Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The differentiation of the words of Jesus -(between those attributed to a terrestrial figure, those attributed to a risen/heavenly figure, and those of the latter transferred to the former)- is such a basic feature of NT and patristic studies that we perhaps become anaesthetised to it. A wake-up cal...

Poet's corner. Ovid, Tristia 1.7, claims that on the eve of exile he burnt his own unrevised manuscript of the Metamorphoses, and that it only survives thanks to unauthorised copies. This may, of course, be a convenient way of forestalling criticism. But it does witness an author's inability to cont...

An excursus on unorthodox methods of book dissemination. Two features not enjoyed by traditional forms of publication were mass distribution, and a fixed text. In sharp contrast, documents from the imperial chancellary benefiited from both. Decrees and letters would circulate widely, and achieve per...

An excursus on letter collections. Jerome, Letter 102, to Augustine : "..copies of a letter addressed by someone apparently to me have come hither. In the said letter I am exhorted to sing the παλινωδια, confessing mistake in regard to a paragraph of the apostle's writing, and to imitate Stesic...

mbuckley3, Nice post! I had contributed a more crude version in the past (2017): https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=75401#p75401 But it is all in unicode Greek with English translations. Enjoy. DCH DCH Many thanks - A) for taking time out, as an Old Master, to read this stuff B) for do...

An excursus on υπομνηματα The distinction outlined in the OP between υπομνηματα/commentarii/'notebooks' and finished works is basic. But there was a sub-set of υπομνηματα which was published as such in deliberate preference to a 'polished' composition. Parallel to the rhetorical tradition there had ...

Recapitulations : additional illustrations of items on this thread A) An unfinished text sent out for 'peer review' could be the source of an unauthorised copy. Cicero, Letters to Atticus 13.21a : "Come now, do you really think you ought to publish without my orders?..Do you really think anyone...

So, it is intrinsic to this method of book production that the only reliable version of a text was the autograph manuscript, or what I have termed an authorised copy, one marked up and corrected by the author himself (which, in a dictated work, would have been the form of the original anyway). An au...

When patristic writers 'misquote' biblical texts, it is an open question whether they are misremembering 'our' text, are accurately reproducing a (valid?) variant text, or freely adapting 'our' version to fit the context of their argument. Galen's project, the recovery of Hippocrates' original teach...

Another (limited) method of authorial control over his text, at least at the elite level, was the depositing of an 'authorised' copy in a civic or imperial library. Galen, 'On Avoiding Distress' 21 : "Everything had already been written in two copies for distribution [προς εκδοσιν], excluding w...