Thoughts on Antiquity

I have always been interested in the purported testimony of Josephus to Jesus Christ in Antiquities of the Jews 18.3.3 §63-64, also known as the Testimonium Flavianum.Not long ago Stephen Carlson (of Hypotyposeis fame, and whom I had the very good fortune to finally meet in person at Duke University recently) emailed me a collection of Greek […]

In Syriac studies, even a beginner will find himself consulting lists of manuscripts, as so much has never been published.  William Wright’s Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum (1870) remains a fundamental reference.  From the Yahoo Hugoye-list I find that this is now online at archive.org: vol. 1; vol. 2; vol. 3. 
The enormous […]

Stephen C. Carlson’s book on “Secret Mark” is a splendid achievement, not least for the way in which it builds up a convincing picture of how a literary faker works and thinks.  I was reminded of it when I received an email from James Irsay, who takes an interest in the Archko volume.  This is one of those […]

In my last post I suggested that native Greek sites may be a good place to find ancient Greek texts online. I feel more than vindicated in this suggestion by a great cache of Patrologia Graeca volumes that I found shortly after posting that weblog entry. The site is at the domain name aegean.gr, the directory is entitled […]

I just discovered on online copy of the Church History in Greek Unicode (previous copies known to me were either scanned as images or rendered in a strange font in a PDF file). No bells, no whistles; just the bare Greek text. The site is a Greek one (with the .gr suffix in the address instead […]

Tertullian.org will be inaccessible for the remainder of the month. This is because on 30th August and 1st September my site was hit by massive overusage of the Additional Fathers url — apparently all the index page — with the result that my ISP intends to charge me $40 overusage fees unless the average […]

There have been some posts in the PAPY-L list alluding to the fact that back in November the Bodmer Foundation in Geneva sold two of its priceless papyrus codexes in order to raise funds.  The two were mss. 14 and 15, which together are numbered p75 date from the early 3rd century, and contain the […]

The Times reports that Truro Cathedral have sold off all their pre-1800 books.  Charmingly they accepted a bid of only $72,000.  The dealer who bought them sold them on for more than $1m, and is now retiring from business.  Details of the historic library and the dispersal are here.

I interrupt this hiatus to ask if anyone needs someone to room with or is aware of cheap hotels in San Diego for the AAR/SBL conference this November? As a student, I’d prefer to room with someone to cut expenses, if possible. Feel free to reply to this blog posting as all replies are screened […]

I’m off to Libya for a long weekend in a couple of weeks.  Actually I went 18 months ago, but didn’t see as much of Leptis Magna as I would have liked.  This time I hope to walk down to the quayside, and walk across the sandy beach that runs between the breakwaters of the […]