Category Archives: Jesus Tradition

A Further Response to Brice Jones

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P1 Matthew

In a prior post, I responded to Brice Jones’ original critique of my chapter in The Early Text of the New Testament.  He has taken a moment to respond on his website here.  I want to thank Brice for this interesting and stimulating interaction.  Certainly anyone should be thanked who is willing to read and interact with a $140 book!  I will offer just a few final reflections here.

I only want to address the following paragraph where Brice summarizes his complaint:

The main difficulty that I find with your essay is your move from a few select passages that do not refer to attitudes toward reproduction

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Brice Jones Reviews The Early Text of the New Testament

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Over at his website, Brice Jones just reviewed The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 2012), edited by myself and Chuck Hill.  In general, he offers a positive summary, “Overall, this book is an important addition to our field and thus is to be recommended to anyone interested in the text of the New Testament.”

However, Brice was critical of my own essay, “Early Christian Attitudes to the Reproduction of Texts,” arguing that it had a “theological agenda.”   Not sure what he meant by theological agenda, since he never gets specific about where I do this in the article.  He does, however, express disagreement over my analysis of …

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Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 1

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new new testament

There has been much chatter recently about the new book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  It intends to combine the traditional 27 books of the New Testament along with 10 apocryphal writings from early Christianity.  As I observed in a prior post, there is nothing particularly “new” about this sort of project—it has been tried again and again since the time of Marcion.

This post is the first installment of my review of this book, with many more to come.  We will focus here just on the promotional description on the inside cover flap.  This is an unusual place to begin a book …

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A New ‘New Testament’ is an Old, Old Idea

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new new testament

My email inbox has been flooded over the last day or so with queries about the recent book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  I have to admit, I love the title.  When it comes to sensationalistic claims about the New Testament canon, modern publishers know what sells.  This volume has bypassed the normal catchwords found in the titles of such books—words like “lost”, “forgotten”, “secret”, or “banned”—and has set a new standard for marketing apocryphal writings.

This volume also sets itself apart by the grandiosity of its claims.  Here is the promo for the book:

To create this New New Testament, Hal Taussig called together

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