classics digests, reflections and reviews
This is the eighth instalment of my blog series on the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB). As I wrote in the prelude, this exercise has a three-fold purpose, to satisfy my personal curiosity, to demonstrate as a proof of concept how information technology (IT) can boost NT studies, and how valuable scholarly resources like LDAB can be used to educate the general reader. IT can and will definitely further […]
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A historical question that interests me personally is the formation of the New Testament Canon, viz. how the 27 books of the New Testament, which were separately composed and transmitted, became collected into one body and regarded as the standard for Christian doctrine and practice. The word “canon” is derived from a Greek word meaning rule or standard. I’d like to explore, by examining the manuscript metadata, whether the New […]
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T. S. Eliot writes that culture is what makes life worth living. Zweig drives that point home with his haunting memoirs, and his own life. He committed suicide together with his wife shortly after finishing his memoirs. European culture had been irrevocably lost to him, and life without culture was not worth living. The act of writing the memoirs was a heroic attempt to preserve European culture, which was preserved […]
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The following table lists the earliest dated manuscripts of all 39 books of the Old Testament, sorted in ascending order by the date assigned according to LDAB[1]. To be consistent with the Hebrew Bible, which consists of 24 books, the twelve minor prophets, including Amos, Habakkuk, Haggai, Hosea, Joel, Jonah, Malachi,Micah, Nahum, Obadiah, Zechariah and Zephaniah, are listed as one book. 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and […]
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The following table lists the earliest dated Greek manuscripts of all 27 books of the New Testament, sorted by the dates assigned according to Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB)[1] and New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR) [2]. It includes all manuscripts dated to between the 2nd and 4th century by both LDAB and NTVMR. The Gospels and the majority of Paul’s epistles are dated to before mid-3rd century. P52 […]
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Parchment (in green) is the dominant manuscript material for Abrahamic religions, namely Christianity, Judaism and Islam, whereas papyrus (in blue) is the dominant material for pagan religions (Figure 1). Of all Greco-Roman manuscripts in roll form, only five are on parchment, compared to over three thousand on papyrus. The roll is the predominant book form for their literary texts, so the predominant material for Greco-Roman manuscripts is papyrus. This is […]
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The classical authors listed above have the most surviving manuscripts, and they have also been cited by other ancient authors. I combined both these factors when ranking their popularity in the ancient world. The list includes epic poets (Homer, Hesiod, Vergil), orators (Demosthenes, Isocrates), philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Chrysippus), writers of tragedy and comedy, lyric poets, historians (Herodotus, Xenophon) and physicians (Hippocrates, Galenus). Not surprisingly, Homer is on top of […]
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