The Bible Style Guide is a reference text designed specifically for those working within the media industry. It provides a crash course in the Bible for busy journalists, broadcasters and bloggers.
Whilst the guide will hopefully tell you nothing new, it is interesting to see the commonly held perceptions of the Bible which are addressed here.
The Patrologia Graeca is an enormous 161 volume collection of the those Early Church fathers who wrote in Greek. Whilst it is sometimes criticized it remains, 140 years on, still a crucial resource.
One of the great gems dug up amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls was the Great Isaiah Scroll. It dates to about 100 BC and is the only complete scroll to have been recovered from Qumran. It is 7.34 metres long.
You can view the scroll here, but be aware it’ll take a while to load over broadband. Take some time to look at the rest of the site too. As well as the excellent Shrine of the Book, there is a good section on the Second temple.
The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest complete text of the Old and New Testaments, having survived for over 1600 years. For centuries is was at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai and since 1933 has been in the British Library.
The Codex Sinaiticus Project is seeking to put the entire manuscript online and is well worth a look.
(image from Wiki Commons)
The issue of chapters and verses came up last week. The Latin Bible (Vulgate) was first divided into chapters in the 13th century, most probably by Stephen Langton who was later to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. As to verses, this is normally credited to Robert Stephanus a Parisian book printer who completed this work in 1551.
Chapters and verses are useful for locating a text, but not always useful for understanding it. Even more unhelpful are the titles often put at the top of sections. Some texts, for example the Nestle edition of the Greek New Testament, put the chapter and verses in the margins. This leaves the reader to split the text up into sections which is a better idea.
All of this is to say that you should try and ignore chapters, verses and sections when reading Biblical texts as they will force you into structure that isn’t part of the text. Oh, and bear in mind that there was no punctuation in the original texts either!
Research on literacy in the Roman Empire in the New Testament period usually gives a literacy rate of between 10 – 15%, and those who could read would read aloud in any case. Texts were meant to be heard and I would suggest that reading a text aloud is still a rich way of encountering it.
You can get the full text of the Martyr’s mirror online here. Hi-res images (some of which I showed yesterday) are here.
The book is not only an account of Anabaptist martyrs, but seeks to documents all martyrdoms in the first sixteen centuries of the church.
As to the man with the three pronged staff, I have asked the question and should have the answer by the next lecture.
The quote I mentioned from Eckhart is:
“they do him wrong who take God just in one particular way. They take the way rather than God”.
It is from Sermon 19. Eckhart is a Dominican who lived from around 1260 to 1328. His history is controversial, but his writings are profound.
The Orthodox podcast I recommended is Our Life in Christ. If you go to their archives page and look for Feb 2005 you’ll find a four part series on Prayers to the Saints. The rest of their output is well worth listening to.
Daily Prayers (services for Morning, Evening and Night Prayer) can be found at the Church of England website.
I was asked for some book recommendations on church history. There are very few one volume histories (2,000 years is a lot to fit into a few pages) but I would recommend:
If you want to look in more detail at a particular period, there is an absolutely superb annotated Bibliography here.
For more online on Benedictine monasticism see the Order of Saint Benedict. For Franciscans in this country go here and look also at the Dominicans.
For plenty of historic texts go to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. You’ll find St. Teresa of Avila here. A good discussion of her life and work is by Rowan Williams called, unsurprisingly, Teresa of Avila.
A good site for early texts is Early Christian Writings.
Finally, I have posted some book recommendations elsewhere for the third years which might also be of interest to you.
