Sleeping with the Gospels
Not many Christians carry around Bibles anymore these days.
In my younger years, I can remember that it was standard fare to carry your Bible to church. Even in college, we would take our Bibles to the evening gathering of our campus fellowship. To have a worn, tattered Bible—due to regularly carrying it around in one’s backpack—was sort of a sign that one took their faith seriously.
Of course, those days are long gone. With the rise of modern technology, and the Bible’s ready availability on phones or tablets, the physical presence of a Bible book is becoming more and more rare. Yes, Christians still care about the content of … Continue reading...
Here’s the Cover for My New Oxford Volume on Miniature Codices
As I have mention in a prior post, I am thrilled about my forthcoming volume with Oxford University Press entitled, Miniature Codices in Early Christianity. It is in the proof stage now, and should be out sometime this Spring/Summer.
I have been working on the subject of miniature codices for more than twenty years now, ever since doing my thesis a while ago under Larry Hurtado on the apocryphal gospel fragment, P.Oxy. 840. I have also written on the miniature codex P.Ant. 12 (0232) which contains 2 John (see here, and inset picture), and a recent overview article on miniature codices in Paratextual Features in Early New Testament … Continue reading...
The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Esther, and the Argument from Silence
When we want to know how the New Testament canon developed, we have a number of sources at our disposal. Most fundamentally, we have patristic sources—the writings of the church fathers—which can show us when books were known, read, and cited.
We also have archaeological evidence at our disposal. We continue to find manuscripts of the New Testament, particularly at the site of Oxyrhynchus among other places, showing that early Christians knew and used these books in some fashion.
But what do we do when a particular book is missing from either of these sources? For example, Irenaeus does not mention (or quote from) the book of Philemon. Should we … Continue reading...
One of the Most Remarkable Features of Early Christian Manuscripts
One of my favorite electives I teach here at RTS Charlotte is “The Origin and Authority of the New Testament Canon.” We cover a lot of ground in that course: why we have a NT canon, what is the earliest evidence for a canon consciousness, what were the factors that led to the church receiving just these 27 books, etc. (To take this class online, see RTS Global).
But I think my students particularly enjoy a sub-module of that course where we study high-resolution photographs of early Christian manuscripts. In particular, we spend some time working through images of P66, one of our earliest (nearly complete) copies of … Continue reading...
How Many New Testament Manuscripts Do We Have From the Second Century?
“There is no second-century manuscript evidence.” —Helmut Koester
When it comes to the transmission of the New Testament text, the second century has been long recognized as a critical time period. And it is not hard to see why. If the New Testament books were written (more or less) in the first-century, then the extant manuscripts that get us closest to that time period will inevitably take on a level of significance.
The second century is also significant because of modern scholarly claims that it was precisely this period when the most serious textual corruptions were likely to have occurred, suggesting the earliest phases of transmission were marked by “textual … Continue reading...