Brent Nongbri, "How Old Are the Oldest Christian Manuscripts?" Biblical Archaeological Review, vol. 26 no. 3 (Summer 2020), 45. So how old are the earliest Christian manuscripts? The evidence we have and a proper understanding of the multiple dating techniques at our disposal reveal that there is a significant discrepancy between what we actually know... Continue Reading →
"For atheists, I would say your life is not meaningless even if you no longer believe you are for something like a hammer is for hammering nails- or even if you believe the universe is absurd! Just because you are not an instrument of someone else’s will, it does not follow that you cannot live... Continue Reading →
"Mark, wanting to make a theological point, locates the event in a place whose name is associated with casting out demons – the language, as Marcus points out, does kinda support this. This strengthens the exorcism theme of the pericope– seems legit. A few years later, Matthew, using Mark as a source for his own gospel, either misses Mark’s theological point or... Continue Reading →
To see all posts in this series, please refer to its index. Thomason's "rebuttal" of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus1 continues, this time focusing on the end of chapter one as well as on chapter two. The post entitled "Does Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus' Give Reasons to Doubt the New Testament?"2 is more pop-apologetic tripe from the Queen of... Continue Reading →
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to my readers. I'll see you in 2019! On December 31st I will have completed reading the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha in the NRSV. I've lost count how many times I've read through the Bible cover-to-cover but I can now say I've read through the entire NRSV! In... Continue Reading →
Bart D. Ehrhman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (OUP, 2016), 25. In the earliest centuries, the vast majority of copyists of the New Testament books were not trained scribes. We know this because we can examine their copies and evaluate the quality of their handwriting, and we can... Continue Reading →
Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 7. A necessary first stage in the study of the Bible is to determine what its actual text is. This is immensely difficult, because thousands of manuscripts need to be compared. Moreover, even before the... Continue Reading →
Yesterday I posted a link to the third video in Dr. Joshua Bowen's series on the topic of textual criticism where he discussed some of the methods and rules utilized by textual critics when they engage in their craft. In the final video of the series, Dr. Bowen discusses the textual criticism of the New... Continue Reading →
Yesterday I posted a link to the second video in Dr. Joshua Bowen's series on the topic of textual criticism where he discussed some of the methods and rules utilized by textual critics when they engage in their craft. In the next video Bowen goes into the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible specifically. The... Continue Reading →
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