classics digests, reflections and reviews
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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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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