classics digests, reflections and reviews
Five years ago, I published a series of blogposts on the earliest New Testament manuscripts, in one of which I tabulated all Greek manuscripts of all 27 NT books that have been dated to between 2nd and 4th century by both LDAB and NTVMR[1]. This particular post and the series have become the most viewed posts of my otherwise obscure blog. Recently, one reader posed a question, “Where can I […]
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As I’ve recently updated the table of earliest New Testaments manuscripts, according to dates assigned by Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) and New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR), I thought it would be interesting to see how these two data sources compare with one another. Both LDAB and NTVMR hold detailed information on thousands of manuscripts, but only about three hundred are in common between them, that is, entries […]
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For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. –John 3:16 It seems fitting to spend some time during this Easter weekend to look at the textual history of one of the most famous verses in the entire Bible, John 3:16. A verse that captures the essence of Christianity. For this exercise, I wrote a […]
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The Back Story There is a Chinese saying, “You never regret how little knowledge you have until the time comes to use it”. Many times in the past two years, I was painfully reminded of that truth. When I started writing this “Exploring LDAB” series last year, I ventured into fields that were totally strange to me, and was forced to learn many things I had never thought of learning […]
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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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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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