Daily Gleanings (10 June 2019)

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Citing a typical description of early Christian scribal culture, Michael Kruger comments:

There are a lot of claims in this brief couple of sentences. Unfortunately, virtually every one of them is mistaken.

Kruger then proceeds to discuss three ways in which this early culture was comparatively more professional and competent than it is often described as being.

For the details of Kruger’s comments, see his original post.


On the eschatology of the Christian tradition’s major creeds, Jake Mailhot comments:

Though there are no charts or timelines in these creeds, they are profound. Christian hope is plain in Scripture, and it’s mirrored clearly in our creeds: Christ will come again to establish justice and peace forever.

For more, see LogosTalk.

Sinaiticus’s B scribe(s)

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On Academia.edu, Dan Batovici has posted an uncorrected proof of his essay “Two B Scribes in Codex Sinaiticus?” BASP 54 (2017). According to the abstract,

The history of scribal hand identification in Codex Sinaiticus is a fairly complicated one. The most recent identification, splitting the work of Tischendorf’s scribe B in B1 and B2, was attempted by Amy Myshrall in a 2015 contribution, as a result of the work on the Codex Sinaiticus digitizing project completed in 2009. This article will assess the argument proposed by Amy Myshrall for distinguishing the two new scribes, and it argues that there is not enough reason to adopt the newly proposed distinction.

HT: Peter Gurry

On the Web (February 7, 2013)

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On the web:

  • Larry Hurtado comments on Alan Mugridge’s PhD thesis, “Stages of Development in Scribal Professionalism in Early Christian Circles,” which is currently under revision for publication.
  • Nathan Eubank enters the biblioblogosphere (HT: Stephen Carlson).
  • Baker is now releasing the “Teach the Text” commentary series. Currently available is Marvin Pate’s volume on Romans, and Robert Chisholm’s volume on Samuel is available for preorder (HT: M. Miller).

Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches

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Emmanuel Tov has made available the full text of his 2009 monograph Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert in two PDF files in the “Publications” section of his website. Excepting certain “minute changes,” these files are substantially identical to the printed versions.

HT: Doretha Burrows