Phoenix Seminary's Text & Canon Institute has uploaded video recordings of two lectures on the history of the OT text. These are aimed at a popular audience, but it is nice to see the speakers' take on the issues.
Peter Gentry, Chaos Theory and the Text of the Old Testament
Anthony Ferguson, Listening to the Dead Sea Scrolls
Showing posts with label Lectures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lectures. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Saturday, June 23, 2012
"How We Got Our Bible"
The audio for the seminar I gave on "How We Got Our Bible" at Calvary Chapel Birmingham (UK) recently is now online at http://sermon.net/calvarychapelbirmingham. It is a very brief two-hour lay introduction to issues of canon, textual criticism, and translation.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Calvary Chapel Birmingham - "How We Got Our Bible"
Today I got to do a two-hour presentation at Calvary Chapel Birmingham (UK) on "How We Got Our Bible." We surveyed three major editorial issues that underly our English translations.
1) Which books do we include in our Bibles? (canon)
2) Which text of these books do we include in our Bibles? (textual criticism)
3) How do we translate these books into English? (translation)
It was a very brief overview of the issues for a lay audience, but I hope it was clear enough and gave some helpful context for using our English Bibles.
We also did a practical demonstration of textual criticism afterwards by letting participants hand copy a paragraph I had written summarizing the manuscript tradition. I then selected four manuscripts and attempted to reconstruct the original text. We succeeded in reconstructing it exactly for all but a few small cases. In the original, long numbers were written out, whereas in the manuscripts they all became abbreviated as digits. Similarly, the word "and" became "&" or "+". Also, the first copyist committed parablepsis and lost six or seven words, an error which was found in all of the manuscripts we examined. It was a very illuminating exercise for those who stuck around afterwards.
1) Which books do we include in our Bibles? (canon)
2) Which text of these books do we include in our Bibles? (textual criticism)
3) How do we translate these books into English? (translation)
It was a very brief overview of the issues for a lay audience, but I hope it was clear enough and gave some helpful context for using our English Bibles.
We also did a practical demonstration of textual criticism afterwards by letting participants hand copy a paragraph I had written summarizing the manuscript tradition. I then selected four manuscripts and attempted to reconstruct the original text. We succeeded in reconstructing it exactly for all but a few small cases. In the original, long numbers were written out, whereas in the manuscripts they all became abbreviated as digits. Similarly, the word "and" became "&" or "+". Also, the first copyist committed parablepsis and lost six or seven words, an error which was found in all of the manuscripts we examined. It was a very illuminating exercise for those who stuck around afterwards.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Big Valley Christian School
Today I had a great opportunity to discuss textual criticism and the reliability of the text of the Bible with the junior high students at Big Valley Christian School in Modesto, CA for their first chapel service of the year. I explained the basic premises of textual criticism, some of the more significant examples of the manuscript evidence available for the Bible, and also a few examples of text-critical problems. It was a very simple presentation, but I think they enjoyed it and hopefully learned something. The main conclusions to be drawn?
1) The Bibles has been preserved essentially through the ages with a very high degree of accuracy.
2) In some cases, textual criticism can help restore the original text more precisely.
1) The Bibles has been preserved essentially through the ages with a very high degree of accuracy.
2) In some cases, textual criticism can help restore the original text more precisely.
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