50 replies to this topic

[Resource Manager]

Where Do Languages Go to Die?

 

The tale of Aramaic, a language that once ruled the Middle East and now faces extinction

 

JOHN MCWHORTER   SEP 10, 2015

 

"If a Middle Eastern man from 2,500 years ago found himself on his home territory in 2015, he would be shocked by the modern innovations, and not just electricity, airplanes, and iPhones. Arabic as an official language in over two dozen countries would also seem as counterintuitive to him as if people had suddenly started keeping aardvarks as pets."

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[Resource Manager]

BOOKS

 

Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Is Found, Scholar Says

 

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLEROCT. 14, 2015

 

"The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration.

 

But now, in an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge, an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it."
 

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[Resource Manager]

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2015

 

New Papyrus (P134) of John: A Report from SBL

 

by Tommy Wasserman at 3:09 p.m. 

 

"Here is a report from the session on Christian Apocrypha joint with Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds at SBL Atlanta on 21 November.

 

The first paper in this session was presented by Geoffrey Smith who always has very interesting presentations. Some years ago, he presented on a new amulet which contained Mark 1:1-2 (without “Son of God” to the great satisfaction of Peter Head who sat next to me; it was then I decided to write an article on that topic)."

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[Resource Manager]

Easy as Alep, Bet, Gimel? Cambridge Research Explores Social Context of Ancient Writing
 

April 5, 2016

 

"A new University of Cambridge research project is set to shed light on the history of writing in the ancient world, and explore the longlasting relationship between society and writing that persists today.

 

A new research project at the University of Cambridge is set to shed light on the history of writing, revealing connections to our modern alphabet that cross cultures and go back thousands of years.
 

The project, called Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS for short), is to focus on exploring how writing developed during the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and will investigate how different writing systems and the cultures that used them were related to each other."

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[Resource Manager]

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

 

CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK

Instructional Videos
 

"The Centre for the History of the Book has produced a series of videos designed to introduce key skills for Book Historians.

 

With the help of our experts, you can learn how to handle rare books, how to tell a quarto from an octavo, how paper is made and where watermarks come from, how to read and write a collation, how to use a scholarly edition and more. These videos offer a useful resource for mastering research techniques that can be difficult to learn from a book.

 

The videos are presented by scholars at Scottish Universities, and they make use of the extraordinary collections of the University of Edinburgh Library and the National Library of Scotland. We'll be adding to the series of videos over time, so check the CHB website regularly, and let us know what other topics you'd like to see covered."

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[Resource Manager]

TRISMEGISTOS

 

"An interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources formerly Egypt and the Nile valley (800 BC-AD 800), now expanding to the Ancient World in general"

Website

[Resource Manager]

OTTC: A Blog for Old Testament Textual Criticism
 

"This blog is intended to be an outlet for research and questions on the textual criticism of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and related issues."

Home

Online Digital Manuscripts and Editions
 

Last updated 6 May 2016

 

"This page is a list of digital images of manuscripts and editions available online. This catalogue should be viewed as a work in progress, and I will continue to update it with new resources. It is by no means complete, but I hope it will be helpful for those looking for a one-stop portal for finding online primary resources that are significant for the study of the Old Testament text. Please post any additional sources you may be aware of in the comments, and I will incorporate them into the main list." 

 

Link

[Resource Manager]

Gospel of Jesus's Wife Likely a Fake, Bizarre Backstory Suggests

 

By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor | June 17, 2016 02:58pm ET

 

"A papyrus holding text that suggests Jesus Christ was married and whose authenticity has been a matter of intense debate since it was unveiled in 2012 is almost certainly a fake."

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[Resource Manager]

Of interest:
 

August 11, 2016

 

A Don's Life: What does the Latin actually say?

 

"People often imagine that if you 'know Latin' you can read more or less any bit of the language that is put in front of you (much like what you can do if you 'know French'). It isn't really like that at all. OK, there are some easy bits. A basic tombstone doesn't present much of a problem. After all most epitaphs are  pretty formulaic, with a few additional idiosyncratic, personal details. And quite a lot of what you read in Latin, you have read before, at least by my age."

 

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[Resource Manager]

Blog Archive

 

Mission Accomplished

 

8/3/2016

 

by Robert D. Marcello, Research Manager

 

"The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) is proud to announce the completion of our digitization project at the National Library of Greece (NLG)! Beginning in 2015 and continuing into 2016, we have spent months working at the National Library digitizing their entire collection of Greek New Testament manuscripts. This collection is one of the largest in the world and has a multitude of priceless treasures, which are now digitally preserved for generations to come."

 

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[Resource Manager]

Syriac Christians Revive Ancient Language Despite War

 

 August 17, 2016    

 

Civil Society, Culture & Art, Syria

 

QAMISHLI – "The Syriac-Assyrian Christians in Syria’s Hasakah, like other communities in the province, are trying to  revive their language and have education in their mother-tongue. The ongoing instability in the country has given the Syriac-Assyrians an opportunity to have education in their own language."

 

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[Resource Manager]

Discover One of the World's Great Collections of Greek Manuscripts

 

"The Greek manuscript collections at the British Library range from the 3rd century BCE to the early 20th century CE. Written on papyrus, parchment and paper, and produced in regions as diverse as Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, Italy, France, and England, they reveal the enduring significance of Greek culture and learning over the centuries."

 

Link

[Resource Manager]

Open Access Journal: Textus: Annual of the Hebrew University Bible Project

 

[First posted in AWOL 4 July 2013, updated 22 September 2016] 

 

Textus: Annual of the Hebrew University Bible Project

 

ISSN: 0082-3767

 

Link

[Resource Manager]

Aramaic Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls

 

by Andrew B. Perrin

 

"Readers of the New Testament may know that Jesus’ native language was likely Aramaic, the language of the first-century Jews living in the Galilee. Aramaic was not a “native” tongue but an imported one, imposed during the waves of imperial occupation of the near East by Assyria and Persia, where it was the official language. This imperial history is reflected in the pages of the Bible itself, where certain texts were actually composed in Aramaic, including Gen 31:47, Jer 10:11, Ezra 4:8-6:18, Ezra 7:12-26, and Dan 2:4b-7:28. 2Kgs 18:26 illustrates this linguistic history and the tension it created between regional groups and imperial powers."

 

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[Resource Manager]

A Curious Student Dug Through a Box in the Archives — and Unearthed a Centuries-Old Geneva Bible

 

By Sarah Larimer October 14, 2016

 

"Sam Bussan says he was almost ready to split for the day.

 

It was late one September afternoon, and Bussan, a junior at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, was getting ready to leave the school’s archives, where he worked.

 

But as he was walking out, Bussan spotted a sign on a shelf.

 

“Bibles four boxes,” the sign read."

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[Resource Manager]

Two New Greek New Testament  Papyri from Oxyrhynchus

4/21/2017 

 

"Two new Greek NT papyrus fragments from Oxyrhynchus have been identified: one of Ephesians and one of 1 Timothy. These fragments, already assigned Gregory-Aland numbers, were just published in the latest volume of the Oyrhynchus Papyri--P.Oxy. 81. Dr. Geoff Smith, the author of the Ephesians fragment, has uploaded the editions of both fragments on his Academia.edu site. (Side note: Geoff and I were both featured in a New York Times piece in 2015.)"

 

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[Resource Manager]

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

 

APRIL 24, 2017

 

The Inception and Idiom of the Apocalypse in the Qumran Aramaic Texts

 

by Andrew Perrin in Articles

 

THE INTERSECTION OF APOCALYPSES AND ARAMAIC IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

 

"Over the years scholars have increasingly noted that the preponderance of ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature was penned in Aramaic, not Hebrew. Statements of this nature are found as early as the 1979 Uppsala conference and as recently as the 2012 Nangeroni meeting of the Enoch Seminar. In view of this, the Aramaic texts that have been the subject of this forum provide a new space to explore how ancient Jewish writers at once contributed to the development of the apocalypse and deployed it to advance ideas on a host of topics ranging from history and empire, to temple and priesthood, to identity and otherness, to name but a few. While research on the Qumran Aramaic texts has only recently come to the fore in Dead Sea Scrolls studies, there are at least four items within these materials that illumine the formation and background of ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature. These are outlined here with select examples in order to point the way forward for future conversations on the intersection of apocalypses and Aramaic in the Qumran library."

 

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[Resource Manager]

Tzaraat in Light of Its Mesopotamian Parallels

 

Notwithstanding its lengthy coverage of tzaraat (צרעת, biblical “leprosy”), why does the Torah omit discussion of its cause (sin?), its infectiousness, and its treatment?  Comparison to the Mesopotamian rituals pertaining to a strikingly similar disease (Saḫaršubbû) shows that these omissions were far from accidental.

 

Dr. Yitzhaq Feder

 

24 April 2017

 

"He is diagnosed as sick, but never treated. He is banished from the community, but not contagious. He offers a guilt offering (אשם), but his sin is left unstated. Who is this meṣor‘a, and what is this disease called tzaraat?"

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[Resource Manager]

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

 

May 01, 2017

 

Between Mesopotamia and Qumran: Cuneiform Literature and Jewish Aramaic Texts of the Second Temple Period

 

by Henryk Drawnel in Articles

 

SCRIBAL CRAFT IN VISIONS OF LEVI AND MESOPOTAMIAN LEXICAL LISTS

 

"At the end of the nineteenth century two large portions of Visions of Levi (so-called Aramaic Levi Document) were found in the Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Seven fragmentary Qumran manuscripts (1Q21, 4Q213, 4Q213a, 4Q213b, 4Q214, 4Q214a, 4Q214b), dated to the early and late Hasmonean period, mostly overlap with the Genizah documents and with their Greek translation found in one of the Mt. Athos manuscripts (Ms. Koutloumousiou 39). This priestly composition contains a large didactic section in which Isaac teaches Levi priestly law."

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[Resource Manager]

Ancient Manuscripts from St. Catherine's Monastery Available Online

 

5/2/2017

 

"More than 1,600 ancient manuscripts from the renowned Eastern Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai have been made available online! The images, digitized from older microfilms, are of very good quality. Here is one such image of Greek Manuscript 212, a ninth century Greek lectionary "miniature codex" classified in the Gregory-Aland system as l 846:"

 

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