November 2003

Greek Language—Text and Canon

Glenn Davis’s The Development of the Canon of the New Testament [Index] [Home]

http://www.ntcanon.org/

An abiding interest in the history of the development of the NT canon was spurred by two Bible classes Glenn Davis took at De Anza College, Cupertino, CA. Feeling that this fascinating story was not as widely and easily available to the general public as could be desired, Davis created this hyperlinked website. Davis wants to present the process in which Christians “selected certain writings as authoritative and separated them from a larger body of early Christian literature.”

Michael Marlowe’s Bible Research [Index] [Home]

http://www.bible-researcher.com/index.html

For Marlowe’s background, see “New Testament—Gateways and Annotated Links” above. He thought his Bible study material on text and canon would be helpful to others, so he has created an extensive website with articles he has written, but including articles from scholars. The material is hyperlinked to various terms and other helpful references to aid the comprehension of the topic discussed.

John Rylands Fragment [Index] [Home]

http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/data1/dg/text/fragment.htm

The John Rylands University Library of Manchester has posted quality images of its famous manuscript fragment, ∏52, the earliest copy of any portion of the New Testament. The text represents Jn. 18:31–38 and dates somewhere from A.D. 100–150. Thus, this copy potentially could be as close as fifty years from the original. The site provides links to high quality, large image files and a discussion of the find and its significance.

Timothy Seid’s Interpreting Ancient Manuscripts [Index] [Home]

http://www.earlham.edu/~seidti/iam/interp_mss.html

This site on basic elements of textual criticism with illustrative images was originally a Hypercard application (Macintosh) developed by Dr. Timothy Seid at Brown University. Dr. Seid, now Associate Dean of Distributed Learning at Earlham School of Religion (a Quaker seminary of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana) converted the material into a website with linked information pages. How to navigate the site is not immediately obvious. On the initial welcome page, you already are in the first step of what is meant to be a linear sequence of pages. The small images arranged in a row at the top of the page are meant to be active icons that the user is to click in sequence left to right to move through the web pages of the discussion on the study of Greek manuscripts. With no key words indicating the nature of each icon, and the intended meaning of the icons not intuitively obvious, or even that they are hyperlinked, this system leaves something to be desired in website design and implementation. Another complaint is that a number of the full manuscript images have not been downsized and optimized for web delivery, so are slow to load. (I imagine with a dial-up modem, intolerable.) However, once over these initial usability hurdles, the site is uncomplicated and educational. The icons at the top of the page represent, in order left to right: Welcome, Paleography, Manuscript Transmission, Modern Critical Text, Exercise in Textual Criticism, Glossary, Index (of the website), and Table of Greek Manuscripts. Each icon takes you to a page discussing that topic. Within each page, various terms are hyperlinked for further discussion. All discussion is mostly English, referring to the Greek only minimally, so can be comprehended by non-Greek students. Most delightful is the brilliant “Exercise in Textual Criticism” page. This page uses an English text written in continuous capital letters and no punctuation (as ancient manuscripts were produced), from which copies were made. The student is to compare these copies, innovatively named for states (“Codex Rhode Island,” etc., similar to ancient manuscripts being named for cities or places), and determine their inherent relationships using standard principles of textual criticism. Well done.

Robert Waltz’s Encyclopedia of Textual Criticism [Index] [Home]

http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/

Waltz is not a textual critic nor an academic but a highly motivated individual who has taken the idea of a possible publication project conceived by Rich Elliott of Simon Greenleaf University (The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism) and transformed that publication idea into his own website of the exact same name (getting the award for the poorest named website). The website is organized into an alphabetical listing of over 160 topics (if I counted correctly!). These topics are discussed by Waltz. Recurring textual criticism vocabulary and ideas are hyperlinked in each article to definitions and discussions of those terms. Some images are available. A number of people apparently have contributed suggestions to Waltz for the site, as he indicates at the bottom of his home page, including Michael Holmes. I would suppose this is the Michael Holmes who is the distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies and Early Christianity at Bethel College, St. Paul MN.