I realized I hadn't posted a table of contents for this book when I blogged about it earlier. The TOC is extensive and runs for six of the book's 900+ pages. I've only listed parts, chapters and contributors below so you can get an idea of the scope of this book. The full TOC is available as a PDF on Hendrickson's site. I'm enjoying reading it thus far and am interested to read many of the essays.

Part One: Introduction
1 Jewish Believers in Jesus in Antiquity—Problems of Definition, Method, and Sources
     Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway
2 The Definition of the Terms Jewish Christian and Jewish Christianity in the History of Research
     James Carleton Paget, Cambridge, England

Part Two: Jewish Believers in Jesus in The New Testament and Related Material
3 James and the Jerusalem Community
     Richard Bauckham, St. Andrews, Scotland
4 Paul as a Jewish Believer—According to His Letters
     Donald A. Hagner, Pasadena, California, United States
5 Paul as a Jewish Believer—According to the Book of Acts
     Reidar Hvalvik, Oslo, Norway
6 Named Jewish Believers Connected with the Pauline Mission
     Reidar Hvalvik, Oslo, Norway
7 Jewish Believers and Jewish Influence in the Roman Church until the Early Second Century
     Reidar Hvalvik, Oslo, Norway
8 Jewish Believers in Asia Minor according to the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John
     Peter Hirschberg, Bayreuth, Germany

Part Three: The Literary Heritage of Jewish Believers
9 The Jewish Christian Gospel Tradition
     Craig A. Evans, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada
10 Jewish Christian Editing of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
     Torleif Elgvin, Oslo, Norway
11 Jewish Christian Elements in the Pseudo-Clementine Writings
     Graham Stanton, Cambridge, England
12 Fragments of Jewish Christian Literature Quoted in Some Greek and Latin Fathers
     Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway
13 Jewish Christian Sources Used by Justin Martyr and Some Other Greek and Latin Fathers
     Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway

Part Four: Jewish Christian Groups according to the Greek and Latin Fathers
14 The Ebionites
     Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway
15 The Nazoraeans
     Wolfram Kinzig, Bonn, Germany
16 Cerinthus, Elxai, and Other Alleged Jewish Christian Teachers or Groups
     Gunnar af Hällström, Joensuu, Finland, and Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway

Part Five: Other Literary and Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Believers
17 Evidence for Jewish Believers in Greek and Latin Patristic Literature
     Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway
18 Evidence for Jewish Believers in the Syriac Fathers
     Sten Hidal, Lund, Sweden
19 Evidence for Jewish Believers in Christian-Jewish Dialogues through the Sixth Century (excluding Justin)
     Lawrence Lahey, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
20 Evidence for Jewish Believers in “Church Orders” and Liturgical Texts
     Anders Ekenberg, Uppsala, Sweden
21 Jewish Believers in Early Rabbinic Literature (2d to 5th Centuries)
     Philip S. Alexander, Manchester, England
22 Archaeological Evidence of Jewish Believers?
     James F. Strange, Tampa, Florida, United States

Part Six: Conclusion and Outlook
23 The History of Jewish Believers in the Early Centuries—Perspectives and Framework
     Oskar Skarsaune, Oslo, Norway

Bibliography Index of Modern Authors
Index of Subjects
Index of Ancient Sources (selective)

A few weeks back, I blogged on Greek Readers. I blogged about A Patristic Greek Reader (amazon.com), Wikgren's Hellenistic Greek Texts (amazon.com), and Goodspeed & Colwell's Greek Papyrus Reader.

Today I noticed a few more Greek readers that will apparently be released by the end of the year, meaning that they might be previewable at the ETS and SBL conferences in November.

1. Koine Greek Reader: Selections from the New Testament, Septuagint, and Early Christian Writers (amazon.com). This one was put together by Rodney Decker; it'll be published by Kregel in November 2007 (so I'd guess you'd be able to get one at ETS or SBL). The Amazon.com description follows:

Providing graded readings in Koine Greek from the New Testament, Septuagint, Apostolic Fathers, and early creeds, this unique text integrates the full range of materials needed by intermediate Greek students. Its many features include four helpful vocabulary lists, numerous references to other resources, assorted translation helps, a review of basic grammar and syntax, and an introduction to BDAG-the standard Greek lexicon.

2. A Historical Greek Reader: Mycenaean to the Koine (amazon.com) by Stephen Colvin. Published by Oxford with a release date of December 6, 2007. I'd love to be able to page through it at SBL as it sounds very interesting. Here's the Amazon.com blurb:

A Historical Greek Reader (amazon.com) provides an introduction to the history of the ancient Greek language by means of a series of texts with linguistic commentary, cross-referenced to each other and to a reference grammar at the front. It offers a selection of epigraphic and literary texts from the Mycenaean period (roughly the fourteenth century BC) to the koine (the latest text dates to the second century AD), and includes a wide range of Greek dialect texts. The epigraphic section balances a number of well-known inscriptions with recent discoveries that may not be easily available elsewhere; a selection of literary texts traces major developments in the language of Greek poetry and literary prose. The book finishes with an account of the linguistic and sociolinguistic background of koine Greek. The commentary assumes no prior knowledge of Greek historical linguistics, but provides a basic amount of up-to-date bibliography so that advanced students and others can pursue linguistic issues at greater depth where necessary.

Chris Brady, of the excellently-named blog Targuman, wanted to do a podcast with me for some reason.

So today we did it. It's 30+ minutes of podcasty-goodness, if you're interested. Check it out here. It was a pleasure talking with Chris, he is a gentleman and a scholar. If you're not familiar with his blog, do check it out—and enjoy the cartoons!

Or so is the title of the interesting post by Mike Bird over on Euangelion.

Reading his post, I thought of a book I've recently been reading, The Early Centuries: Jewish Believers in Jesus (amazon.com) by Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik. I've only read the introductory essay, but it's really prompted me to think about the spectrum between Jews and Christians in the early Christian Era.

The most intriguing insight, for me, was that there weren't just two flavors, "Christian" and "Jew". There definitely were "Christians" and "Jews", but there were also Jews moving toward Christianity (what the book calls "Jewish Believers") and Christians being influenced by and moving toward Judaism (what are typically called "judaizers"). Sort of like this quick diagram I made up:

Of course, there are other influences—don't even get me started on gnosticism—but the idea of thinking about the movement between these two poles and thinking about where, on this particular spectrum, different examples from different early writings could be plotted, causes me to think now when I read or notice Jewish-sounding influence in Christian writings.

Skarsaune & Hvalvik's book (amazon.com) should be interesting the more I get into it.

For two years now, I've been drooling over a Mohr-Siebeck title: Paul Treblico, The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius. It was published in 2005 and sold for like $250 as I recall.

It is out of print now (they must've only printed five copies) and unavailable. A search of Mohr's website only finds a few paragraphs from reviews of the book, but no listing. RBL reviewed the book as well.

For about a year, I've been lamenting that I was never able to purchase the book. Today, however, I was browsing Eerdmans' upcoming releases in preparation for my annual SBL book-buying spree and noticed that they've got the book slated for publication in October (just previous to SBL!) at a price of $85! That means mortals like me could actually purchase the book at SBL and probably get a decent discount.

This was encouraging in light of my recent disappointment with Royse's Scribal Habits book ...

I received the following today from Eerdmans:

Stanley E. Porter, ed. Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament (amazon.com). (Wm. B. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI), 2006. xii, 316pp with indices.

It's quite timely; I'm doing a lot of work thinking about quotations of the Pastoral Epistles in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers and I'm considering a paper on OT references in the NT* for the inaugural BibleTech 2008 conference, hosted by Logos in January 2008. The book should come in very handy to me, particularly Aageson's essay on the major Paulines. As I dig more into that, I will likely blog more about it.

If you have experience with the book, particularly if you've read it and have feedback for how different authors approach quotation, allusion and even looser forms of reference, please feel free to comment here or zap me an email.

Update (2007-08-17): Regarding the phrase, "... I'm considering a paper on OT references in the NT", I mis-remembered what I proposed. What I really proposed was locating NT cross-references automagically; nothing to do with OT references specifically. Whoops. Glad I remembered before I started writing the paper.

Update II (2007-08-29): There are two more posts related to this book:

• TOC of Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament
• Some thoughts and response to Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament

I'm frustrated.

A few years back I noticed that Eerdmans was going to publish James Royse's monumental dissertation, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri — consistentely and frequently cited in footnotes in just about every NT text-critical tome I've read or looked at in the past three years. "Woo Hoo!", I thought. It would be available and might even be less that $100, which means I could buy it at SBL at a reasonable price!

Yesterday, I read the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog post on Brill's NTTSD series, which notes:

For those of you who have waited on James R. Royse's study of Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri finally to be published (the orginal dissertation on which it is based dates from 1981) will be pleased to hear that it is due this autumn (according to Brill's representative whom I met in Vienna). According to the gossip at the SBL in Vienna the delay of Royse's book on the part of the former publisher Eerdman's caused frustration for both the author Royse and the SD editor Epp and led the latter to turn to Brill which has now resulted in this permanent solution.

Well, I'm glad the book is getting published. But Brill wants $369.00 for it! (amazon.com) That means it is destined to only be purchased by university libraries; that it will suck hard-to-come-by money from other book purchases at said libraries, and it will be destined to sit in the office of some NT prof (or a departmental library) away from the main stacks where folks could actually use the durn thing.

What to do?

Don't buy the book. Go to the UMI dissertation express. Search for "Royse, James". It looks like you can get a copy of the dissertation for under 50 bucks, at least in the US. The 751 page dissertation was submitted in 1981, and the text has surely been sharpened in the past 26 years ... but hey, you'll actually be able to read and refer to it on your terms.

Even if Brill releases a paperback, who knows what the price will be. If you've considered the book before because, like me, you've seen it cited in footnotes and have drooled over it, then consider getting the dissertation via UMI instead of spending upwards of $400 with Brill.

Update (2007-08-09): Responding to the comments, particularly to Mike. I know the book would be expensive, but $370 is crazy. Are libraries really going to drop $370 on one title, and that not a substantive reference title? I am very glad Brill is publishing the title. My hope is that a few years down the road, after the libraries pay off the book's cost, it'll be put out in paperback, perhaps even by the SBL, and it will be do-able price-wise. I understand the economics of publishing and know there are costs for publishers to account for -- they don't grow money on trees. My post was a bit of a rant (hence the "rant" category), but also to point out that the primary substance of Royse's book, his dissertation, is available at a much more reasonable price for those who are really interested in the work but don't have a good library close (or who, like me, might be able to get it at a library but are such zealous bibliophiles they don't like to let go of books they've read, particularly if they could be useful in future studies). Anyway, c'est la vie, Scribal Habits. If I deem my text-critical reading needs to require Royse before a paperback is available, I'll head to UMI to get the dissertation.

Rob Bradshaw of the ever-helpful biblicalstudies.org.uk posts the following that may be of interest:

F.P. Cotterell, "The Gospel of Barnabas," Vox Evangelica 10 (1977): 43-47.

Here's the first paragraph:

The Gospel of Barnabas is one of three, or more precisely four, writings associated with the name of Paul’s companion in the first part of his mission to the gentiles. The earliest of these writings is the Epistle of Barnabas, dating from the first half of the second century. The Acts of Barnabas, a more convenient appellation than the formal Greek title, The journeys and the testimony of St. Barnabas the apostle, dates from the fifth century. Then there is the Gospel of Barnabas, a title which is confusingly applied to two works. The first of these is known to us only by name. It is referred to in the Latin Decretum Gelasianum, associated with pope Gelasius (492-496). Of the text of this Gospel we have no knowledge whatever. The second Gospel of Barnabas made its appearance in the sixteenth century and has re-surfaced at intervals ever since, most recently through a series of publications originating in Karachi, edited by Begum Aisha Bawany Wakf. This brief note is intended simply to draw attention to the character of the ‘Gospel’, to record what is known of its antecedents and the claims made for it by some Muslim apologists.

So if you have interest in such things, read the whole article.