A Conference on Text and Tradition of the Hebrew Bible

The conference will also explore questions of text and tradition of the New Testament. It is scheduled for November 1-3 at St Michael’s College, part of the University of Toronto (HT: Rob Holmstedt). The sessions that are most likely to interest readers of this blog:

The conference will also explore questions of text and tradition of the New Testament. It is scheduled for November 1-3 at St Michael’s College, part of the University of Toronto. The sessions that are most likely to interest readers of this blog:

THURSDAY, 1 NOVEMBER 2006

John van Seters (Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University: "The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the "Editor" in Biblical Criticism

FRIDAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2006

Hindy Najman (University of Toronto): "Authority and Tradition: Archetypes of Tradition"

Eugene Ulrich (University of Notre Dame): "Insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls for Future Editions of the Hebrew Bible"

Sarianna Metso (University of Toronto): "Editing Leviticus"

Robert Kraft (University of Pennsylvania): "In Search of Jewish Greek Scriptures: Exposing the Obvious?"

Kristen de Troyer (Claremont Graduate University): "From Reconstructing the Old Greek Biblical text to Reconstructing the History of the Hebrew Biblical Text: The Contribution of the Schoyen Joshua and Leviticus Papyri"

That’s a stellar lineup. Go here for more information.

I really like the conference brochure's description of the textual variation we are faced with in the case of the New Testament (the description of the situation with respect to the Hebrew Bible is not so remarkable; I won’t reproduce it here):

In the case of the New Testament, the sheer volume of manuscript witnesses 5300 Greek manuscripts from the late II–XIV CE, along with a large number of manuscripts of early versions in Coptic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Gothic offers a daunting problem that requires special techniques for sorting and collating manuscripts, classifying variant readings, and reconstructing an archetype that accounts for subsequent textual transformation. Not only are there thousands of points where the available manuscripts differ from one another it has been estimated that there are 250,000,350,000 variation points, but the complex relationships among manuscripts and cross-fertilizations has made it impossible to establish simple stemma diagrams to establish genealogical relationships. The situation is comparable in complexity to that of the Human Genome Project, where any individual can share characteristics with multiple identity groups. Indeed, mathematical modelling developed for the genome project has now been employed in the analysis of New Testament manuscripts.

Comments

[Suzanne]

I enjoyed this paper of de Troyer, and used some of it in my Lindisfarne series as background. Too bad I'll miss this.

[JohnFH]

Thanks for the link, Suzanne. The paper is helpful indeed.