HBU theology conference: Ad Fontes, Ad Futura: Erasmus’ Bible and the Impact of Scripture

In celebration of upcoming 500th anniversary of Erasmus’ Greek text and the Reformation, the Department of Theology at HBU, in conjunction with the Dunham Bible Museum, is pleased to host the conference Ad Fontes, Ad Futura: Erasmus’ Bible and the Impact of Scripture. The conference will be hold at HBU on February 25-27, 2016.

We will consider the textual and historical issues surrounding the development of the Bible, the Bible’s impact on human society across the centuries, and the future of Biblical translation and interpretation in the future. Our keynote speakers include Craig Evans (Houston Baptist University), Timothy George (Beeson Divinity School, Samford University), Herman Selderhuis (Theological University Apeldoorn) and Daniel Wallace (Dallas Theological Seminary). The plenary talks are free and open to the public.

We also invite proposals for short papers from scholars and graduate students from a wide array of disciplines and topics, including:

• The historical context, and textual tradition, of the Biblical canon;
• The history of the Greek text of the Bible;
• The social and/or cultural impact of the Bible in any historical period or location;
• The Bible and the history of the book;
• Modern Bible translations and translation practice;
• Textual and cultural issues concerning the Bible in the Digital Age.

Anyone who is interested should submit a 300 word abstract on any relevant topic by December 18, 2015. Papers should be 20 minutes long, and decisions will be announced in early January. Send proposals to Jason Maston at jmaston@hbu.edu.

You can get further information and register here:  www.hbu.edu/theologyconference.

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What do you want in your stocking? NA29?

So, I’m hoping for an NA28 for Christmas. Nevertheless,  in a recent research seminar here in Cardiff, I was interested by a comment from Hugh Houghton of the University of Birmingham who said, ‘Don’t worry if you don’t get an NA28, the NA29 is just round the corner.’ Admittedly, when quizzed afterwards, ’round the corner’ probably means a couple of years, but still.

From the proposed timeline he showed us, there may be quite a number of new editions over the next decade or so as the Editio Critica Maior approaches completion. Although this will lead to lots of blue volumes on the shelf, I don’t see this as a bad thing (apart from financially). Quite apart from increasingly reliable and useful text and notes, I hope this plurality of editions will move us away from seeing NAxx as a definitive and fixed text. It was fascinating, now that I’m in a primarily Religious Studies department, to hear scholars of other religious traditions arguing that the quest for a single text (albeit eclectic and with apparatus), seemed to them to be unhelpful, and ideologically driven. They considered it far more intellectually useful to work with actual texts, along with their variants. Happily, this is the way that things seem to be going with the advent of excellent online resources (e.g. Codex Alexandrinus has gone online this week). Nevertheless, such an approach is generally not practical for much work in NT studies, and NAxx is still a very useful tool. But I take the general point and want to avoid the ‘laziness’ that reverence for the ‘default’ text can bring. So here’s my suggestion for future editions: how about putting the apparatus at the top (i.e. making actual MSS the main feature) and the text at the bottom?

Having said this all this, Santa, I hope I’ve been a good boy this year.