Here are a few personal lines of what is going on in relation to my research just now.
On Tuesday I traveled from my hometown Örebro to Lund university (500 km). On that day I completed my final course in the PhD programme, which means that I officially earned the degree that day, although the real trial was of course the examination in December previously reported on this blog. After having earned my degree I could also apply for a research post which has been announced (and the final day for application was March 7). I had prepared the application 16 pages long. For the description of the research project (3 pages) I wrote my short proposal last weekend under the heading: "'Orthodox Corruption' Revisited: Scribal Motivation in New Testament Textual Transmission". I do not think that I will get the post, because I saw who some of the other applicants were (folks that have earned their degree during the last five years are eligible). In any case, I will write something on the subject, as soon as I have time, but I have to prepare papers for three conferences (Birmingham colloquium, SBL International and Annual Meetings). In the afternoon I went to the exegetical seminary (OT + NT), which funny enough was a presentation of a paper by professor Bengt Holmberg on Bauer's thesis with the title "Did Heresy Emerge before Orthodoxy? Walter Bauer's Thesis on the Earliest History of the Church in Later Research" (my quick translation). Two of the questions for the discussion that followed was: a) How much (justified) critique can an historical hypothesis be subjected, before it "suffers the death of many qualifiations?"; and b) To what degree does the erroneous terminology, "orthodoxy" and "heresy," affect the result of an (historical) examination?
I spent the Wednesday morning in the university library, where there is a collection of 800 papyri, which has been completely forgotten since the 30's! Back then, an interested librarian bought them for the university, and from that particular purchase, the other part of this particular lot went to Ann Arbour in Michigan so maybe in APIS some items will be reunited in the digital realm. Only 50 of the papyri have been edited. Now there is a project in co-operation with APIS to digitize the lot. I saw about 20% of the collection on Wednesday. They were brought out in boxes that contained the papyrus items mounted in glass. However, this had been done 75 years ago, and the tape around the glass had dried out, so the glass fell open, and out the very fragile fragments, some of which lay in the bottom of the box!!! I am glad that there is now a conservation project going on, but only one person is working on this project, and it will take a long time. I did not discover any Christian papyri, but some of the items contained religious language (APOLLWN, hAGIOS, MEGALOS QEOS), but no nomina sacra were spotted.
More to follow soon: new discoveries of and in manuscripts
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Online Resources of Interest to Text Critics
[Though this appears on another blog it is certainly of interest to this one and is reposted with gratitude to the author - PJW]
Online Resources of Interest to Text Critics
Preliminary Observations
John F. Hobbins
jfhobbins@gmail.com
Textual criticism is a glorious field of study whose landscape is dotted with monuments of past and present erudition. The question I address in this post is to the degree to which the field is currently navigable online, and prospects for voyages in the future. In the interests of brevity, I confine my attention to a few aspects of the question only.
A new dynamic is operative in the world of information exchange, whereby, more and more often, something new from the point of view of method or content first becomes available free of charge online and only later is repackaged for sale in a market. For this and other reasons, there are a number of online resources out there for anyone to use that lack as yet a better equivalent in the commercial sphere. This holds true for the field of text criticism as much as for any other field of study.
This is a healthy situation, unless one holds to the view that Mammon must always be king. For my part, I have a demythologized view of Mammon, with a corollary: the purpose of an information market is not to make money per se, but to provide a venue that ensures support for and dissemination of original research and tools of the trade. To ring the changes on an eternal verity, the market was, or should be, made for man, not man for the market.
The line between online resources available free of charge and those which cost a pretty penny needs to become blurrier than it is now, so that access to the former becomes a portal to access to the latter, and ownership of a paid-for resource brings with it enhanced access to resources available to all. Someday any book worth paying for will include an online dimension. Reference works will be updated electronically on a continuous basis. Examples of both, of course, are already out there.
How this works for the moment and how it should work are often two different things. An example or two may serve to illustrate.
Let’s say I am interested in researching the Peshitta as a text-critical resource for the study of the Hebrew Bible and/or the New Testament, a key component of the Aramaic linguistic and literary heritage, and a magnum opus in its own right, knowledge of which is essential for an understanding of Syriac Christianity.
Ideally, in my view, I would be able to go to the site of the Leiden Peshitta Institute, access the text in the form of a tagged database free of charge, and in that context be offered other tools, both free and commercial, that will allow me to study the Peshitta in its various facets. In reality, when I go to the site, I find no more than a list of the Institute’s ongoing projects and links to lists of the fascicles of the Major Edition and the monographs of the Institute which have so far appeared. The cute picture of an unidentified researcher, of course, makes up for this. But still.
At the very least, one would have wished for a link to CAL, where part of the Peshitta Institute’s own database has graciously been made available to those who use CAL online. On the other hand, the OT Peshitta is not available in the for-pay version of CAL through Logos-Bible-Software. This is unfortunate.
Links to www.peshitta.org, www.assyrianlanguage.com, and so on would also have been helpful. (The music of Linda George on the first site is a nice throw-in.)
Furthermore, the purchasable items in the Institute’s lists are cold, so one has to look elsewhere for a place to buy them. In this regard, a good place to start is Eisenbrauns, and if one plugs “Syriac” or “Peshitta” into the online search engine, all kinds of excellent purchasable resources pop up, but not the Leiden Peshitta edition itself! The best way to examine and purchase volumes of the Leiden Peshitta online is to go to Brill’s site, and from there to its links to books.google.com via ISBN number. It is then possible to take a look at a volume’s cover, peruse its table of contents and so on, and choose a bookseller from which to purchase. Here’s an example of what I mean: books.google.com/leiden-peshitta-isaiah. Beyond that, an almost complete listing of the Institute’s published monographs purchasable new or used is available at amazon.com-search-keywords=Monographs+Leiden+Peshitta.
One more example. Let’s say I’m interested in the Septuagint for reasons like those stated above with respect to the Peshitta. Here the situation is different, thanks to the marvelous site on the Septuagint and resources in the field offered by Joel Kalvesmaki. The site is literally priceless.
On the other hand, despite what Joel says, it’s not necessary to buy the Göttingen critical editions of the Septuagint via their publisher. You can purchase them at Eisenbrauns. After winning the lottery first.
I keep hoping that I will wake up someday, go to eisenbrauns.com, and discover that it has become a one-stop shop for all my needs as a biblical scholar. It’s not that I’m expecting, necessarily, to find Gabriel Afram’s Swedish-Syriac-Dictionary among its listings, the very existence of which warms my cockles. But it is my hope that a commercially viable way will be found for Eisenbrauns’ book catalogues to become a comprehensive portal to the purchasable print and electronic resources of the fields of study they cover. I can dream, can’t I?
I also keep hoping that someone will gather and introduce to the rest of us online resources available in other subfields of the textual criticism of the Bible with the same alacrity as Joel has done for the Septuagint.
If you look long enough, you can find real gems, like this. But who has time to do all that looking?
[This post is also available at www.ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com]
Online Resources of Interest to Text Critics
Preliminary Observations
John F. Hobbins
jfhobbins@gmail.com
Textual criticism is a glorious field of study whose landscape is dotted with monuments of past and present erudition. The question I address in this post is to the degree to which the field is currently navigable online, and prospects for voyages in the future. In the interests of brevity, I confine my attention to a few aspects of the question only.
A new dynamic is operative in the world of information exchange, whereby, more and more often, something new from the point of view of method or content first becomes available free of charge online and only later is repackaged for sale in a market. For this and other reasons, there are a number of online resources out there for anyone to use that lack as yet a better equivalent in the commercial sphere. This holds true for the field of text criticism as much as for any other field of study.
This is a healthy situation, unless one holds to the view that Mammon must always be king. For my part, I have a demythologized view of Mammon, with a corollary: the purpose of an information market is not to make money per se, but to provide a venue that ensures support for and dissemination of original research and tools of the trade. To ring the changes on an eternal verity, the market was, or should be, made for man, not man for the market.
The line between online resources available free of charge and those which cost a pretty penny needs to become blurrier than it is now, so that access to the former becomes a portal to access to the latter, and ownership of a paid-for resource brings with it enhanced access to resources available to all. Someday any book worth paying for will include an online dimension. Reference works will be updated electronically on a continuous basis. Examples of both, of course, are already out there.
How this works for the moment and how it should work are often two different things. An example or two may serve to illustrate.
Let’s say I am interested in researching the Peshitta as a text-critical resource for the study of the Hebrew Bible and/or the New Testament, a key component of the Aramaic linguistic and literary heritage, and a magnum opus in its own right, knowledge of which is essential for an understanding of Syriac Christianity.
Ideally, in my view, I would be able to go to the site of the Leiden Peshitta Institute, access the text in the form of a tagged database free of charge, and in that context be offered other tools, both free and commercial, that will allow me to study the Peshitta in its various facets. In reality, when I go to the site, I find no more than a list of the Institute’s ongoing projects and links to lists of the fascicles of the Major Edition and the monographs of the Institute which have so far appeared. The cute picture of an unidentified researcher, of course, makes up for this. But still.
At the very least, one would have wished for a link to CAL, where part of the Peshitta Institute’s own database has graciously been made available to those who use CAL online. On the other hand, the OT Peshitta is not available in the for-pay version of CAL through Logos-Bible-Software. This is unfortunate.
Links to www.peshitta.org, www.assyrianlanguage.com, and so on would also have been helpful. (The music of Linda George on the first site is a nice throw-in.)
Furthermore, the purchasable items in the Institute’s lists are cold, so one has to look elsewhere for a place to buy them. In this regard, a good place to start is Eisenbrauns, and if one plugs “Syriac” or “Peshitta” into the online search engine, all kinds of excellent purchasable resources pop up, but not the Leiden Peshitta edition itself! The best way to examine and purchase volumes of the Leiden Peshitta online is to go to Brill’s site, and from there to its links to books.google.com via ISBN number. It is then possible to take a look at a volume’s cover, peruse its table of contents and so on, and choose a bookseller from which to purchase. Here’s an example of what I mean: books.google.com/leiden-peshitta-isaiah. Beyond that, an almost complete listing of the Institute’s published monographs purchasable new or used is available at amazon.com-search-keywords=Monographs+Leiden+Peshitta.
One more example. Let’s say I’m interested in the Septuagint for reasons like those stated above with respect to the Peshitta. Here the situation is different, thanks to the marvelous site on the Septuagint and resources in the field offered by Joel Kalvesmaki. The site is literally priceless.
On the other hand, despite what Joel says, it’s not necessary to buy the Göttingen critical editions of the Septuagint via their publisher. You can purchase them at Eisenbrauns. After winning the lottery first.
I keep hoping that I will wake up someday, go to eisenbrauns.com, and discover that it has become a one-stop shop for all my needs as a biblical scholar. It’s not that I’m expecting, necessarily, to find Gabriel Afram’s Swedish-Syriac-Dictionary among its listings, the very existence of which warms my cockles. But it is my hope that a commercially viable way will be found for Eisenbrauns’ book catalogues to become a comprehensive portal to the purchasable print and electronic resources of the fields of study they cover. I can dream, can’t I?
I also keep hoping that someone will gather and introduce to the rest of us online resources available in other subfields of the textual criticism of the Bible with the same alacrity as Joel has done for the Septuagint.
If you look long enough, you can find real gems, like this. But who has time to do all that looking?
[This post is also available at www.ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com]
Machine guns and P75
To find out what machine guns have to do with P75, and about how the latter may now be classed as a relic, see the Discovery Channel's reporting of the transfer of this Bodmer papyrus to the Vatican here. [Thanks to Dave Black for the reference.]
Monday, March 05, 2007
Scanned patristic material
I've just stumbled across the charitable site Christian Hospitality and found that it has a veritable wealth of patristic and related material scanned in. I was actually searching for the text of Moses of Chorene, but found much more. All the Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers appear to be here, though they can also be found at CCEL. More welcome, however, are some original language resources, e.g. Harvey’s edition of Irenaeus. The site apparently looks back to one William Branham as a prophet of some sort.
Critical edition of the Armenian version?
Louis Leloir in K. Aland (ed.), Die alten Übersetzungen des neuen Testaments, die Kirchenväterzitate und Lektionare, 1972, p. 306, mentions the preparation by the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchy of St James in Jerusalem of a new critical edition of the entire Armenian Bible. Does anyone know of any more recent news on this project or any one that may have developed from it?
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Searchable Sahidic NT?
The Sahidic NT (and the Gothic for that matter) are now available at the Unbound Bible. It really looks as if it is searchable, but I cannot actually get it to search on Coptic words. Can anyone else achieve success?
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