classics digests, reflections and reviews
Sanctuary in Our Time According to a NPR report today, a Protestant Church in the Hague Netherlands has kept a nonstop service since Oct. 26 to protect an Armenian immigrant family from deportation, for what New York Times refers to as “an obscure Dutch law” forbids police from disrupting a church service. This reminds me of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which “sanctuary” protected Esmeralda from the gallows. […]
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In Preface of Book I, Augustine writes, “I treat of [City of God] both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat.” Augustine’s conception of time underlies his view of history. In his Confessions, his writes that time exists only within the material world as God’s creation, which is subject to […]
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Augustine of Hippo’s magnum opus The City of God is one of the greatest works of the Western intellectual tradition—so powerful, in fact, that one could argue all of Christian theology has been a series of footnotes to Augustine. — Charles Mathewes, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia In the beginning of 2010, I read Augustine’s Confessions for the very first time, and immediately followed up with City of […]
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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 Wounds and Glory of Alexander When the thigh of his father Philip had been pierced by a spear in battle with the Triballians, and Philip, although he escaped with his life, was vexed with his lameness, Alexander said, ‘Be of good cheer, father, and go on your way rejoicing, that at each step you may recall your valour.’… How, then, think you, did he glory in his own wounds, […]
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