Editing the Bible: Assessing the Task Past and Present

by John S Kloppenborg (Editor), Judith H Newman (Editor)

Overview

The Bible is likely the most-edited book in history, yet the task of editing the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts of the Bible is fraught with difficulties. The dearth of Hebrew manuscripts of the Jewish Scriptures and the substantial differences among those witnesses create difficulties in determining which text ought to be printed as the text of the Jewish Scriptures. For the New Testament, it is not the dearth of manuscripts but the overwhelming number of manuscripts—almost six thousand Greek manuscripts and many more in other languages—that presents challenges for sorting and analyzing such a large, multivariant data set. This volume, representing experts in the editing of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, discusses both current achievements and future challenges in creating modern editions of the biblical texts in their original languages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781589836488
Publisher:	Society of Biblical Literature
Publication date:	05/25/2012
Series:	Sbl - Resources for Biblical Study (Paper)
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

John S. Kloppenborg is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author most recently of Q: The Earliest Gospel (Westminster John Knox), The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine (Mohr Siebeck), and the co-editor of Reading James with New Eyes (T&T Clark).

Judith H. Newman is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Emmanuel College and holds joint appointments with the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Praying by the Book: the Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Scholars Press), the co-author of Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (Walter de Gruyter), and the co-editor of The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel (Brill). She has served as the editor of the SBL series Early Judaism and Its Literature.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Editing the Bible: Assessing the Task Past and Present
John S. Kloppenborg and Judith H. Newman

Th e Genealogy of the Biblical Editor
John Van Seters

Th e Evolutionary Composition of the Hebrew Bible
Eugene Ulrich

Editing the Hebrew Bible: An Overview of Some Problems
Eibert Tigchelaar

Evidence from the Qumran Scrolls for the Scribal Transmission of Leviticus
Sarianna Metso

Greek Papyri and the Texts of the Hebrew Bible
Kristin De Troyer

What Text Is Being Edited? Th e Editing of the New Testament
Michael W. Holmes

The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method: A New Way to Reconstruct the Text of the Greek New Testament
Klaus Wachtel

Scribal Practices and the Transmission of Biblical Texts: New Insights from the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method
Holger Strutwolf

Th e New Testament in the Light of Book Publishing in Antiquity
David Trobisch

Unseen Variants: Conjectural Emendation and the New Testament
Ryan Wettlaufer

Bibliography

Contributors

Index of Primary Sources