classics digests, reflections and reviews
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 […]
Read moreMan as Scrooge Watching the movie “Scrooge” (1951) starring Alastair Sim has become part of Christmas tradition for me. I’ve seen other film adaptions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, but no actor conveys the joy of reclamation as infectiously as Sim did in the 1951 film. Scrooge was rich, but he lived as a poor wretch. He had no appreciation of human worth, neither the worth of his fellow human […]
Read more
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 […]
Read moreThere is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God. –Peter Kreeft, Professor of philosophy, Boston College In the fall of 1977, Voyagers I and II were sent into space, where they are expected to reach the edge of our galaxy. In the hope that someone somewhere would intercept these crafts, a variety of messages were placed on board that would be capable of communicating the […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read moreA Personal Anecdote Many years ago, I was having trouble finding a job after graduate school. The situation lasted for some time, and I became quite depressed [1]. In desperation, I prayed earnestly: I wrote down a specific list of things I was looking for in a job, and even made a vow that if I ever found one I would confess the name of Christ before everyone. It was sort […]
Read more