenende hand.

Personalia
Bart Jaski is conservator handschriften van de Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht
Jan Krans is universitair docent Nieuwe Testament aan het Departement Godgeleerdheid, Universiteit Utrecht
Hermine Pool is conservator van het Bijbels Museum, Amsterdam
Annette Merz is hoogleraar Cultuur- en Literatuurgeschiedenis van het Vroegste Christendom aan het Departement Godgeleerdheid, Universiteit Utrecht
Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte is hoogleraar Nieuwe Testament aan de Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

RBL on NTTC books

2009-01-28T07:03:00.015+01:00

Among the latest additions to RBL, two interesting reviews of NTTC books:

J. K. Elliott reviews J. Harold Greenlee, The Text of the New Testament: From Manuscript to Modern Edition. Warning/recommendation: a very critical review!
Marcus Sigismund reviews U. B. Schmid, with W. J. Elliott and D. C. Parker, The New Testament in Greek IV: The Gospel according to St. John: Volume 2: The Majuscules.

5. To Touch or Not to Touch: Lepsius on John 20:17

2008-12-09T20:00:00.001+01:00

This is the fifth instalment of the series on conjectures in the Nestle editions. See the sidebar for earlier posts.

In the Biblical Studies Carnaval XXXVI, Jim West says that the text-critical matter presented in the previous instalment of this series (Camerarius on John 19:29), is “really fascinating stuff ..., but not for the faint of heart”. Well then, it gets even worse today (for the faint-of-heart, that is), for today’s conjecture, if accepted, would render obsolete beautiful paintings such as this one by Titian. (Not that art ceases to be art when it is discovered to be based on textual misunderstandings - perhaps a nice idea for a new series.)

In John 20:17, the risen Jesus says to Mary Magdalene: “Touch me not (μή μου ἅπτου); for I am not yet ascended to my Father” (KJV). At the surface, the connection between the two phrases seems to be awkward, especially because of the word ‘for’ (γάρ). The current Nestle edition (NA²⁷), as did NA²⁶, records a conjecture by ‘Lipsius’, ἅπτου μου instead of μή μου ἅπτου. That is, Jesus asks (commands) Mary to touch him, apparently while it is still possible!

Somewhat surprisingly, earlier Nestle editions, from N¹³ to NA²⁵, give ‘Lepsius’, not ‘Lipsius’ as the author of this conjecture, and ‘Lepsius’ turns out to be correct. So, in your copy of NA²⁷, please take a pencil (not a ballpoint pen) and correct the ‘i’ into an ‘e’ (or strike the entire conjecture, see below; or supply a different author, see below). The error was easily made, for there is a conjecture by Lipsius recorded on Luke 16:17.¹

As customary in this series, let us go to the sources and ask who Lepsius was and what he proposed.

Lepsius and his conjecture
Johannes Lepsius (1858-1926) was the son of Carl Richard Lepsius, a famous Egyptologist. The son was a missionary; he is especially known for his work for the Armenian cause.

From 1898 to 1911 he edited a journal, Das Reich Christi. It is in this journal that his conjecture can be found, in a series of articles on John’s gospel.² First some context, therefore, derived from these articles.

In general, Lepsius’ approach must be characterised as harmonistic, that is, he tries to reconcile the differences between the resurrection stories as found in the four New Testament gospels. He follows for instance the idea according to which ‘Galilee’ in the resurrection stories in Mark and Matthew is actually found on the Mount of Olives.

In his remarks on Mary Magdalen in John 20, one also detects an interest related to harmonisation, namely to consider the story not as fiction (or narrative elaboration of a rather vague tradition), but as eyewitness report, with a reasoning that I do not entirely understand:

... entweder war der Verfasser Augenzeuge oder ein Romanschriftsteller ersten Ranges. Die unmittelbare sittliche Empfindung entscheidet für das erstere. (p. 31)

Perhaps someone can explain what ‘unmittelbare sittliche Empfindung’ is exactly, but I fail to see how such directness can be a criterion for historical authenticity.

The conjecture itself is introduced in rather simple terms, but theses words contain some surprises for those who know the conjecture only from secondary sources (the Nestle apparatus):

Daß in den Worten: Rühre mich (nicht) an – das “nicht” als Dittographie (im aramäischen Grundtexte des Evangeliums) zu streichen und “Rühre mich an” zu lesen ist, legt schon der Vergleich mit Joh. 20,19 [sic; probably John 20:20 is meant]; 20,27; Luk. 24,39-40 nahe. Alle Gründe, die die Kommentare für das noli me tangere geltend machen, offenbaren nur die Verlegenheit der Ausleger. (p. 31)

The last remark is to the point: the commentators betray many difficulties in explaining the verse in particular and the meaning of ‘Do not touch me’ in particular. All commentators tend to regard their solution as definitive, but the multiplicity of solutions, in this case, is telling.³

Lepsius’ conjecture is a literary one, that is, prompted by the comparison with other texts. Had Lepsius only referred to John 20:20 and 20:27, his would be a valid, if debatable, argument. With the inclusion of Luke 24, however, his harmonistic interest makes itself to be felt again. Such an approach almost automatically disqualifies the resulting conjecture, just as harmonistic variants, other things being equal, are not considered as original.

Even more problematic than the harmonistic approach is another aspect of Lepsius’ method, if it can be called thus. He appeals, albeit between brackets, to an original Aramaic source or version of the Gospel. Such conjectures, however, are not conjectures on the Greek text. Lepsius assumes a dittography in the original Aramaic, not even a dittography in an Aramaic copy or a translation error made when the Greek text was prepared.

There is no reference, and no elaboration on the Aramaic words Lepsius has in mind. If one (unscholarly) takes the Peshitta wording as a starting point, a dittography seems not very likely.

In general, I do not find such translation hypotheses very convincing, and the methods used for them are shaky, but I know that nineteenth- and twentieth-century research is full of such theories. In Lepsius’ case, the Aramaic source theory is not applied in order to better understand linguistic and other idiosyncrasies of John’s gospel, but to take away an inconcinnity as perceived by him.

In any case, Lepsius does not assume an error in the Greek transmission. Therefore, his opinion on this text does not belong to the realm of textual criticism, but to source criticism. Interesting though it may be, with Lepsius’ argumentation it has no place in the Nestle-Aland apparatus.

Gersdorf
Yet the conjecture can perhaps remain in the apparatus, as an apt reminder of the exegetical difficulties of this verse, but if so, a different author should be indicated: Christoph Gotthelf Gersdorf (1763-1834). This German pastor wrote a single influential book (and even only vol. I of it), namely Beiträge zur Sprach-Characteristik der Schriftsteller des Neuen Testaments. Eine Sammlung meist neuer Bemerkungen, Erster Theil, Leipzig, Weidmann, 1816. Gersdorf is mentioned in older German commentaries (though mostly without a proper reference), making it somewhat strange that only Lepsius’ name appears in the Nestle editions.

Moreover, Gersdorf’s proposal clearly differs from Lepsius’, for it really qualifies as a conjecture (found in the long footnote on pp. 79-80 of the xxxvi+579-page book). His reasoning is as follows (in my words). Exegetically, the verse is both strange in itself, and odd compared with John 20:27. Textcritically, the concurrence of the variant readings μή μου ἅπτου, μὴ ἅπτου μου and even the difficult μὴ ἅπτου may suggest that an original μου ἅπτου was miscopied as μὴ ἅπτου, to which subsequently μου was supplied in two different ways, as ἅπτου evidently needs an object. One can also imagine ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ corruption alike, for a text in which the risen Jesus asks a woman to touch him may not be to everyone’s taste. Finally, from a psychological point of view, one would more readily imagine fear to be the first reaction of someone confronted with a friend who is risen from the dead.⁴

Other conjectures
There are other conjectures known to the same words, the most popular of which is μὴ πτόου (‘don’t be terrified!’), addressing precisely the psychological point made by Gersdorf. However this post is already getting too long. Once again, it feels like I have only scratched the surface of this intriguing verse.

Notes
1. Lipsius, in this case, is the nineteenth-century theologian Richard Adelbert Lipsius, not the sixteenth-century classical scholar Justus Lipsius.
2. See ‘Das Johannes-Evangelium. I. Der Text’, in Das Reich Christi 5 (1902), issues 2-5 (February-May), and ‘Die Auferstehungsberichte’, in issues 7-8 (July-August). From the latter, a separate publication exists, entitled Reden und Abhandlungen von Johannes Lepsius. 4. Die Auferstehungsberichte, Berlin, Reich Christi-Verlag, 1902, which will be quoted here.
3. Lepsius may have had Bernard Weiss’ commentary (KEK II, ⁸1893) in mind. There, I easily count 12 different opinions mentioned in the footnotes on pp. 611-612, which makes at least 13 together with Weiss’ own solution, and all that more than a century ago.
4. Compare Gersdorf’s own words (pp. 79-80 footnote): ‘Für μη μου ἁπτου hat aber B. (Vat. 1209.) μη ἁπτου μου, und Mt. B. (b. Wetst. auch D. codd. lat.?) bloss μη ἁπτου. Durch diese Weglassung oder Versetzung des μου, das, wenn ἁπτου echt ist, nie gefehlt haben kann, dürfte man vielleicht auf die Vermuthung geführt werden, dass die Negation μη in diesem μου auf eine oder die andere Weise bereits früherhin ihren Ursprung fand, und es anfänglich bloss hiess: ἁπτου μου, oder auch μου ἁπτου, das aber mit der Heiligkeit des Erstandenen nicht ganz verträglich schien, und den Freunden des Docetismus anstössig seyn mochte. Denn wenn gleich v. 16. Μαρια eine freundliche Zusprache des Herrn und sanfte Ankündigung seiner Persönlichkeit war; so wird doch gewiss Maria ihr Ραββουνι jetzt, bei einer so unerwarteten Totenerscheinung (v. 15.), nur mit Graus und Schrecken, gleich einem Angstschrei, erwiedert, und sich wahrscheinlich mehr entfernt als genähert haben. Auch scheint v. 16. στραφεισα, und v. 14. ἐστραφη εἰς τα ὀπισω eher an die Flucht als an eine Annäherung zu erinnern, und v. 5. οὐ μεντοι εἰσηλθεν (vgl. v. 11.) offenbar an ihre Furchtsamkeit, so dass aus dem Munde Jesu zunächst zu erwarten war: “fürchte dich nicht, tritt näher, rühre mich an; ich bin noch derselbe und in eurer Mitte; habe mich noch nicht zu meinem Vater erheben!” (vgl. Luc. 24,37-40.).’ For the reading μὴ ἅπτου, Gersdorf depends on Griesbach's edition; Griesbach in turn refers to Matthaei for it (hence ‘Mt’).

Exit Live Search Books - Enter Internet Archive

2008-12-08T10:32:00.001+01:00

In a previous post, I mentioned a number of NTTC (and OTTC) books found on Microsoft’s Live Search Books. The service, however, was discontinued in May 2008. The Wikipedia page on MSN states that it "integrated into regular web search", but this standard phrase appears to be incorrect (also the page on LSB itself).

Fortunately, many of LSB’s out-of-copyright books are now found on the Internet Archive, the best known part of which is the Wayback Machine. The books are available in different formats. For important books, I would recommend to download a copy on your own computer. There are just too many examples of websites taken down or crashed servers. The following list contains the examples given in the previous post mentioned above. As many people do not use the DjVU format, I will provide a link to the PDF alongside the reference to the archive page itself. In many cases, other copies are available (marked with +).

* Friedrich Blass, Philology of the Gospels (1898). (pdf) (+).
* Charles Fox Burney, The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel (1922). (pdf) (+)
* Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt ... (1875) vol. 1. (pdf)
* Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt ... (1875) vol. 2. (pdf)
* Frederick Field, Notes on the Translation of the New Testament (1899). (pdf) (+)
* Caspar Rene Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (1907). (pdf)
* James Rendel Harris, Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai (1890). (pdf)
* James Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae (1891). (pdf)
* George Milligan, Here & There Among the Papyri (1922). (pdf)
* [Eberhard Nestle], Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ. Text with Critical Apparatus [Nestle text with TR and RV variants] (1904). (pdf)
* James Hardy Ropes, The Text of Acts (The Beginnings of Christianity I.3) (1926). (pdf)
* Philip Schaff, A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (1883). (pdf) (+)
* Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, Contributions to the Criticism of the Greek New Testament (1859). (pdf) (+)
* Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, Six Lectures on the Text of the New Testament and the Ancient Manuscripts Which Contain It (1875). (pdf)
* Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students. Vol. I (⁴1894). (pdf)
* Alexander Souter, The Text and Canon of the New Testament (1913). (pdf) (+)
* Henry Barclay Swete, The Old Testament in Greek vol. 1 (³1901) (pdf); vol. 2 (²1896) (pdf); vol. 3 (³1905) (pdf). ((+))
* Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament (1854). (pdf) (+)
* Thomas Hunter Weir, A Short History of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament (1899). (pdf) (+)

Happy hunting!

Manuscripts in Cyberspace - the Virtual Manuscript Room

2008-12-07T15:15:00.001+01:00

Suppose you can study the textual complexities of a New Testament verse in an attractive and easy-to-use web-interface, with access to an exhaustive critical edition, which for a start lists all manuscripts together with all readings in this verse (and, as far as I am concerned, even the scholarly conjectures in a different layer, editorial choices and whatever). And what is more, for any manuscript listed you have access to a digital image of the page with the verse you are studying, just one mouse click away. Wouldn’t this be heaven on earth for the textual scholar? Tommy Wasserman could have done his dissertation in one year or less ...

This heaven may well be realised, at least for the New Testament, in the not-too-distant future. Eschatology in the process of realisation. I cannot demonstrate how it will be (it is the future, remember), but I can tell something about a small, essential step being taken right now. It is time then to already learn a new acronym: VMR, the Virtual Manuscript Room, for that is where the manuscripts will be - for as we all know, virtual is just as real as real itself, only different.

As far as every virtual reality has a foothold in our everyday space-time continuum, this one is located in a country known as Germany, more precisely in Münster, at the INTF. The project is managed by Ulrich Schmid and Martin Faßnacht, two persons I know to exist - Ulrich even speaks Dutch.

To begin with, the VMR addresses a very important problem that hampers efficient interaction with the wealth of digital images coming available on the internet: lack of indexes. Normally one does not only want the images, but also to easily find a given passage. It is of course much more, but in its most simple form, the VMR index contains a list of pages with their internet address and contents. Thanks to that index, the VMR promises to be the ideal intermediary between any form of information that uses verse references and the web-based images themselves.

The index can (and will) contain more than just the textual contents; it also records illuminations, decorations, canon tables, kephalaia lists, etc. Some images may not show the manuscript itself, but its binding, or a scale (or the gloved fingers of a Google collaborator). This can be indicated as well. The screenshot here shows the interface I am using right now, as a beta tester, to provide the index information for the Codex Boreelianus (F 09) of the Gospels.

Not much eye candy here, except for the fancy colours, but the interface is effective enough.

A popup-window can be opened with the web-image of the page you are indexing. In this case I am at the beginning of Mark. As said, the indexing allows (demands) me to draw attention to the decoration (the head piece) here.

More important than the interface, of course, is the underlying database technology (MySQL), and the model adopted to describe and index the manuscripts in a unique and complete way. All this guarantees the (re)useability of the data.

Wouldn’t this indexing job be a nice pass-time for a talented undergraduate, as it is just looking up some verse references and filling in some numbers, after all? Partly yes, but mostly no. In the first place, one always underestimates how much background knowledge is taken for granted. How do you know that something is special when you hardly know what is normal? More in particular, part of the beta testing process is to find out how to handle the unexpected. One example is the indexing of pages which are incomplete. And the Boreelianus, a two-column manuscript, definitively has its share of torn and cut pages, in many different ways. The few days of working with the project allowed me once again to realise how useful beta testing can be. It is all a matter of finetuning and making explicit aims, limitations and working procedures.

Once the VMR is up and running, with the data entered by collaborators all over the world, it should become really easy to answer questions such as "how many complete manuscripts of Mark’s gospel are there?" or "which manuscripts contain Rom 1:1-7?". I am convinced that the data, all together, will give textual scholars research possibilities not thought of previously.

The VMR, in my view, would not have to be limited to manuscripts (what’s in a name?). Alongside manuscript study, the history of the printed text and of textual criticism as a scholarly discipline deserves some attention as well. So why not include important editions such as Tischendorf’s Editio Octava? By the way, the TC Ebind site, which contains images of the entire scanned edition, is down at the moment, but I hope it will be back online before long.

Are there possible problems? Of course, and certainly more than I can think of. A first difficulty has to do with the lack of stability of the internet. As the VMR database contains references to images anywhere, it will certainly require frequent maintenance. Another problem may be lack of direct access to images on the web. In many cases, for instance, images are hidden behind (inside, that is) intricate web interfaces which do not allow so-called "deep linking".

Another important issue, from a scholarly point of view, may be data suffocation. Of course we need the data, with speedy access to all we want, but we should keep in mind that wealth of information does not necessarily make us better textual critics. With everything visible at arm’s length, we are almost bound not to have a "grand view". Nothing will replace the hard and intense labour of actually working with the data, but the VMR promises to make our time even more well-spent.

Thanks to Ulrich Schmid and Martin Faßnacht for permitting me to blog on the VMR project while it is still in beta.

Some information on the VMR can be found on the projects page of the INTF website. Stay tuned there for developments. A call for collaboration was issued in December 2007 on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

4. Hyssop or Spear: Camerarius on John 19:29

2008-11-27T10:36:00.006+01:00

This is the fourth instalment of a series on conjectures in the Nestle editions. See the sidebar for other posts.

In John 19:29 we read: "... they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth" (RSV). The meaning of "put ... on hyssop" (ὑσσώπῳ περιθέντες) is so problematic that a popular conjecture exists, namely to read ὑσσῷ περιθέντες ("put ... on a spear"). Before presenting the conjecture itself, let me first elaborate the exegetical issue somewhat. It is twofold here.

In the first place, there is a notable difference with Mark 15:36 (and Matthew 27:48), where ‘hyssop’ is not mentioned, but a ‘reed’ (κάλαμος). Perhaps this is not much of a problem, for we can simply assume, as in many other cases, that John, being familiar with the synoptic traditions, changed a detail in order to put his own ‘spin’ on the story.

In the second place, however, comes a more serious problem. Doesn’t the presence of ‘hyssop’ render an essential detail of the scene unimaginable and inconceivable? Hyssop, after all, is a rather small plant, completely unsuited for the function described by John. Please note that I am not interested in "what really happened" and the like, but simply ask whether John's contemporaries would have accepted this part as coherent story-telling.

This second issue is addressed by the conjecture mentioned in the Nestle apparatus, according to which Camerarius proposed υσσω instead of υσσωπω. Let me quote from the source, Joachim Camerarius the Elder’s notes published in 1572. In my provisional translation:

‘Hyssop’ is the name of a herb. What mentioning it here may mean, others have inferred elsewhere through guessing; Matthew mentions a reed. It is perhaps permitted to suspect that to this reed that herb as well had been attached; Nonnus asserts that the vinegar presented to Jesus was mixed with hyssop, for he calls it ὑσσώπῳ κεκερασμένον [mixed with hyssop]. But if there is room left for conjectures, what if it would be permitted to suspect that the archetype had ὑσσῷ προπεριθέντες, so that on top of a spear a sponge, put around there, was presented to Jesus? For the spear of the Roman army, in particular the (throwing) javelin was called ὑσσός by the Greek. From which Matthew perhaps used the common name of spears, ‘reed’. Although also someone else could have taken a reed, drench a sponge with vinegar, and bring it mockingly to Jesus’ mouth. But that I leave undecided, and in my view it cannot be known thus far, notwithstanding the inquiry into the essential truth.¹

Remarks

1. Camerarius is not very explicit on the problem; perhaps the lack of agreement with Matthew (and Mark) is just as important to him.

2. Camerarius' conjecture differs from what is found in the Nestle apparatus, for he lets -ΠΩ of ὑσσώπῳ be the visible trace of ΠΡΟ in προπεριθέντες (instead of περιθέντες). It transpires that the omission of this element is due to Beza, who simply mentions only the first part of the conjecture in his NT editions of 1582 and later. Beza’s form may actually be better than the original proposal by Camerarius, as one can imagine dittography (ΥΣΣΩΠΕΡΙ becoming ΥΣΣΩΠΩΠΕΡΙ), or perhaps even a scribe who nilly-willy introduced hyssop into the text.

3. Some Old Latin manuscripts (to wit b ff² n v) read ‘perticae’, which means a ‘pole’ or ‘long staff’ (Lewis & Short).² This reading is alluded to in NA²⁷, where the conjecture comes with the comment ‘cf it’. In my view, however, the origin of this reading is translational; it does not reflect a lost reading in Greek, and ‘pertica’ does not stand for κάλαμος or another word, let alone ὑσσός.

4. Some late minuscules (476* and 1242) have ὑσσῷ. If a scholarly conjecture is found in such a late manuscript, I would not state that the conjecture has ceased to be a conjecture. In this case, the coincidence cannot even be called a confirmation. One would of course have to study the manuscripts themselves, but Metzger’s idea that the reading (in 476*) "seems to have arisen accidentally through haplography" is attractive.³ In short, the agreement between the conjecture and these manuscripts is probably accidental itself.

5. The conjecture has an impressive reception history, more so than almost any other conjecture on the text of the New Testament. A few examples out of an admittedly very complex history: ὑσσῷ was printed by Baljon and Lagrange, and accepted in Moffatt’s translation and the NEB; David Parker supports it (at least, he did so in 1997).⁴ Many other conjectures on the same problem have been proposed and forgotten, but this one (in Beza’s version) still stands out as a good test case for the viability of the application of conjectural emendation on the NT text. Rest assured, however, that this post merely scratches the surface of the issue of John 19:29.

[6. Update 29 July 2010: Camerarius’ book can be consulted online. The link takes you directy to p. 297.]

Notes
1. "Notae herbae nomen est hyssopus. Cuius quid hoc loco mentio sibi velit, alii aliter divinando coniecerunt, Matthaeus arundinis facit mentionem, cui et applicatam herbam illam fuisse fortasse liceat suspicari Nonnus fecit, acetum illud oblatum Iesu mistum fuisse hyssopo, vocat enim ὑσσώπῳ κεκερασμένον. Quod si coniecturis locus relinquitur, quid si liceat suspicari? in archetypo fuisse: ὑσσῷ προπεριθέντες, ut sit supra pilum spongiam ibi circumdatam Iesu fuisse oblatam. Nam pilum Romanae militiae peculiare telum Graeci appellarunt ὑσσόν. De quo fortasse Matthaeus arundinis nomine usus est telorum generali. Cum alius quoque arreptam arundinem madefactamque aceto spongiam, per ludibrium admovere ori Iesu potuerit. Sed haec in medio relinqui, atque adeo, illabefactata veritatis necessariae cognitione, ignorari posse existimo." Cited from Joachim Camerarius (1500-1574), Notatio Figurarum Sermonis in Libris Quatuor Evangeliorum, Leipzig, Vögelin, 1572, pp. 297-298. Camerarius' notes are also printed as part of the 1642 Cambridge edition of Beza's NT. The reference to Nonnus concerns his paraphrase of John's gospel; see e.g. Nonni Panopolitani Paraphrasis S. Evangelii Ioannei (ed. Scheindler), Leipzig, Teubner, 1881, p. 206 l. 154 (ὤρεγεν ὑσσώπῳ κεκερασμένον ὄξος ὀλέθρου).
2. See the ITSEE edition; there two-digit numbers are used, in this case 04 08 16 25.
3. Metzger, Textual Commentary, ²1994, p. 217.
4. D.C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 176-177. Parker writes: "Here is a conjecture which would have been accepted in such a narrative in any other kind of text. It should be accepted here."

Hoskier on Greek scholars

2008-10-16T19:36:00.000+02:00

While reading Hoskier's Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse, I came across a nice generalization made by Hoskier. Discussing min. 617 (his no. 74), he writes (Vol. I, p. 238):

This MS. is written by a Greek scholar, a thing fatal to the accurate transmission of the sacred text, it would seem.

Which reminds me of a statement once made by Erasmus (against Stunica, ASD IX-2, p. 200):

... no one corrupts books more, or more dangerously, than the half-learned or the learned even when they are for the most part careful. (... nulli magis aut periculosius depravant libros quam semidocti aut docti etiam partim attenti.)

In general, I find that Hoskier's work bristles with emotion, something one would not immediately expect from these hundreds of pages with manuscript descriptions and collations.

3. How to Track Down a Conjecture - A Note on Method

2008-09-24T17:20:00.004+02:00

This is the third instalment of a series on conjectures in the Nestle editions. See the sidebar for other posts.

In a comment on my posting on 1 Thes 2:16, Peter Head asks whether there are any short-cuts in tracking down the source of a given conjecture in the NA apparatus, compared to the following steps:

1. get a basic idea of the era of the person;
2. check the older detailed commentaries that are likely to discuss this sort of thing;
3. locate the original source in a good library.

The discussion is important enough to be given a separate posting. The general problem is the following. The Nestle editions indicate numerous conjectures in their critical apparatus, but the information consists of only two elements: a reading and a name. How does one proceed to find out which author is meant, and what the original source for the conjecture is (assuming that the author proposed it in a written source)?

Well, I agree with Peter’s method, but I do have some preferences and some short-cuts. Most of the following, by the way, applies just as well to conjectures that did not make it into the Nestle apparatus, but which are mentioned without proper references in commentaries and articles.

To begin with, I already have a detailed list of any conjecture’s first appearance in any Nestle edition, which gives me a first terminus ante quem. Besides, in many cases it is not very hard to guess the author (‘Erasmus’; but try e.g. John 20:17 ‘Lepsius’/‘Lipsius’ or 2 Tim 3:10 ‘v. Wyss'), and for many authors, the source is not hard to guess. In the case of Erasmus, for instance, his Annotationes are the obvious place to go, and there indeed his opinion on Col 1:15 (see NA²⁵) and Jas 4:2 is found.

The key term for the most important short-cut is ‘collections’. It may be true that especially older German commentaries (KEK (Meyer), KNT (Zahn), HNT (Holtzmann)) discuss many conjectures, but one fares much better with special sources of collected conjectures.

The first collection to mention is Wettstein. If the conjecture occurs in Wettstein’s 1750-1751 edition (or in the list found in the 1730 Prolegomena), the possible period becomes much shorter, of course, and in most cases, the author can be identified with confidence. The second collection is from the same century, namely Bowyer’s Critical Conjectures (various editions up to 1812), as important as Wettstein, with even the advantage that Bowyer regularly gives a - rudimentary - reference (he actually gives one if he happens to have one).

The other collections are found in the second half of the nineteenth century. Monographs, dissertations, and articles by scholars in the ‘Dutch School’ are very useful. First came the general books by van Manen and van de Sande Bakhuyzen. Later, dissertations by Franssen, van de Beke Callenfels, de Koe and Baljon gave more detailed discussions of conjectures on individual books of the NT. Together with a series of articles by Baljon, these detailed discussions eventually formed a collection covering the entire NT (except Acts and Revelation).

Needless to say, one would have to have some command of the beautiful Dutch language in order to use these sources (just as Latin for Wettstein and English (and German!) for Bowyer). And we all know that references in those times were not always very clear, but in many cases they are just sufficient to track down the source.

For 1 Thes 2:16, for instance, I now notice that I could have used one of the articles by Baljon (or van Manen’s book) as well, but I had already noted Lünemann’s reference in my files.

A good library is indeed essential, or actually several good ones. Luckily, the Netherlands is a small country. The Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung turned out to be available in microform at the Nijmegen Radboud University. Sometimes nowadays one can be even more lucky and find books and articles on Google Books or archive.org, to name just the two most important sites. The future may be bright for this type of research.

Now that the short-cuts are discussed, the necessary roundabout routes should be mentioned as well. The most important problem is that the information on conjectures and their authors in the Nestle editions is not always reliable. Conjectures can have earlier authors (but how could one possibly know that?), they can have been withdrawn, or proposed quite differently by the authors that are mentioned, etc. Besides that, the Nestle editions often mention only one conjecture for a given textual problem, whereas the nature of conjectural emendation (and the scholars’ indépendance d'esprit) more often than not leads to several efforts worthy of attention. Historical research of NT conjectural emendation is intricate, to say the least.

In the end, one of the remarkable results in tracking down conjectures is that most riddles remain for the period after, say, 1890. More recent books and articles are of course easier to find, but the manner in which the conjectures found their way into the Nestle apparatus can at times be very obscure. I sometimes speculate about someone simply writing a letter to Eberhard Nestle, or to Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel who then informed Nestle. In any case, there is still a lot of work to be done here.

2. Did God’s Wrath Come? - Ritschl on 1 Thes 2:16

2008-09-23T19:21:00.005+02:00

This is the second instalment of a series on conjectures in the Nestle editions. See the sidebar for other posts.

In 1 Thes 2:14-16 we find Paul uttering very harsh words against ‘the Jews’. He writes about ‘... the Jews, ¹⁵ who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men ¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved – so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God’s wrath has come upon them at last!’ (RSV).

An important part of the historical exegesis of these verses is the assumption made by various commentators, or by historians of early Christianity, that the transmitted text contains an interpolation. Their proposals vary from the end of verse 16 only, to 1 Thes 2:15-16, or even 1 Thes 2:13-16 entirely (if for a moment we exclude those who suggest that the entire epistle is not Pauline).

At 1 Thes 2:16 NA²⁷ mentions two conjectures. The second one, by ‘Rodrigues’, will be discussed at another occasion. The first one concerns the omission of ἔφθασεν δὲ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοὺς ἡ ὀργὴ εἰς τέλος in verse 16b, and was proposed, according to Nestle-Aland, by ‘Ritschl’. But which Ritschl is it? The famous theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), his son Otto Ritschl (1860-1944), also theologian, or the classical scholar Friedrich Ritschl (1806-1876)? And where did this Ritschl propose the conjecture? Such questions on authors and sources are frequent indeed for anyone interested in the conjectures mentioned in the Nestle editions.

In this case, the author of the conjecture turns out to be Albrecht Ritschl, and its source is his review of Baur’s Paulus (1845)¹, in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 1847. The extended review is found in no. 124 (June), cc. 985-990; no. 125 (June), 993-100 (the entire issue); no. 126 (June), cc. 1001-1008 (the entire issue); and no. 127 (June), cc. 1015-1016; the conjecture itself occurs on c. 1000.²

Some background is necessary to understand what is going on. Well, Ritschl, in general, finds Baur’s approach to the history of the earliest Christians far too schematic. Baur, says he, has a fixed view of Paul’s opposition against Jewish Christians, and does not distinguish sufficiently between Jews and Jewish Christians. Moreover, in the case of 1 Thessalonians, he denies Paul a really apocalyptic mind-set. Baur declares letters or parts of letters authentic or inauthentic with these criteria only in mind. One by one, Ritschl addresses Baur’s arguments against the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians, such as those derived from 1 Thes 2:15-16:

Dass die folgenden Aeusserungen des Paulus gegen die Juden (V. 15. 16) nicht aus der Apostelgeschichte entnommen sein können, wie der Hr. Vf. [Baur] meint, ist erwähnt, und bei der nachgewiesenen Verschiedenartigkeit der Beurtheilung, welche die Judenchristen von Paulus erfahren, können wir uns über den Ausbruch seines Eifers gegen die Juden nicht wundern, wenn wir bedenken, dass gleichzeitige Erfahrungen in Corinth ihm diese Vorwürfe entlocken konnten. Für den von Hrn. Dr. Bauer [sic] beanstandeten Ausdruck λαλῆσαι ἵνα σωθῶσιν finden sich nicht nur in der Apostelgeschichte, sondern auch 2. Cor. 2, 17; 4, 13; Col. 4, 4 Parallelen.³

There remains one problem, that is, one difficulty felt by Ritschl himself, and in this context his conjecture can be found:

Die einzige Stelle, welche nach meiner Meinung gegen den Ursprung des Briefs Verdacht erwecken könnte, sind die Schlussworte dieses Absatzes, ἔφθασε δὲ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοὺς ἡ ὀργὴ εἰς τέλος, welche kaum eine andre natürliche Erklärung zu finden scheinen, als durch ihre Beziehung auf die Zerstörung Jerusalems. Allein weil von diesem Punkte aus der ganze Brief nicht verstanden werden kann, so will ich lieber annehmen, dass die Worte Glossen seyen, als dass ich ihnen ein Gewicht in der Bestimmung der Abfassungszeit gegenüber allen sonstigen Merkmalen der Echtheit im Briefe einräume.

So here it is. The method in this case is clear: there is no reason to assume that the epistle itself was not dictated by Paul, except for one obvious anachronism: 2:16b assumes the destruction of Jerusalem, and can for that simple reason not be Pauline. In this respect, and in this respect only, Baur’s observations were correct.⁴ The simple solution is the assumption of a gloss, which of course depends on the combination of Pauline authorship at the one hand, and the interpretation of 2:16b as alluding to 70 CE. Note also that Ritschl sees no problems in Paul’s other words in 2:15-16. The general context has to be kept in mind: Ritschl’s defence, against Baur, of the epistle as authentically Pauline.

To my knowing, Ritschl did not repeat his conjecture at a later occasion. Once, decades later, he discussed the same words, but, without any reference to his former conjecture, explained them as entirely Pauline.⁵

The conjecture has an impressive reception history,⁶ and in my view deserves serious attention. But that is not the scope of this posting.

Notes
1. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi. Sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre. Ein Beitrag zu einer kritischen Geschichte des Urchristenthums, Stuttgart, Becher & Müller, ¹1845.
2. The source was found thanks to references in Lünemann’s commentary (KEK 10, ²1859, p. 68, referring to ‘Hall. A. Lit. Z. 1847. Nr. 126’) and in Schmiedel’s commentary (HNT 2, ²1893, p. 21, referring to ‘Halle’sche allg. Lit.-Ztg. 1847 I 1000’).
3. Ritschl’s reacts to Baur’s ideas on these verses as found in Baur, Paulus, pp. 482-483.
4. Baur, Paulus, p. 483: ‘Und wovon kann, nachdem die Juden fortgehend das Maaß ihrer Sünden voll gemacht haben, ἔφθασε δὲ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοὺς ἡ ὀργὴ εἰς τέλος natürlicher verstanden werden, als von dem durch die Zerstörung Jerusalems über sie gekommenen Strafgericht?’
5. See Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 2, Der biblische Stoff der Lehre, Bonn, Adolph Marcus, ²1882, p. 142. Ritschl now sees ἡ ὀργὴ εἰς τέλος as a prophetic utterance imitating some typical Old Testament prophecies. His conclusion, however, remains somewhat forced: ‘Hiedurch ist erklärt, warum Paulus sich ein Urtheil dieses Inhaltes [‘such a judgement’] für die Gegenwart gestattet, und zugleich ist der eschatologische Sinn des göttlichen Zornes bewahrt.’
6. 1 Thes 2:16c is of course the object of an extensive article by Tjitze Baarda (in Dutch), ‘Maar de toorn is over hen gekomen’, in T. Baarda e.a., Paulus en de andere joden. Exegetische bijdragen en discussie, Delft, Meinema, 1984, pp. 15-74. Baarda mentions James Moffatt, Rudolf Knopf, James Parkes and John W. Bailey as supporters of Ritschl’s conjecture. On pp. 22-30 Baarda discusses all kinds of interpolation proposals, far more than those recorded in the Nestle apparatus, and rejects them all. For Ritschl’s conjecture, Baarda refers to various sources that mention the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, but in the end (p. 62 n. 47 to p. 23) echos van Manen’s words: ‘Ik kon het blad zelf niet inzien’ (‘I was not able to consult the journal itself’).

1. Seven or Eight Beatitudes: Wellhausen on Mt 5:5

2008-09-16T12:52:00.002+02:00

This is the first of a series of short posts on conjectural emendations found in the Nestle editions (mostly in the apparatus only). In each post, I will give the source of the conjecture, and a short evaluation. Some other aspects can be discussed as well, such as its transmission history, within the Nestle editions or elsewhere.
Needless to say, comments, suggestions and questions to the series are welcome.
See the sidebar for other posts in the series.

In its apparatus NA²⁷ mentions a conjecture on Mt 5:5: the omission of the entire verse is proposed by Wellhausen.

Why would Wellhausen want to rob us of the Beatitude of the meek (μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν)? In order to understand what Wellhausen intended with his conjecture, one has to know where he proposed it. In this case, the source is not hard to find: Julius Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Matthaei übersetzt und erklärt, Berlin, Reimer, 1904. There, on p. 15, he writes:

5,10 wäre die achte Seligpreisung. Mt vermehrt aber die drei Seligpreisungen bei Lc nicht deshalb, um sie auf acht, sondern um sie auf sieben zu bringen; ebenso wie er es bei den Bitten des Vaterunsers macht. Er hat auch sieben Gleichnisse in Kap. 13 und sieben Weherufe in Kap. 23. Eingeschoben ist nun nicht der allerdings inhaltlich leicht wiegende Vers 10; denn er soll den Übergang zu den beiden volgenden Versen machen. Sondern vielmehr Vers 4, denn er ist mit Haut und Haar (τὴν γῆν) aus Ps. 37,11 übernommen, und er hat in den Hss. eine schwankende Stellung – was öfters ein Zeichen der Interpolation ist.

It is clear from this citation that verse 4, in Wellhausen’s text, is the Beatitude of the meek, verse 5 in the modern critical text. Wellhausen follows the numbering of the Vulgate, in which verses 4 and 5 are transposed. This already shows the ‘schwankende Stellung’ mentioned by Wellhausen. The verses are also found transposed in D (05) and 33 (see NA²⁷).
The reasoning that leads to the conjecture is typical. Wellhausen detects a rule according to which Matthew prefers the number seven in literary composition. This rule is then made so important that it leads to emendation of places where it is not found to be confirmed. Wellhausen’s sample, however, seems to be rather small. One may therefore ask how firm his rule was in the first place, if emendation has to be applied to make it work.
Moreover, the conjecture suggests that the Beatitudes in their current form do not betray a balanced composition, an idea that does not hold water when careful exegesis is done.

In conclusion: Wellhausen’s conjecture is completely unnecessary, and should not even have been mentioned in the Nestle editions. Its only interesting aspect is to remind us that Matthew does not hesitate to recast a line from the Psalms in order to compose the Beatitudes. It reflects a time in which scholars tended to find glosses at the most unexpected places (which of course does not mean that interpolations never occurred ...).

One more aspect of the conjecture deserves some attention: in NA²⁶ it was indicated as to be applied to verse 6. It is hard to see why such an error was made. Perhaps the above-mentioned frequent transposition of verses 4 and 5 played a role. Interestingly, we have here one of the few cases in which NA²⁶ introduced a fresh conjecture in its apparatus, compared to NA²⁵.
The error has been corrected in NA²⁷, though initially not in its Introduction, in which Wellhausen’s conjecture is used as an example (pp. 12*.54*).
Finally, Bowyer (Critical Conjectures, ⁴1812, p. 62) records (Johannes) Piscator’s opinion, according to which verses 5 and 6 should be inverted.

Summer Project: Beza’s Latin New Testament

2008-07-16T10:25:00.001+02:00

These days, I am working very hard on collecting all the data for a critical edition of Beza’s Latin New Testament. This involves analysing the five major editions (1556 (Latin only); 1565; 1582; 1589; 1598 (Latin-Greek diglots)) published during his lifetime, and also the corrected Cambridge 1642 edition.
Here at the left p. 1 of the first part (f. A i^r) of the 1589 edition, containing Mt 1:1-6.
Beza called his own translation the "nova interpretatio", the Vulgate of course being the "vetus" one. His "New Version", however, was revised over the decades, though rather unevenly, I must say. Anyhow, it is fascinating to see the changes in Beza's latinity, and his translation choices, at times switching back and forth between the Vulgate and Erasmus. Exegetically remarkable choices can be seen as well, and text-critically the work is important for the history of the Textus Receptus, for close reading of the Latin text shows quite a few instances in which Beza adopted a Greek reading that however was not printed in the Greek column of his diglot.
Stay posted if you want to know how this work will eventually become available to the scholarly community...

The "word cloud" you see here is created with Wordle. Give it a try.

SNTC

2008-06-16T15:16:00.001+02:00

Today, June 16th 2008, was the meeting of a very important society, the Studiosorum Novi Testamenti Conventus (SNTC), not to be confounded with the also famous SNTS. Each year, in June, Dutch-speaking New Testament scholars come together.
This year we had two interesting longer lectures. In the first one, dr. Rieuwerd Buitenwerf used Acts 9:1-25 to demonstrate that Luke (or better: "the author of Acts") knew and used at least a sample of Paul's letters and composed maximum stories based on this minimal information, together with some other traditional elements.
In the second lecture, dr. Istvan Czachesz explored the early christian traditions of Jesus' death and resurrection by using methods developed in cognition sciences.
It was also noticed that for some strange reason, the society's website is not found by Google. It can be found at sntc.nl. Some knowledge of Dutch may come in handy there.

SBL San Diego 2007 III - IGNTP

2007-11-29T12:18:00.000+01:00

Over at ETC Tommy Wasserman already blogged about the IGNTP Presentation. It was fascinating to hear all the reports on the various aspects of the work in progress. The presentation, and the way it was scheduled, showed an organisation bristling with activity. These are good times for textual criticism...
I do have a few minor complaints on the session, however. There was almost too much information in such a short time; the room was far too small for the audience (this happened more often at SBL; the inverse occurred as well); and there was hardly any possibility to ask questions.
Something that also came by very fast was the schedule for ECM (Editio Critica Maior), Nestle-Aland and the UBS Greek New Testament. As Tommy noted, I took a picture of one of Wachtel's sheets, and was thus able to capture the research and publication schedule, preliminary as it may be, of course.
The grand idea is the following: ECM will be the central project, carried out by INTF (Münster) and IGNTP together. INTF will do Acts (scheduled for 2013), Mark (2018), Matthew (2024) and Luke (2030), and IGNTP will do John (2013), Pauline Epistles (2026) and Revelation (2030).
As for the hand editions, NA28 is planned for 2009, and it will follow the parts of ECM that have been published already (i.e. the Catholic Epistles), both in text and information in the apparatus. The same will be the case for all subsequent editions of NA and GNT (2014: NA29 and GNT5; 2019: NA30 and GNT6; 2025: NA31 and GNT7; 2031: NA32 and GNT8). Until the completion of ECM in 2031, there will thus be a certain unevenness in the editions, but that is inevitable.
One of the questions I would have asked if time had been given would be the following: the NA26/GNT3 text was accepted by the UBS as the standard text for bible translation worldwide, and it was established by an international and oecumenical committee. If ECM is to be followed, will the UBS automatically accept and adopt the new Greek text? Presumably most changes from the NA26 text will be minor, but nevertheless, changes there will be, as the Catholic Epistles already show.

SBL San Diego 2007 II - Mark

2007-11-24T22:55:00.000+01:00

Monday morning, I attended a session of the Mark group, if only because (1) it was to be focussed more on textual criticism than usual, and (2) we were supposed to assemble for the ETC lunch there.
The first paper was given by Peter Head, who guided us through the particularities of the presentation of Mark's gospel in Codex Sinaiticus. Though he admitted that his contribution contained more observations than conclusions/interpretations of the findings, I liked it very much, especially the way Peter uses PowerPoint to highlight the points he is making (you had to be there to know what I mean).
A nice example of an observation in search of a fitting explanation is the remarkable use of ekthesis in Mk 9: the many instances of καί with which the paragraphs start are pushed more to the left than usual. One can even observe this phenomenon in Tischendorf's pseudo-facsimile (here - enter "any"/"any" when prompted for a login), but why was it done?
After a short discussion, Nicholas Perrin discussed a well-known variant reading in Mk 1:41: should it read that Jesus was σπλαγχνισθείς ("moved with compassion") or ὀργισθείς ("angered") when a leper said to him; "If you choose, you can make me clean"? Against Ehrman (and others) he defended the first reading.
Vicki Cass Phillips took a different approach to the issue; if the two readings existed, and were scripture for some early communities, what meaning may they have had for these communities?
In my view, Perrin's paper was not really text-critical. The only thing he did was mounting a case for σπλαγχνισθείς as a reading that actually makes a lot of sense in the gospel of Mark. How strong his appeal to the "exodus motive" really is I am not able to judge, but no textual critic ever suggested that Jesus' being moved here would not make sense. The rub lies elsewhere.
Only in the discussion afterwards one of the important questions was raised: if the reading σπλαγχνισθείς is original, how can one explain the origin of the reading ὀργισθείς? There were some confused allusions to the tendency of either the Western text or the scribe of Codex Bezae, but really, this question should have been addressed in the paper. The lectio difficilior argument for ὀργισθείς is too important to be dealt with in a footnote.
The other important question was not even mentioned: part of Ehrman's case - if I remember correctly - is the observation that Luke and Matthew take over Mark's story, but each in a different way, as if they took offense to Mark presenting Jesus as "angered". Here too, thus, a kind of lectio difficilior reasoning: one can better explain the way Mark is used by the other evangelists if one assumes that they read ὀργισθείς. In order to counter Ehrman's case, Perrin should address this issue as well.
After the time for discussion, I quietly left the room, not for lack of interest in the other papers, but because I had to rehearse my own presentation with Geert van Oyen for the TC session in the afternoon (more on this session in a following posting).

SBL San Diego 2007 I - UBSGNT5

2007-11-20T20:00:00.000+01:00

Already on my way back I finally find some time to write something about at least one of the sessions I attended, the first one actually. On saterday morning there was an extra session (not found in the program book) on the next edition of the UBS Greek New Testament. It will be the fifth edition.
As Tommy Wasserman already blogged on the session over at ETC, I will just add some personal points of view and some stunning announcements.
To commence with the latter, and with the most important point of all: the font will certainly be changed, and probably more towards the font of the third edition, but maybe a move towards the NA27 font (is that Hellenica?) will be considered. Please contact Florian Foss (German Bible Society) with all your brilliant ideas on the appearance of the book as a book.
I have always been puzzled about the lack of balance in the GNT editions: on the one hand, there are actually very few variant readings in the apparatus, but on the other, those that are included are treated with an amount of detail that seems way beyond the purpose of the edition. David Parker pointed out to me that there are - of course! - historical reasons for this oddness: for the first editions, the Committee could provide - at least for these variants - something far better that the Nestle-Aland editions. The point remains however that translators, for whom the editions is primarily intended, are not well served with large lists of minuscules and bracketed church fathers. And even more: the criteria for including a variant reading are (1) its importance for the meaning of the passage and (2) the variant having at least some possible claim to being original (that word should be between quotation marks nowadays); but should one then include variants that are certainly conflations or scribal corrections, or should one only mention the two or three competing variants? The issue goes deeper: should the apparatus allow competent textual critics with all the material for a complete local stemma and all the other niceties for a textcritical discussion? My take would be that the limited choice of variant readings eo ipso excludes this: one has to see what is going on in other verses with a similar problem, or what the manuscripts you are interested in do in cases that do not affect the meaning in present-day languages.
And what about the (in)famous rating system? Despite the customary reference to Griesbach, it still is in my view a non-sensical part of the edition. More interesting than my point of view, perhaps, is how it actually functions. As we were told, apparently the degrees of certainty expressed by A to D are "translated" thusly by translators in the field: A: if you diverge, be ready to split the church; B: only if a major language translation around you follows it you may choose the variant; C: there are diverging opinions: look around the major translations and do what suits you (i.e. what will probably upset the fewest number of people); D: the text is a mess, do whatever you like.
Just another point before my flight starts boarding: we were shown one of Klaus Wachtel's sheets (whose contribution was presented by Ulrich Schmid) with a time schedule of GNT, NA and ECM, and even more, on which I will hopefully blog later. Be prepared to buy your GNT5 in 2014, and GNT8 (yes, the eighth edition!) around 2031. NA and GNT will be closely following the Edition Critica Maior project, which will accelerate and be finished by then. Exciting times!

Off to SBL - San Diego

2007-11-15T22:04:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow morning, I will be on my way to San Diego. I hope to attend as many sessions on (New Testament) Textual Criticism as possible, and even to blog about them if time and means permit.
In one of my previous posts, I ventured the idea that a presentation on the Codex Boreelianus might be given at the SBL. And so it will be: Geert Van Oyen and I spent quit some time looking closely at the manuscript in the past few months, and we will present our findings - as well as the riddles that remain. And we do have some announcements to make on the manuscript, so keep posted. For now, let me just quote the abstract of our contribution as found in the SBL Program Book:

Codex Boreelianus Revisited: A Fresh Look at Codex F (09) after 160 years
Codex Boreelianus is one of the rare examples of an uncial manuscript from around the turn of the first to the second millennium. Brought to the Netherlands around 1600 by Johannes Boreel, the codex which is kept since 1830 in the library of Utrecht University contains in its present state the four gospels starting with Matthew chapter nine. It has probably not been seen by anyone since that time and certainly no research has been done on it since 1845. A handout with a summary of some data about the codex and its trajectory will be distributed. Finally, through digital pictures the codex can now be made accessible to a larger public.

A riddle

2007-06-22T00:35:00.000+02:00

Textual critics have an unhealthy relation with the phenomenon ‘error’. They find errors in texts just as easily as other people breathe, and consider it their main task to explain the origin of the errors they spot. Nothing brings greater frustration to them than an error they fail to understand.
Here is a nice one. Just take a look at your Nestle-Aland (27th ed.) at Romans 4:20.

It is rather obvious what happened to the word ἐπαγγελίαν here: there are some ink spatters above the ί, even extending to the word τὴν in the line above.
Such errors (of the press) just happen, and there is nothing much to explain about them. My surprise, however, came with SESB, the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible. SESB is the only electronic edition of NA²⁷ with the apparatus. One would suppose that the SESB publishers/editors received and used an electronic text of the edition. But what does SESB read here? Believe it or not, it is ἐπαγγελῒαν.
Or take 3 John 14. On the printed page, something went wrong just above the word λαλήσομεν.

Just a loose spot, definitely not an accent or a breathing. Still, in SESB, this becomes λἁλήσομεν. Hence my question: how on earth is this possible?

Live Search Books (again)

2007-06-19T07:34:00.000+02:00

Here in Amsterdam, Live Search Books was not working, so I initially thought that the service was down (after all, it is still Beta). Then I found some rumours on it being "US only", but using (US) proxy servers did not work. I finally discovered the obvious reason: when Live Search is displaying in Dutch (or in any language other than (A)English), no book search is available. Let me skip any musings on cultural imperialism and give the solution: tell Firefox (or whatever browser you are using) to prefer pages in English.

La bibliothèque du Cerf

2007-04-24T16:21:00.000+02:00

At his blog Observatório Bíblico, Airton José da Silva notes a new resource for those who read French: ‘La bibliothèque du Cerf’. The site contains a few electronic editions of interest. The books are accessible through a table of contents menu, but they cannot be searched. The format adopted is Macromedia FlashPaper.

One finds, as far as biblical studies are concerned:
La Traduction oecuménique de la Bible (TOB).
La Bible de Jérusalem (BJ).
Marguerite Harl, Gilles Dorival and Olivier Munnich, La Bible grecque des Septante, 2nd edition 1994.
Dominique Bertrand (intr.), Les écrits des Pères apostoliques, 1993.

In Bible Programs such as BibleWorks, one only finds the translation of TOB and (F)BJ, not the full editions with all the notes and other elements of ‘paratext’.

It is clear that the list is rather small. Perhaps Les éditions du Cerf will extend the number of books made accessible this way, but I did not find any information on the background or future plans of the site.

Yet another review

2007-04-24T00:54:00.000+02:00

Something you may want to check out (in order to convince your library that the book should be available for everybody): Arie Zwiep's Judas and the Choice of Matthias: A Study on Context and Concern of Acts 1:15–26 (WUNT 2/187) has been reviewed by Loveday Alexander in RBL.

The canon of Dutch history

2007-03-31T10:33:00.000+02:00

Or the Dutch canon of history, of course. Anyway, there is large effort going on to educate the Dutch people and give them (back?) a feeling for their own history. An idea of what this means can be seen at www.entoen.nu.

I also found a nice cartoon for textual critics there. Fokke and Sukke, quite famous in the Netherlands, comment on the invention of printing (around 1450).

Fokke & Sukke have been doing it for forty years already: "Printing ... is not here to stay!" "People will always want to read hand-written books!"

The cartoon can also be found in a nice booklet, De historische canon van Fokke en Sukke (2007).

Codex Boreelianus Rheno-Trajectinus

2007-03-21T19:54:00.000+01:00

Yesterday (March 21st, 2007) we (Arie Zwiep and I) attended a delightful lecture at the Utrecht University, given by David Trobisch. The initiative was taken by Annette Merz, who has just become professor of New Testament at the same University.

The subject of the lecture was Codex Boreelianus, one of the few manuscripts of the New Testament that can be found in the Netherlands. Its siglum as a New Testament manuscript is F (09). This ‘F’ was already given by Wettstein in the first half of the eighteenth century, though the manuscript was lost at that time, and only known to him in the form of a collation. It was found again in 1830 by the Utrecht professor Jodocus Heringa, and has been in Utrecht since then. Using Wettstein’s edition, Heringa could easily identify the manuscript as the Boreelianus; he could find an especially clear sign in the words Χριστῷ τελείω χάρις (cf. ‘pfff’) at the end of Luke’s gospel. These words were cited by Wettstein and are indeed found in the manuscript.

Scrivener (in his Plain Introduction) states that ‘Tischendorf had looked through it in 1841’, but in Utrecht rumour has it that he was actually denied access to the manuscript, not so much because of what he had done with Codex Ephraemi rescriptus, but simply because he arrived in Utrecht at the wrong time of the year, in summer. Gregory writes that Tischendorf could not work on the manuscript because Heringa was preparing his collation, but this is a mistake. Tischendorf did admire (and use) Heringa’s work on the manuscript, though.

The codex is named after Johannes Boreel (1577-1629). In the 1840s there was an effort in Holland to rename the manuscript after its present location (as in ‘Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis’), but the new name ‘Codex Rheno-Traiectinus’ did not hold. In the literature Boreel is above all named as the Dutch ambassador to James I, but his office as Pensionary of Middelburg and later the whole of Zeeland may be more important. Moreover, an ambassador (or ‘Envoy’) then was not the same as today. In Dutch sources, it is mentioned that Boreel was sent on diplomatic missions to England (three times), and that he was knighted by the King. Sir John Boreel, then, presents us with one of those sad cases of talented youngsters who opt for a political career and are thus lost for real scholarship.

The manuscript is not very important for its text, but it is a relatively early representative of the Byzantine text of the Gospels, and, more importantly, it is a very late uncial manuscript. It was probably used for worship, as the Ammonian section numbers are there (but the Eusebian canon numbers are not found in the margins), and the beginnings and endings of lections are often indicated in a special way.

The image (courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht) shows the beginning of Mark. As usual, one chooses the most remarkable or beautiful pages for an image. Only the starting pages of the gospels have these kinds of decoration, and from the four candidates, the one of Matthew is missing, the one of Luke is interesting but mutilated, and the one of John is rather faded.

Prof. Trobisch made us take a good look at some of the pages and asked for our observations, which he then took as the starting point for a more general lecture on NT textual criticism. After the lecture, we were taken to the reading room in the Library itself, where we could see the manuscript itself in all its splendour and with all the traces of its life in church, private hands and the university library. The manuscript is not bound, many pages are missing, and at some locations it has been mutilated. Scrivener even writes that ‘few manuscripts have fallen into such unworthy hands’. This may be true for part of its history, but the manuscript is now in able hands, and the Utrecht staff is even thinking about a digital edition. Perhaps there will be an occasion at the next SBL meeting for a presentation on the manuscript.

Update March 27: Dr. Trobisch’s travel journal mentions his visit to Utrecht; his site also contains the original invitation to the lecture.

Live Search Books results

2007-03-12T13:26:00.000+01:00

Over at ETC, Christian Askeland draws attention to TC reprints from Scholarly Reprints. It may be worthwhile to point out that several titles mentioned by him are already available online as part of Microsoft’s Live Books Search. It is (still?) a bit tricky to find these titles there, for the search engine only allows a query on keywords. Using quotation marks around several words is very useful.

The following list is not comprehensive, but gives a good idea of what can be found (NB.: pdf downloads can be rather large):

Friedrich Blass, Philology of the Gospels (1898) (pdf).
Charles Fox Burney, The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel (1922) (pdf).
Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt ... (1875) vol. 2 (pdf).
Frederick Field, Notes on the Translation of the New Testament (1899) (pdf).
Caspar Rene Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (1907) (pdf).
James Rendel Harris, Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai (1890) (pdf).
James Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae (1891) (pdf).
George Milligan, Here & There Among the Papyri (1922) (pdf).
[Eberhard Nestle], Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ. Text with Critical Apparatus [Nestle text with TR and RV variants] (1904) (pdf).
James Hardy Ropes, The Text of Acts (The Beginnings of Christianity I.3) (1926) (pdf).
Philip Schaff, A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (1883) (pdf).
Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, Contributions to the Criticism of the Greek New Testament (1859) (pdf).
Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, Six Lectures on the Text of the New Testament and the Ancient Manuscripts Which Contain It (1875) (pdf).
Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students (vol. 1 only; ⁴1894) (pdf).
Alexander Souter, The Text and Canon of the New Testament (1913) (pdf).
Henry Barclay Swete, The Old Testament in Greek vol. 1 (³1901) (pdf); vol. 2 (²1896) (pdf); vol. 3 (³1905) (pdf).
Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament (1854) (pdf).
Thomas Hunter Weir, A Short History of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament (1899) (pdf).

A Catalog Card

2007-01-12T10:33:00.000+01:00

(thanks to the Catalog Card Generator)

Live search -> Books

2006-12-12T10:48:00.000+01:00

Jim West and Mark Goodacre just informed the blog-reading world of the beta launch of Microsoft's answer to Google Print: within Live Search one can now search for out-of-copyright books. The place to go is http://books.live.com (resolved into http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=&scope=books); see also the announcement on the Live Search's Weblog.

A few cons and pros can already be mentioned:
- the books are English only as far as I can see;
- as said, only out-of-copyright books are included;
+ the web interface is easy to use and searching within books is reasonably accurate;
+ each book can be downloaded as a PDF file.
What is more, these PDF files remain fully searchable (as far as Latin characters are concerned), while at the same time showing the original image of the printed page. Of the latter, even the often brownish background can be turned off. For those interested in the technical details: the files appear to have been produced with LuraTech PDF.

For NT textual critics (and exegetes), several interesting books can be found, for instance Tregelles, Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament; Scrivener, Plain Introduction (4th ed.; Vol I only); Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae; Grenfell and Hunt, New Sayings of Jesus; Blass, Philology of the Gospels; Field, Notes on the Translation of the New Testament. All these books are easily found with search terms such as "textual criticism" or "Greek New Testament". Most books are from the University of Toronto.