Archive for category: Textual Issues

Kevin Johnson writes, There are those who actually advocate that textual criticism is an essential thing for people to understand in practicing and exercising the faith.    I don’t need to advocate this, given that it is believers themselves who want to learn such matters when they ask “Where did we get our Bible?” and “Is the Bible we have today,

   During the past month, Dr. White gave an instructive primer on Textual Criticism, explaining the history of the transmission of the text, textual methods, and its practice in concrete Biblical examples. It should be self-evident that this apologetic field is essential for defending the faith and providing confidence that our source for the knowledge of God is true.    Because the

   For those who are really ambitious about learning textual criticism and want to place it in a concrete context (the various characteristics of the materials and the human process of making or copying actual manuscripts), I recommend the following classic primer on paleography, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Paleography, by Bruce M. Metzger.    Though someone with a

   A correspondent sent me a screen shot of his Logos program providing a textual comparison. Here is a shot of my Logos comparison screen, followed by BibleWorks doing the same kind of thing.

   Here’s an additional document for today’s DL (UBS2.pdf). I am hoping the landscape orientation doesn’t lose too much in the way of detail. Hopefully it will not. This will help to illustrate some common scribal errors, so download it and have it ready for the DL today. And here are some materials that I wish to make reference to as

   I pulled down an image of the end of Jeremiah and the beginning of Lamentations in Sinaiticus (a) from the British Museum. It is super high resolution (12 megs, 4000×5000 resolution). Here is a portion of it, just to give you a feeling of the nature of the manuscript. It is such a good quality picture you can see elements

   Why should you listen to the textual criticism series on the DL? Well, here is a brief portion of comments made by Islamic apologist Shabir Ally in our debate at Biola University last May regarding the text of the New Testament. How would you respond? It is my experience that especially Muslims are willing to repeat what leaders like Shabir

   This manuscript almost got me in trouble. I’ve told this story on the DL in the past, but I do not believe I have on the blog. This image comes from a book I purchased back in 1993 during the Papal visit to Denver. The “Papal Treasures” exhibit was in town, and Rich and I went to visit it one

   Jeff Downs sent me a link about the reading of 1 Timothy 3:16 in Codex Alexandrinus, and though I have a ton of things to be doing this morning before the DL (mainly packing!), I just could not resist taking the time to do what I love to do. Here’s a close up of the text. For those who are

I heard back from Dr. Robinson, and he mentioned that there is a better, fuller presentation of his position on line, available here. And he said he does read my blog! Made my day. Here is the argument Dr. Robinson presented, almost verbatim: It is peculiar that the na27/ubs4 editors would reason in such a manner, particularly since their own

I am tremendously honored to discover that Dr. Maurice Robinson, Senior Professor of New Testament and Greek at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (Wake Forest, NC) reads my blog, though, I realize, it may just be that someone forwarded the current blog entry to him for his comment (I’ll hope for the former, but expect the latter). Anyway, Dr. Robinson

Fast “weekend” so I’m behind already. Peoria, IL, this weekend, back Tuesday, gone again Thursday for LA and the debate/conference/cruise! Time is short, blogging will be brief for a while. So as to utilize my time better, I tried to find a textual variant in the New Testament that involved an infinitive but that would also allow me to make

The following was submitted by Colin Smith as a part of his studies at Columbia Evangelical Seminary Introduction The final goal of textual criticism is the recovery of the words of the original writers of Scripture out of the many manuscripts of the New Testament available to the scholar today.  Since the Scriptures are the very foundation of Christian belief,