Earliest manuscript fragment of Mark rumour

There's nothing more likely to get the blogs all talking than a rumour about a newly discovered manuscript fragment.  See Jim Davila on Paleojudaica, James McGrath on Exploring our Matrix, Peter Head on Evangelical Textual Criticism (with tons of comments), Joel Watts at Unsettled Christianity,  Jim West and others.  The basic gist is that Dan Wallace, in a debate last week with Bart Ehrman, made the following claim:

Bart had explicitly said that our earliest copy of Mark was from c. 200 CE, but this is now incorrect. It’s from the firstcentury. I mentioned these new manuscript finds and told the audience that a book will be published by E. J. Brill in about a year that gives all the data.

I'll throw in a couple of quick things in.  The first is that the claim is, of course, hopelessly vague, and that the promised Brill publication "in about a year" may well mean that the book in question is not even in press yet.  Authors are typically over-optimistic about when they think the press will publish their work and if the author is saying "about a year", my guess is that s/he has not let go of the manuscript yet.

It's also worth adding that it is a fair guess that this manuscript discovery is connected with Scott Carroll (HT Matthew Hamilton) who tweeted on 1 December 2011: 

For over 100 years the earliest known text of the New Testament has been the so-call John Rylands Papyrus. Not any more. Stay tuned .

I am staying tuned but there is nothing more yet.  I'd guess that Carroll is connected with Wallace's announcement given the unlikelihood that there are two such discoveries at the same time, and given the similar contacts the two figures have (e.g. both are part of a series on The Bible's Survival and Success).  However, it is worth noting that Wallace remarked that the "world-class paleographer" in question had "no religious affiliation" and this does not appear to be the case with Carroll, who is advertised as an expert on, among other topics, "the Authenticity of the Bible".

I would also add at this point that it is always good on these occasions to begin with a healthy scepticism.  As often, the hunt for the lost Doctor Who episodes provides a good analogy with New Testament textual criticism. There have been rumours over the years that a new discovery of one of the lost episodes is about to be discovered, and often these come to nothing.  As with manuscripts, we should wait for the physical evidence before we get our hopes up.

Update (Tuesday, 6.41): sage comments from Stephen Carlson on Hypotyposeis.

Update (Tuesday, 9.01): Larry Hurtado weighs in with similarly useful comments.

Biblioblog Carnival February 2012

When you are away from the blogs as often as I tend to be these days, it's great to have a Biblioblog Carnival  to help you catch up.  This one is by Amanda Mac on Cheese-Wearing Theology and it's a nice treat to have it divided up along lines dictated by Babylon 5, surely one of the best TV series of all time.

What is the trouble with Q?

In a recent article in Bible and Interpretation, Dan Smith reflects on The Trouble with Q.  But the troubles he is talking about are not those niggles that make some of us question the existence of Q, the Minor Agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark, the Mark-Q overlaps, the weakness of the arguments for Luke's independence from Matthew and so on, but the way that many scholars fail to take the implications of the Q theory seriously.  Like Kloppenborg, Dan draws attention to facile appeals to Q's hypothetical nature by those who refuse to think through what the existence of Q means for our reconstructions of Christian Origins.

But is this really the trouble with Q?  I am puzzled by Dan's focus on scholars who are uninterested in the Synoptic Problem and Q.  Those who have not invested time in studying the problem are unlikely to want to engage seriously with the implications of the hypothesis.  In my own experience, the same set of scholars, the so-called "lazy" believers in Q, are equally unwilling to invest time in engaging with Q sceptical scholarship like my own. 

It is never easy in scholarship to find yourself in a position where you are telling other people that they should be interested in what you are studying.  Engaging other scholars' interest is always tough, and it is especially tough in areas like the study of the Synoptic Problem, which requires a lot of hard work and a degree of technical expertise. 

There is always the option, though, of seeking out dialogue partners among those who are already interested in the problem.  Dan alludes to those who do not accept the existence of Q but he does not mention them by name, much less engage them directly.  Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my memes relates to the Farrer Theory getting ignored in scholarship, but I am usually in those contexts talking about introductory-level works, textbooks and the like.  It is, however, something that happens in the higher-level work too.

The problem is that there is a major alternative to the Q hypothesis and critical engagement with it can help to clarify and focus the bigger picture questions that Dan mentions here, about the degree of diversity in early Christianity, in particular the question of the role played by Jesus' death.  Dan talks about engaging with people who may help with refining the Q hypothesis, but a healthy hypothesis is also one that engages with those who are attempting to refute it.

Let me offer one example of how this works.  Dan talks about taking seriously Q's silence about the salvific death of Jesus, the resurrection and the term "Christ".  Arguments about silence are often worth hearing and in the case of a text like the Gospel of Thomas, its silence on these same features is indeed worth some serious thought.  There is a difference in the case of Q, however, that makes any study of its silence problematic.  Given that the document is reconstructed on the basis of Matthew's and Luke's double tradition, there is always the possibility that it is not Q that is silent on the matters in question but that Matthew and Luke are silent in their witness to Q's contents.  

Dan talks about what he regards as similar difficulties in reflecting on Matthew, noting that there are many things we do not know about Matthew, its author, whether he wrote other materials and so on.  But we do have textual witnesses to Matthew that are pretty clear about the scope, parameters and wording of the work, the very things that are absent in the case of Q.   Indeed, the absence of any kind of textual witness to Q is one of the things that invites us to consider the alternative, that the kind of close verbatim agreement that Dan discusses may be evidence not for a lost document but for a direct link between Matthew and Luke.  

In other words, the hypothetical nature of Q is indeed relevant in this discussion.  Dan is right that the hypothetical nature of Q should not be used as an excuse for a refusal to think.  The real issue, though, is that Q's hypothetical nature is an invitation always to think about live alternatives.  To imagine a world without Q is surely one of the best ways of testing a model where Q is central.

To put it another way, what are the chances that Dan's essay will be noticed by those who are his targets?  At least the Q sceptics are willing to have the conversation.

Death of Frederick Danker

I was sorry to hear from Jim West that Frederick Danker died earlier today, also mentioned on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

Update (Friday): Rod Decker has a tribute on the NT Resources Blog.

Wilfred Lambert Obituaries

I posted on the death my former colleague Wilfred Lambert in December.  Jim West followed up his earlier posts with a notice that Wilfred Lambert was featured on Last Word, Radio 4's regular obituaries programme.  Although the podcast version is no longer available, you can listen again to the episode.

Now also the Telegraph has published its obituary: 

Professor Wilfred Lambert
Professor Wilfred Lambert, the Assyriologist who has died aged 85, was a scholar of ancient Mesopotamia and the world’s leading expert on cuneiform, an ancient form of writing which began as a system of pictographs and, over three millennia, developed into a more simplified and abstract script.

Returning to the Talpiot Tomb

There is a new article over on Bible and Interpretation about the Talpiot Tomb, the tomb alleged by Simcha Jacobovici and others to have been Jesus' family's own tomb, widely discussed in the media and here in the blogs back in 2007.  I was sceptical and have remained sceptical (see NT Blog: Talpiot Tomb for some of my many posts on the topic).  The new article is by Kevin Kilty and Mark Elliott, Regarding Magness and Talpiot and it provides an answer to comments made by my colleague down the road at UNC Chapel Hill, Jodi Magness.  The article is attracting some comment among the blogs and over on the Biblical Studies e-list, as well as in the comments section over on Bible and Interpretation.

I enjoyed reading the new article, and I appreciate the even-handed and careful nature of Kilty's and Elliott's response.  The article continues in a series of articles that they have written on the topic over the last three or four years.  I am particularly pleased to see Kilty and Elliott playing down one of the most egregiously problematic elements in Jacobovici's case, the notion that "Mariamne" was an especially appropriate way of designating Mary Magdalene, a claim that Jacobovici regarded as the lynchpin of the  case.

Nevertheless, there are still a couple of major problems, as I see it, with the way that Kilty and Elliott are presenting the case for the identification:

(1) They claim that "Yoseh" is significant because it is rare, a claim that does not take the New Testament evidence seriously.

(2) They do not regard "Judas son of Jesus" as contradictory evidence for the identification with the Jesus family.

The difficulty over (1) is that the names Joses and Joseph are clearly regarded as similar or the same in the New Testament. Mark 6.3 calls Jesus' brother "Joses" while the parallel in Matt. 13.55 calls him "Joseph".  Matthew clearly regards Joseph as an alternative, preferable way of saying "Joses".  Likewise, the character who appears in Mark 15.40 and 15.47 is called Joses in Mark and Joseph the Matthean parallel (Matt. 27.56).  Moreover, the fact that this character may be a different character than the brother of Jesus also witnesses against the alleged extraordinary nature of the name. The same Joseph / Joses variation is found in the texts too, and not just here in Matthew but also in Acts 4.36, Joses / Joseph Barnabas.

The difficulty with (2) is that there is simply no evidence that Jesus had a son called Judas. (As a commenter on this blog once facetiously said, "How likely is it that Jesus would have named his son Judas?!"). This might sound like a simple point, but I am afraid that it needs to be taken seriously. The whole case for the identity of the Talpiot Tomb with Jesus' family is based on the idea of an extraordinary positive correlation between clusters of names. It is unacceptable when calculating probabilities to ignore contradictory evidence like this.

The difficulty over Judas son of Jesus is already clear in the Jacobovici presentation.  On the page Judah son of Jesus, we read:

The most controversial ossuary pulled from the Tomb of the Ten Ossuaries was undoubtedly the one inscribed “Judah, son of Jesus,” the ossuary of a child. If indeed the tomb uncovered in East Talpiot in 1980 is that of Jesus and his family, and if indeed Jesus of Nazareth had a son, this ossuary contradicts dramatically nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition.

The difficulty ought to be immediately apparent.  The whole case is based on the idea of an extraordinary correlation between the names in the tomb, but here there is an admission that in fact one of the ossuaries "contradicts dramatically nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition" (emphasis added).  In a case that requires extraordinary correlation, extraordinary contradiction simply will not do.

Update (Friday, 7.03): James McGrath has a helpful round up of links to recent discussion.

Jesus, Criteria and the Demise of Authenticity

Jesus, Criteria and the Demise of Authenticity is edited by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne and it will be out this summer, published by T & T Clark.   I have contributed an article the volume entitled "Criticizing the Criterion of Multiple Attestation: The Historical Jesus and the Question of Sources".  The book also features essays by Morna Hooker, Dale Allison, Scot McKnight, Loren Stuckenbruck, Jens Schroeter, Dagmar Winter, Rafael Rodriguez and the editors.

Here's how T & T Clark are blurbing the book:
------
Criteria of authenticity, whose roots go back to before the pioneering work of Albert Schweitzer, have become a unifying feature of the so-called Third Quest for the Historical Jesus, finding a prominent and common place in the research of otherwise differing scholars. More recently, however, scholars from different methodological frameworks have expressed discontent with this approach to the historical Jesus. In the past five years, these expressions of discontent have reached a fever pitch.

The internationally renowned authors of this book examine the nature of this new debate and present the findings in a cohesive way aimed directly at making the coalface of Historical Jesus research accessible to undergraduates and seminary students. The book’s larger ramifications as a thorough end to the Third Quest will provide a pressure valve for thousands of scholars who view historical Jesus studies as outmoded and misguided. This book has the potential to guide Jesus studies beyond the Third Quest and demand to be consulted by any scholar who discards, adopts, or adapts historical criteria.
-----
Sounds interesting, doesn't it? There is a conference associated with the book and I'll be blogging about that tomorrow.

Duke Holy Land Archaeology

Thanks to Eric Meyers for this great picture of our students spelling out the name of our favourite university in the Caesarea theater, taken last week during the Holy Land Archaeology at Duke course run by Eric Meyers and Carol Meyers on behalf of the Religion department.

You can read all about the trip over on the Holy Land Archaeology blog, with lots of detailed reflections from the students involved and some great pictures too.

Star of Bethlehem (1912) available online

One of the oldest Bible films is now available to watch in toto online, The Star of Bethlehem (Lawrence Marston, 1912):

The Star of Bethlehem (1912) from Ned Thanhouser on Vimeo.

Thanks to David Shepherd for the notice. You can see the film in context here: Star of Bethlehem It is part of the Thanhouser Company's Film Preservation site. Edwin Thanhouser was the force behind the film. For more on the Star of Bethlehem, see the Bible Films Blog post on the film, and links there.

Hilarious but Adorable Nativity Clip

This made my day -- an adorable video of a Nativity play with one of the angels stealing the show. Thanks to AKMA and Tim Gombis for sharing on Fb. I guarantee you'll enjoy it.

 

Death of Wilfred Lambert, Obituary and Reflections

Jim West reports on the sad news of the death of Prof. Wilfred Lambert and links to a nice, detailed obituary in the Birmingham Post:

Birmingham-born historian and archaeologist Wilfred Lambert dies

I got to know Professor Lambert while I was at the University of Birmingham between 1995 and 2005.  He was unfailingly gracious and kind-spirited though I must admit to thinking him, at times, a little eccentric.  He was a regular in the coffee room in the Arts Building and I remember many interesting conversations with him there.  He would always try to get to our Biblical Studies colloquium and on one occasion presented a paper.  I used to have to make a special effort to tell him about the colloquium because he never embraced email; everything was done the old-fashioned way.

I knew about his Christadelphian affiliations and remember his disdain for a lot of modern medicine, and especially modern drugs.  I had not realized until reading the obituary, though, that he was so thoroughly Brummy, born in Erdington, at King Edward's High School in Edgbaston (where many a great classicist studied) and so on.  Nor did I know that he was a conscientious objector during the war.

The obituary has a little (but important) mistake:

His knowledge of ancient eastern history could not be bettered and in January 2010 Prof Lambert and colleague Dr Irving Finkel identified pieces from a cuneiform tablet that was inscribed with the same text as the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay artefact dating from 6 BC praising the rule of Babylon monarch King Cyrus The Great.

It should, of course, be the 6th Century BC.  Details about that discovery are found in a press release at the British Museum (scroll down to 23 January 2010).

Bethlehemian Rhapsody

I really love this. As I've said before, there are not enough puppets on the NT blog:

 

Thanks to Stephen Carlson, Judy Redman and Trevor Hawes for posting this on Fb.

Biblical Studies Carnival 69

The latest and unbelievably comprehensive Biblical Studies Carnival is up:

Biblical Studies Carnival 69 (November 2011)

It is compiled by the ever-impressive Deane Galbraith and it is as lively as you would expect.  I am now proud to have met Deane, sadly only very briefly, in San Francisco last week.  

What if the Pauline letters were labelled after their sender?

Since we are towards the end of the semester, I am at that point in my NT intro course where we are looking at the (so-called) Catholic Epistles.  It occurred to me yesterday that the genius of Paul's epistles is that they have nice memorable, catchy individual names like "Philippians" and "Galatians".  There is only one sequel  (2 Corinthians), possibly two (2 Thessalonians).

But what if Paul's letters were were named after their sender rather than his audiences?  Would Romans have worked as well if it were called 6 Paul?  Or 1 Corinthians if it were 2 Paul?  It's difficult to imagine, somehow.

It's a bit like the Bond films.  Would On Her Majesty's Secret Service have been as appealing if it were called James Bond 6?  Or Die Another Day if it were James Bond 20?  I doubt it.

Method and Meaning -- Harold Attridge Festschrift

I was delighted to receive today my copy of Andrew B. McGowan & Kent H. Richards, Method and Meaning: Essays on New Testament Interpretation in Honor of Harold W. Attridge (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011).  It's a massive volume, just under 600 pages, and aims to honour one of the great scholars of early Christianity of our time.

You can read a little more about the volume over on the SBL site -- front matter including introduction and table of contents -- and there is a nice flyer there too.  One of the two editors, Andrew McGowan,  has been blogging about it too, with more over on academia.edu too.

My essay in the volume is about the Synoptic Problem.  It's called "The Synoptic Problem: John the Baptist and Jesus" and it comes just after James Robinson's contribution (and there's an honour I never expected to have).   I know -- surprise, surprise! -- Goodacre is writing about the Synoptic Problem again!  But in my defence, I was asked to write on the topic, and the idea of the volume is that it will not simply be one of those Festschriften that allows scholars to throw in any old piece they happen to have been working on.  Rather, it looks to provide a volume that will be of use to students of the NT and early Christianity, looking at the major methods in the field and applying them to specific texts.  Seriously, I am absolutely delighted to have been invited to participate in what looks to be a fantastic volume.  I have already begun delving into it.  

There was a reception in honour of Harold Attridge at the SBL this year, at which this volume was presented, on the Friday evening, and it was very clear just how well-loved and greatly respected Harold Attridge is in the guild.  My hope is that this volume will contribute in some way to honouring the wonderful contribution that he has made to enriching the study of early Christianity.

Pods, blogs and other time-wasters

I have been invited by the Student Advisory Board at the Society of Biblical Literature to speak at a session on the "Wired-in Generation".  It is on Saturday at 1pm and the details of the program are at the bottom of this post.  My title is "Pods, Blogs and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship?"

Putting "pods" at the front of that title is a deliberate and self-indulgent reference to my own attempts at podcasting, something that at this point still marks out my own online output as a little different from others'.  In spite of the massive proliferation of academic blogs in recent years, there are still relatively few podcasts around, thinking especially of genuine podcasts, i.e. programmes produced specially for the occasion of disseminating via the internet, and not just online recordings of lectures.

Having produced the NT Pod for over two years now, I am still struck at how podcasting differs from a lot of the other stuff one does online.  Somehow, perhaps because it takes so much longer to prepare, record and produce a podcast than it does to blog, it feels like it has a longevity that the blogs lack.  But perhaps it is just that it is a relatively new medium.  Perhaps podcasts will, in the long run, go the way of other experiments on the net and will come to be seen as "of their time", dated, forgettable, a waste of time.

My title is, of course, slightly facetious given that I have "wasted" a huge amount of my own time in online activities.  First, back in the mid to late 90s, it was the e-lists.  I still remember the thrill of participating in the e-lists, first b-greek and Crosstalk and later also Synoptic-L and several others.  The late 90s were their hey-day.  Back then, the whole world was not on email and it now seems extraordinary to imagine that it was actually a thrill to receive an email.  And to receive emails from all around the world and to be able to reply instantly, arguing about some element of Greek grammar, or some theme in Historical Jesus scholarship -- it was genuinely exciting stuff.

I have similar memories of the early days of blogging, roughly a decade ago.  When Jim Davila began his Paleojudaica blog, I read it avidly.  It was the first blog I remember even being aware of.  It wasn't long before I wanted to begin my own, then as a sister to the New Testament Gateway site that I had been running since the late nineties, though later under its own NT Blog heading. Back then blogging was easy, innovative and fun.  With so few people blogging in our area, there were only a handful of blogs to read, and that gave one more time to write.  There was a thrill in exploring the new medium, and I loved it.

The email lists have not gone away, but their importance has diminished massively now that we are all desperately fighting to stay on top of the hoards of daily emails, longingly imagining that simpler world that we once inhabited with its letters, memos and time for reading.  Looking back on the heyday of the e-lists, I can't help thinking that I must have wasted a huge amount of time on them.  It really felt like it mattered when one was deep in debate with someone about some point of Greek grammar, or some argument for the existence of Q.  But what value was it really?  I am embarrassed to think of the boldness with which we circulated our half-baked opinions and relieved to think that lots of that stuff has vanished from the net, never to be seen again.

But what about blogs?  What about the time spent blogging?  Could it have been spent more profitably doing something else instead, like reading a book, taking a walk or sleeping? I remember how people would sometimes comment on the time stamps on my posts, so often written in the early hours of the morning.  I used to say that that was the only way that I could find time to blog, and I think I believed it.  Why didn't I just take life a little easier?  Or why didn't I write more real stuff and get more published?

3,604 posts in eight years.  Hundreds of thousands of words.  Hours, days, weeks of time wasted.  Why did I bother?  Why do any of us bother?  After all, I am not the most prolific blogger, not by a long shot.  How much time has been burned up by the likes of uber-bloggers like James McGrath, Jim West and Joel Watts?

Back in the early days of doing scholarship on the internet, I remember being asked by another scholar about the value of this sort of work, not, at that point, blogging, but e-lists, websites and the like.   I was working in the UK at the time where we had a thing called the "Research Assessment Exercise".  I wouldn't be able to submit any of my internet stuff to that, would I?  I was a little take aback by the question.  It had never even occurred to me that the internet stuff might be taking me away from proper scholarship, the kind of stuff that one could submit to the RAE.  Perhaps he was right; perhaps this is not the way for a true scholar to behave.

Anyone who has had a blog for a while will be aware of just how short our memories are.  When the same old question comes back around again -- there is a kind of blog cycle -- it is rare for one of us to say, "Oh, I remember a great post about that two or three years ago."  Blogs are ephemeral.  Blog posts do not endure.  Even if you keep a full archive of everything you have ever posted, the vast majority of your posts, the great bulk of activity, 99% of your output evaporates from consciousness.  Here today, gone tomorrow.

I have often been surprised at what I forget of my own blogging activity.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference in a recent article written by John Lyons, and published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, to something I had once said here about the conflict between the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment in historical Jesus research.  It was a good thought, I think, but one that I had completely forgotten. 

But here is another thought.  Perhaps I would have forgotten that idea forever if I had not blogged it.  Perhaps this is one of the values of a blog -- it is the chance to put down a marker in the sand, to share some thoughts, to put things out there and to see what happens.  Indeed, this is one of the values of the medium -- it is a little more than the casual conversation but a little less than the published piece.  It can occupy a kind of middle ground.  It is a sketch pad, but it is also interactive.  If you are lucky, people talk back.

A New Testament scholar once asked my advice on starting a blog in order to support his new book that was coming out, to give it a bit of extra publicity and to provide a place where people could come and interact with him about the book.  I advised caution.  Blogs that are set up to support publications seldom last very long, not least because they end up being rather self-possessed and narrow.  The most successful blogs, or the ones that I like reading, are those that range widely, blogs that chat about topics that are outside the narrowly defined area of a particular scholar's research interest, and touch on ephemera related more broadly to the discipline.

They are great for intellectual tidbits, the things you just can't resist sharing but know will never make it into one of your publications.  They are places for notes about teaching, for reflections on the funny side of scholarship, for research ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day.  And it's worth thinking too of those ideas that are better left to the blog alone, or would have better left even off the blog.  Sometimes blogging is all you need to do to convince yourself that an idea does not have legs and can be quietly dropped.

I don't think I'd advise anyone to start a blog unless there was a chance that they would be become an enthusiast.  In the end, it has to be its own reward.  The same is true with those other bits of public technology, podcasts, gateway sites, even the ones that now look long in the tooth, the e-lists, the scholarly websites.  That's why I don't regret the time I have spent online.  I have enjoyed it and it is just possible that it has made me a better scholar.  It's certainly given me some practice in writing, in interacting with others, and in improving my teaching.

I suppose that what I am saying to the graduate students is that it really is a waste of time to blog, to podcast, even to tweet, if you are doing it for its own sake, to gain recognition or something like that.  But if it's something you'd enjoy, it does have its rewards.  I sometimes think, "That's bloggable!" even if I don't get around to blogging it.  Or "I could do a podcast on that!" even when I never find the time to sit down and record.   And that's something that can keep you sane, which can't be a bad thing.

Engaging the "Wired-In Generation": Knowledge and Learning in the Digital Age
11/19/2011
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Room: 3002 - Convention Center

Theme: Hosted by the Student Advisory Board

Teresa Calpino, Loyola University of Chicago, Presiding
Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Pods, Blogs, and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship? (15 min)
Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University
On the Internet No One Knows You're a Grad Student, Or How Social Media Can Help You, Build You Up, and Tear You Down (15 min)
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
Videoconferencing in the Classroom: Broadening the Horizons of Students through Interactive Scholarly Exchange(15 min)
Discussion (30 min)

It's SBL again

The time has come for the SBL Annual Meeting again, when thousands of Biblical scholars all descend on some American city and hang out together for a few days, listening to good, bad and many mediocre papers, walking through the book exhibit, going to meetings, networking and, most importantly of all, socializing.

This year it is in San Francisco and travelling there from the east coast is almost like travelling from England.  You even have to cross several time zones.  As a result, I've got a horribly early start in the morning.

As usual, I'll be tweeting my way through the conference (follow me @goodacre)  I've just taken an early look and it appears that the hashtag of choice is going to be #SBLAAR.  

I always used to blog my way through the conference too, and used to enjoy it, and I'll see if I can do the same this time.  It can be a good way of staying awake in sessions, but it does depend also on not being too busy.

I look forward to seeing lots of you there.

Erasure History Conference

As I mentioned the other day, I went to an excellent conference on "Erasure History" in Toronto last weekend.  I tweeted through the event.  It was a genuinely outstanding conference, organized by John Marshall, and the qualities of the papers were excellent.  Tony Burke has some reflections on Apocryphicity.  My own paper imagined A World Without Mark and I've made it available here (PDF) for a while, with the usual remarks about it being work in progress and subject to revision, and so on.

Erasure History Conference

Tony Burke has already mentioned this, over on Apocryphicity, but there is a conference later this week (11-12 November) on Erasure History: Approaching the Missing Sources of Antiquity in Toronto.  Here is the blurb:

From Antiquity to the early middle ages, lost texts may outnumber survivors. The reconstructive efforts of historiography in general and textual editing in particular must grapple with the way in which the poverty of preservation conditions scholarly efforts. "Erasure History" names the effort to think through significant historical problems as if a crucial surviving source were instead among the lost. This endeavour of programmatically holding data in abeyance is meant to illuminate the conditions under which we actually labour and to facilitate fresh consideration of, and renewed humility before, the generative problems of Western historical scholarship. 

The purpose of the Erasure History Workshop is to bring together students and scholars from disciplines that study the ancient Mediterranean world historically to participate in a thought experiment with methodological significance. The workshop's participants will consider the status of "the archive" of Mediterranean Antiquity by abstaining from an important source in analysis of a literary/historical problem.

Several prominent scholars from North American Universities have been invited to think and write provisionally in contradiction to their specialized knowledge of a key topic in their field. The goal of the exercise is to understand better the problems under investigation by understanding better the status of the archive that is the basis for their analysis. The Erasure History Workshop will form the 47th instance of the Conference on Editorial Problems held annually at the University of Toronto.

I will be speaking on "A World without Mark" and John Kloppenborg will be responding. More details, full program and registration details here.

The Origin of the Symbol "Q"

An anonymous writer on the Sheffield Biblical Studies blog has a nice post on Why was ‘Q’ named ‘Q’: because ‘Q’ comes after ‘P’? in which s/he quotes R. H. Lightfoot's contention that the symbol "Q" did not originate in Germany but rather in England.  J. Armitage Robinson claimed that he used it in the 1890s as the letter coming after "P" in the alphabet.  For him, "P" stood for "Peter", the alleged source of Mark's Gospel.

It's a great myth of origins and while it is quite possible that Robinson introduced the term "Q" independently of the German scholarship, there is no question that the term is in fact first used in the German scholarship.  Frans Neirynck shows that the use of "Q." as an abbreviation for Quelle goes back to Eduard Simons, Hat der dritte Evangelist den kanonischen Matthäus benutzt (Bonn: Universitäts-Buchdruckerei von Carl Georgi, 1880).  It is then used as "Q", without the dot, from 1890 onwards, by Johannes Weiss, and with full critical self-awareness by Paul Wernle in 1899.  Some bibliography:

Frans Neirynck, "The Symbol Q (=Quelle), ETL 54 (1978): 119-25

Frans Neirynck, "Once More: The Symbol Q", ETL 55 (1979): 382-3

Frans Neirynck, "Note on the Siglum Q", Evangelica II (BETL 99; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), 474

See too the helpful summary in:

James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann and John S. Kloppenborg. The Sayings Gospel Q in Greek and English: with Parallels from the Gospels of Mark and Thomas (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002), 23-4