classics digests, reflections and reviews
Old and New Testament Manuscripts, Textual Criticism, Exegesis and Hermeneutics
Previously in the “Exploring LDAB” blog series, I calculated roughly the manuscript coverage for every book in the New Testament. To my excitement, I’ve since found out that I can now calculate the New Testament manuscript coverage with precision. Thanks to the tremendous joint efforts of NT scholars and IT professionals, who have provided detailed manuscript information online. There are a total of 7957 verses in the New Testament. For […]
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Last year, I wrote a blog series on Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB), in which I queried the metadata of ancient manuscripts, including their bookform, material, manuscript counts, popularity of classical authors, and the historical formation of the New Testament Canon. To my pleasant surprise, that series became by far the most popular series in 2018. In this post, I’ll look into another topic related to the New Testament, […]
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I created an interactive map locating all New Testament manuscripts dated to the first four centuries, based on geographical data provided by Leuven Database of Ancient Books and OpenStreetMap. All the earliest New Testament manuscripts were found in Egypt, except one in Greece and another in Italy. It is interesting that locations of provenance (marked in blue and purple) are generally populous and accessible to travellers. For example, in Egypt […]
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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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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 […]
Read moreBackground and Disclaimer Almost three years ago, I wrote a series of posts on John Calvin’s “Institutes of Christian Religion“, one of which critiqued the principle of sola scriptura. A recent debate with a few Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians helped me appreciate Calvin’s position better than before. In the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it is fitting to write in defense of sola scriptura, the formal principle […]
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