My own response is: Says who? What is the justification for the premise I’ve described? Why should a difference between what Jesus taught about himself and what believers subsequently came to assert about him be a problem?
More good stuff from Hurtado, and well work a read.
A few days ago a former PhD student shared with me the anonymised reviews of a book proposal, one of which was a bit ill-tempered, and also ill-informed (and which also directed some of its ire against me). One of the substantive errors was the claim that it is anachronistic to refer to texts as functioning as “scripture” in the second century, the reviewer asserting that this is to import a concept from the fourth century.
An important distinction to be made, and also a good glimpse of the early use of sacred writings. Read the whole post here.
academic-bible.com is the leading website for academic Bible study. It provides free access to the original Bible texts in Greek and Hebrew, published by the German Bible Society, in addition to English and German Bible translations.
Tradition is not a second source alongside Scripture; clearly normative for us Orthodox is Scripture as interpreted by the seven ecumenical councils. But tradition lives on. The age of the fathers didn’t stop in the fifth century or the seventh century. We could have holy fathers now in the 21st century equal to the ancient fathers.
Read the whole interview with Metropolitan Kallistos Ware here.
The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM), under the umbrella of The Center for the Research of Early Christian Documents (CRECD), exists for the following purposes:
To make digital photographs of extant Greek New Testament manuscripts so that such images can be preserved, duplicated without deterioration, and accessed by scholars doing textual research.
To utilize developing technologies (OCR, MSI, etc.) to read these manuscripts and create exhaustive collations.
To analyze individual scribal habits in order to better predict scribal tendencies in any given textual problem.
To publish on various facets of New Testament textual criticism
To develop electronic tools for the examination and analysis of New Testament manuscripts.
To cooperate with other institutes in the great and noble task of determining the wording of the autographa of the New Testament.
All sorts of loveliness. And on iTunes too!
I speculated that if the Gospel of Matthew were published and circulated in 75 CE and if it and some of the first copies of it were in use as long as the manuscripts in the collections and libraries studied by Houston were in use, then some of these manuscripts could still have been in circulation, being read, studied, and copied, as late as the end of the second century and perhaps even on into the third century. This means that New Testament autographs and first copies could still have been available when our oldest extant papyri manuscripts (e.g., P45, P46, P66) were produced. If still in circulation and being read and copied, the autographs and first copies would have continued to give shape to the text. In a sense, then, the gap between autograph and extant manuscript is bridged.
There’s been a bit of abuzz about this post by Craig Evans, and it’s a fascinating insight into the early life of the New Testament. Go read it all.
Bibledex is a project by the University of Nottingham’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies in conjunction with video journalist Brady Haran.
The videos are by no means comprehensive – rather they’re a curious assortment of academic insights into what is probably the most famous collection of books in history.
Go and visit Bibledex on Youtube.
Private Eye ran a cartoon some years ago of St Peter standing in front of Jesus’s Cross and saying to the other Disciples: “It’s time to put this behind us now and move on.” It was a satire not on Christian belief, but on politicians and counsellors, and their trivialising mantras. It depended on Jesus’s death being not just an odd, forgettable event – and that it was His Resurrection, rather than a shoulder- shrugging desire to “move on”, that got the early Christians going.
“Last night, my wife and I watched the final episode of Neil Oliver’s series on the History of Britain, this one dealing with the Roman impact on ancient Britain. Overall, so far as I can judge, interesting and informative. But one thing got up my nose, and prompts me to correct and clarify.”
Spot on from the Sacred Sandwich.