PJ Williams at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog notes an email he received offering a complementary copy of Ehrman's upcoming book The Lost Gospel of Judas: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed from Oxford University Press (OUP).

I received the same email too. And I've only ever interacted with Ehrman's stuff on this blog, so they must've searched around a bit to find folks.

I blogged about Ehrman primarily in a post called Bart Ehrman has "Jumped the Shark", lamenting his slide toward sensationalism at that time evidenced in his essay in the Gospel of Judas book from National Geographic.

I can't pass up a free book on a topic I'm interested in (development of early Christianity, along with Greek and Coptic) so I've responded to the offer with a request for the book. I'll let y'all know what I think if/when I receive the book.

Also note that PJ Williams mentions a forthcoming book on Gospel of Judas by ETC's own Simon Gathercole noting it will have " plenty of philological learning as well as sound judgement on the subject". Now that's a book I hope Oxford promos and wants to offer me a complementary copy of!

Side note: The post on Ehrman jumping the shark has a humorous comment from one purporting to be Dr. Ehrman. If that really was Dr. E, I note that you'll be in Seattle on Oct. 9. If you're able to slide up to Bellingham (just under two hours freeway drive north on I-5) I'll fire up the BBQ. Have your people call my people.

Baylor Press are publishing Han-Josef Klauck's Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis. The book is in their Fall 2006 catalogue. It is a translation and complete revision of Klauck's 1998 volume Die antike Briefliteratur und das Neue Testament: Ein Lehrund Arbeitsbuch.

Here is the publisher's blurb from the Baylor Press web site:

This volume places the New Testament letters squarely in the middle of all the important letter corpora of antiquity. Chapters cover the basic letter formula, papyrus and postal delivery, non-literary and diplomatic correspondence, Greek and Latin literary letters, epistolary theory, letters in early Judaism, and all the letters of the New Testament. Part I of each chapter surveys each corpus, followed by detailed exegetical examples in Part II. Comprehensive bibliographies and 54 exercises with answers suit this guide to student and scholar alike.

• Comprehensive, detailed, essential reading
• A major book by a leading expert
• Perfect for all students of the New Testament

Through a fortunate twist of fate, this intrepid blogger has secured a copy of the book before release. I'll be reading through it and blogging a bit along the way.

I can tell you this much right now: It looks very good. One great feature is the end-of-chapter exercises. That, and the preface starts out with a quote from Alice in Wonderland. How cool is that?

Update I: I've blogged a bit about the first two chapters: Klauck on Epistolography Part I.

Update II: Klauck's Ancient Letters, Part II is now up.

Update III: Part III is up as well.

Since the ETS program book is out, and the SBL program book has been out for awhile, I thought I should note when I'm presenting at both of these conferences.

ETS 2006: Thursday Morning, Nov. 16; the New Testament session in the 'Slate' room, from 11:00-11:40.

Subjects and Predicates and Complements, Oh My! Searching the New Testament with Sensitivity to Syntax

Logos Bible Software have implemented an edition of the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament. One facet of OpenText.org's work isolates clause boundaries. Within each clause, subjects, predicators, complements and adjuncts are identified. This enables searching of the Greek New Testament with sensitivity to clause-level criteria. This advance raises certain questions: How should syntactic annotation be used? What sorts of things can be searched for?

This paper examines different sorts of searches that can be pursued from the starting point of a word. Questions like "When is [word] used as a subject?" or "What verbs are used when [word] is a subject?" will be examined and discussed.

SBL 2006: Sunday Afternoon, Nov. 19; Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics session in room 204C-CC, from 4:00-6:30. My paper is the second paper and starts around 4:10. The format of the session is four 10-minute papers followed by 30 minutes of informal discussion. So drop by and see me, and do ask me questions.

Word Groups, Head Terms and Modifiers in the Pastoral Epistles: Insight for Questions of Style?

The OpenText.org group have completed a preliminary syntactic analysis of the Greek New Testament. One level of their analysis is the Word Group level. A word group is a group of words that consists of, at minimum, a head term. It also contains any terms that modify the head term and additionally specifies the type of modification as that of definer, qualifier, relator or specifier.

Heretofore, stylistic analysis has been largely bound to tracking criteria such as word usage and morphology along with perhaps sentence length. The OpenText.org Word Group analysis allows for stylistic analysis of the corpus at a different level. Does modifier usage offer any insight for comparative studies of the Pastoral Epistles and the generally accepted Paulines? This paper will examine modifier usage data for both the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul and will offer preliminary comparisons between the results where results may offer insight for questions of style.

More SBL 2006: There are two additional meetings that I will be involved with.

Saturday, Nov. 18; 4:00-6:30 PM. AM18-107 (p. 246 in SBL program book). Logos Bible Software Syntactically Tagged Databases of the Hebrew Bible: Overview and Training Seminar. See program book for more details.

Monday, Nov. 20; 4:00-6:30 PM. AM20-101 (p. 256 in SBL program book). Logos Bible Software Syntactically-Tagged Databases of the Greek New Testament: Overview and Training Seminar. See program book for more details.

I will of course be much more involved with the Greek session on Monday than the Hebrew session on Saturday. But come to either/both; we'd love to see you there and talk about syntax!

Update (2006-09-18): In the comments, Paul asks if I'll make the papers available to the general public. Thanks for asking, Paul. The answer is "Yes!". This will likely be before the conference. Also note that for the SBL session, anyway, the paper will be much longer than 10 minutes will allow so my presentation there will actually be a summary. The ETS paper will be less of a summary, but since I can't bring myself to simply read pages, the paper there will reflect the content but be more appropriately presented (using a projector, powerpoint and perhaps even screen-captured video where necessary).

Since Jim West (10 pts, "Not Nerd"), Stephen C. Carlson (96 pts, "Nerd God"), and Loren Rosson (43 pts, "Lightly Nerdy") took it, I had to take it too. The results?

I'm worried, though -- I achieved that score having never built my own computer ...

I've recently devoured George K. Barr's Scalometry and the Pauline Epistles (JSNTSup 261), and found it interesting and thought-provoking.

If you've read it or if you've read/are familiar with is articles on the same topic, I'd like to pick your brain. I'm wondering what you think of it and if you're aware of any critical reviews. I checked RBL but didn't find any.

What do you think of his work? His conclusions? His methodology? Feel free to contact me via email if you have thoughts or pointers to interaction with his work.

Update: ricoblog reader Jan Krans (the author of the NA27 review cited in the previous blog post) responds with a pointer to a review article in the Journal of Greco Roman Christianity and Judaism. Jan also notes:

FWIW: the book lost much of its potential to me when I noticed that Barr regards for instance 1 Tim 3:1-16 as a later insertion (pp. 89.91), in order to detect the same 'scalometric' pattern as in the other Pauline epistles.

I can understand that to a degree (ditto for throwing out portions of Titus 1 for the same reason). But is this a reason to throw out Barr's work? He detected an anomaly and posited a solution. He could've also posited a solution like "Therefore 1 Timothy and Titus are not Pauline since they don't fit typical Pauline scale patterns" -- aligning with much of current scholarship that, properly or not, considers the Pastoral Epistles pseudepigraphs. If he'd have done that would his results be more palatable?

In other words, is it proper to throw out the whole of his work if one disagrees with one aspect of the conclusion? What about his argument applied to the other 10 Paulines?

Also, FWIW, I find Barr's proposal to consider 1Ti 3.1-16, Titus 1.7-9 and perhaps Titus 1.12-16 as non-Pauline somewhat intriguing. It removes the major ecclesiological portions from the letters and in so doing removes the "chronologically inapproriate eccelsiology" argument (aka the "Ignatian ecclesiology" argument) from those who would discredit Paul as author. We of course don't have good text-critical evidence for such a position, but it is an interesting thought nonetheless. At least to me.

Lastly, Barr's interaction with Anthony Kenny's work (Appendix C, "Scale Sensitivity", pp. 148-154) shows some promise and direction for future work in the realm of stylometry that takes Barr's scalometry into account.

I notice that TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism has a review of the NA27 edition, with apparatus, that is contained in the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible (SESB). If you're a user of the NA27 in SESB, then you want to read this article. Do it now.

Here's the abstract of the review article, which is a 26 page PDF.

Abstract: The Stuttgart Elecronic Study Bible is a groundbreaking electronic publication. It contains the most widely used scholarly biblical texts, BHS and NA, as well as their critical apparatuses. In this extensive review article, Krans focuses on NA²⁷, especially its critical apparatus, though he frequently draws BHS and its apparatus into the discussion as well. He asks this question: What are the possibilities, surprises, limitations, and future prospects of the implementation of NA²⁷ in SESB 1.0?

Looking for other things related to Sahidic Coptic, I stumbled across this.

Someone typed up Metzger's list and PDF-ified it. If you're working with the Sahidic Coptic NT at all, chances are you'll find this word list (with brief glosses) useful.

Citation: Metzger, Bruce M. List of Words Occurring Frequently in the Coptic New Testament (Sahidic Dialect). Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1961.

Over on PaleoJudaica, Jim Davila notes that there will be a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in Seattle, over at the Pacific Science Center.

I'm really looking forward to it. Actually, one Saturday while the scrolls are in town (not sure which one, though), my employer (Logos Bible Software) is taking the whole company to see the show! So after I've seen what's there I'll be sure to report back.

Here's the exhibit web site, if you're interested: Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls. They have some background on featured scrolls. They sound mostly fragmentary, though some interesting passages are represented. There are also some lectures associated with the scroll exhibit, though I don't know that I'll be getting down to Seattle for those.