Textual Criticsim
Michael Horton Interviews Dan Wallace on White Horse Inn
Last month, Michael Horton interviewed me concerning the reliability of the text of the New Testament. The radio show aired today, 12 May 2013. Here’s the link: http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2013/05/12/whi-1153-has-jesus-been-misquoted/
The Authenticity of the Gospel of Judas
Katherine Weber of the Christian Post asked me some questions this week about the recent revelation that the Gospel of Judas had been authenticated by a number of means. See http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/08/17656331-scholars-reveal-how-they-scrambled-to-authenticate-gospel-of-judas for the news report, and http://www.christianpost.com/news/gospel-of-judas-free-of-forgeries-but-still-fake-heretical-says-new-testament-scholar-93781/ for Katherine’s article (published 11 April 2013). Below are her questions and my responses. This will also be published in the Christian […]
Snoopy Seminar coming on Feb 22–23, 2013
On February 22 and 23, I will be conducting a “Snoopy Seminar” at the Hope Center in Plano, Texas (2001 W. Plano Parkway). This seminar is a fun, interactive, and challenging exercise about textual criticism. Enrollment is limited to 60 people. Intended audience: motivated laypeople, though we are not limiting it to them (seminary students […]
Do Manuscripts of Q Still Exist?
A favorite argument against the existence of Q is simply that no manuscripts of Q have ever been discovered. No more than this bare assertion is usually made. But a little probing shows that this argument has some serious weaknesses to it. In particular, three come to mind: (1) If Matthew and Luke swallowed up […]
Five More Myths about Bible Translations and the Transmission of the Text
There’s an old Italian proverb that warns translators about jumping in to the task: “Traduttori? Traditori!” Translation: “Translators? Traitors!” The English proverb, “Something’s always lost in the translation,” is clearly illustrated in this instance. In Italian the two words are virtually identical, both in spelling and pronunciation. They thus involve a play on words. But […]
Nestle-Aland 28: The New Standard in Critical Texts of the Greek New Testament
Overview At the annual Society of Biblical Literature conference held in Chicago last month, the latest edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece, or the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, was unveiled. This has been a long time coming—nineteen years to be exact. The Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster is behind this production, and deserves […]
New Early Fragment of Romans
At the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual conference in Chicago last week (17–20 Nov 2012), Grant Edwards and Nick Zola presented papers on a new papyrus fragment from Romans. They have dated it to the (early) third century, which makes this perhaps only the fifth manuscript of Romans prior to the fourth (though a couple […]
The Demise of Codex 1799
A graduate of Princeton University in the early nineteenth century, Robert Garrett, acquired a medieval copy of Paul’s letters, Hebrews, Acts, and the Catholic letters from Mt. Athos in 1830. His estate later donated this manuscript to Princeton University. The manuscript was produced in the twelfth or thirteenth century on parchment. It was meant as […]
Lectionary 2258—-A Most Unusual Manuscript
Meteora is one of the most stunningly beautiful and other-worldly places on earth. Nearly a millennium ago, monks traveled throughout Greece in search of a place where they could get close to God and spend their days praying in undiluted solitude. Ultimately, six monasteries were established there, all but one perched atop stone pillars rising […]
The Five Countries Called Greece
I go to Greece every year, with several others from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org), to photograph biblical manuscripts. And every year, we ‘discover’ manuscripts too—that is, we inform the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster about New Testament manuscripts that they were unaware of, and give them the details […]
