Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Here are two examples where, because of failing eyesight, being read to aloud is a last resort. The clear implication is that Pliny and Jerome would normally read silently. Pliny, Letter 7.21 : "I am obedient to your commands, my dear colleague, and I really am taking care of my eyes according ...

Posts based on tenuous evidence are not unknown on this forum, but this is a necessarily speculative attempt to grasp some of the intangible influences on the literary tradition. Methodological rigour is not claimed. Rather, as John Moles wrote in another context, "..because the evidence is so ...

Of the 33, zero women, zero children, zero infants, 33 males. A military camp would have similar numbers. [/quote Au contraire, Stephan. Before the fully professional armies of the C19/C20, a large number of 'camp followers' - to use the old, polite term - would have been embedded within any milita...

There seems to be some confusion of categories here.Three points. Firstly, in the Imperial era, intertextual allusions and (adapted) quotations were regarded as the 'added value' of fine writing. To describe 2 Peter as the re-fashioning or adaptation of a previous text is a reasonable description. '...

One argument that I made against Clementine authorship years ago has (rightly or wrongly) been little noticed. http://hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2009/11/educational-and-initiatory-texts.html I argued that the letter attributed to Clement involves Neoplatonic ideas about mystical texts (as distinct fro...

Acts 13.9 : "But Saul, who is also Paul.." From this point on, apart from the 'conversion' accounts at 22.7,13, 26.14, the main protagonist is always styled Paul. No explanation is offered. Exegetes from Origen* onwards have thought it a problem requiring a solution. However, I (tentativel...

A footnote on libraries. It is a constant frustration that large portions of the works of, in particular, Roman historians are extant only in epitomes, whether ancient or medieval. One of the drivers for this was practical necessity, given the state of the books themselves. The 'mixed' condition of ...

Bernard Knox's splendidly bad-tempered article, referenced in the OP, should have put an end to the scholarly consensus that silent reading was virtually unknown before the fourth century. It did not. In the Classical Quarterly 47/1 (1997), the formidable and exasperated Myles Burnyeat made two cont...

The eyes have it again in this tale from Pausanias (10.38.13) : "The sanctuary of Asclepius I found in ruins, but it was originally built by a private person called Phalysius. For he had a complaint of the eyes, and when he was almost blind the god at Epidaurus sent to him the poetess Anyte, wh...

While the OP was about the curious assertion that a text's authenticity depended on its posthumous origin, Stephan's entertaining contributions serve as an excuse to remind readers of the classic case of actual/alleged 'ventriloquising the dead'. John Chrysostom, Homily 40 on 1 Corinthians, (on 1 Co...