Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

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...

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...