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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."

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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." 
 
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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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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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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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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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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."
 
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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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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."

Continued
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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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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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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?"

Continued
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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."

Continued
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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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Discarded History Exhibition Lifts the Lid on 1,000 Years of Medieval History

 

Published: 27 Apr 2017

 

"Treasures from the world’s largest and most important collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts – chronicling 1,000 years of history in Old Cairo – have gone on display in Cambridge today for a six-month-long exhibition at Cambridge University Library ..."

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Publication of Azusa Pacific University’s Dead Sea Scrolls to Enhance Biblical Scholarship

 
News Release
 
May 17, 2017
 
"Azusa Pacific University announces the long-awaited formal publication of rare Dead Sea Scroll (DSS) manuscripts from its Special Collections library. In 2009, the university acquired five ancient biblical manuscripts for scholarly study and preservation for posterity. A faculty team from APU’s School of Theology has completed its systematic examination, transcription, and analysis of the 2000-year-old manuscripts. The highly anticipated official publication of these rare and fragile antiquities will appear as a volume in the prestigious Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project series in 2017."
 
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Old Testament Corpus Release

 

JUNE 12, 2017 / AMIR ZELDES 

 

"We are happy to announce the release of the automatically annotated Sahidic Old Testament corpus (corpus identifier: sahidic.ot), based on the version of the available texts kindly provided by the CrossWire Bible Society SWORD Project thanks to work by Christian Askeland, Matthias Schulz and Troy Griffitts."

 


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CULTURE

 

See An Ancient Ten Commandments Fragment Digitized By Cambridge Digital Library

 

June 22, 2017 By Jake Romm

 

If you’re looking for some light weekend reading, well, the Cambridge Digital Library has got you covered — that is, if you can read ancient Hebrew text. As Open Culture reports, the Library digitized the Nash Papyrus, “a second-century BCE fragment containing the text of the Ten Commandments followed by the Šemaʿ,” back in 2012. The papyrus is named after Egyptologist Dr. Walter Llewllyn Nash who purchased the document in 1902 from an antiques dealer in Cairo. It is, with the exception of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known biblical text. Though the actual purpose of the Papyrus is unknown, the Library website states that, “it has been suggested that it is, in fact, from a phylactery (tefillin, used in daily prayer).”

 


 

H/t: PaleoJudaica

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Monday, August 07, 2017
 
Luke & Acts (7): Caiaphas
 
(Posted by Michael J. Caba)
 
"This series of posts examines the historical reliability of the New Testament books of Luke and Acts by comparing these books to other ancient textual sources and the archaeological record. Supplemental information of additional interest is often given as well."

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A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
 
Volume 22 (2017)
 
 
 
 

Welcome

 
TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (ISSN 1089-7747) is a peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to study of the Jewish and Christian biblical texts. Details of the journal are provided on the About page while current and past issues are accessed through the Contents page.
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Why the Hebrew Bible is so Easy/Difficult to Interpret
 
See Also: How to Read the Torah
 
By Kenneth Seeskin
Northwestern University
January 2018
 
"Any interpreter of the Hebrew Bible faces a number of challenges. It is not just that the text describes a prescientific culture that lived over 2,500 years ago. That much could be said of Homer’s Iliad. It is rather that the Bible contains a number of features that make it unique."

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How did they Read the Bible in Jesus’ Time?
 
JANUARY 30, 2018
 
"As I began researching my latest book Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus, I realized that a basic question was a puzzle to me. How did people actually study their Bible in his time, considering that few people owned scrolls, and many (especially women) were illiterate? Ancient witnesses say that the Jews of Jesus’ time were quite knowledgeable of their Scriptures, our Old Testament. Where did they study and learn them?"

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