What does a dinosaur tooth have to do with the New Testament?

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In an article about a big dinosaur tooth HERE, the editors of the Houston Chronicle put a box called "more rarities" and in it this blurb about the Codex Sinaiticus:
An old New Testament: The oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, a 4th century version that had its Gospels and epistles spread across the world, is being made whole again — online. The British Library says the full text of the Codex Sinaiticus will be available to Web users by next July.
What an odd placement! It would have been nice to have the full story, but then the Houston Chronicle's coverage of anything having to do with religious studies has been inadequate (at least in the last two years while I've lived in Houston and have read the paper). Here's a link to the full AP story HERE. Jim Davila is featured in it. And HERE is the link to the forthcoming Sinaiticus website with a few photos already available. Beautiful! I will put the link on my sidebar for future reference. The British Library has its own article about it HERE.

At any rate, I am looking forward to this web site. Finally we can begin checking the manuscripts of the New Testament from our office computers!

Photo: leaf of Codex Sinaiticus, 2005

More information on NT manuscripts

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Eric Sowell on Archaic Christianity has written a great post with much information on the NT manuscripts and what is happening in the field of textual criticism. Take a look HERE. He shows the difference between the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, the Editio Critica Maior, United Bible Society Greek Text, Tischendorf, the International Greek New Testament Project, Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text, Swanson, and an on-line resource. THANKS ERIC.

I am going to put some of these links into my sidebar this month, because they are important to keep track of digital images and projects that continue with the manuscripts.

New Testament Greek Manuscripts Series

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One of the comments put me onto a Tyndale House Publishers series, called the New Testament Greek Manuscripts. When I went to Tyndale House website, I found that they no longer own them, but sent me to a mission website where they can be purchased. They are book-by-book complete manuscript traditions of all verses, I think. But, there are not volumes for every book of the NT. Since Tyndale no longer owns the series, I wonder if this means that there will be no more volumes. Does anyone know?

Here is the LINK.

Manuscript Month on Forbidden Gospels

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In order to circulate more information about the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, I have decided to devote a series of posts in the month of April to this topic. I am frustrated as a scholar that we are operating with so little knowledge of a manuscript about what a gospel or a letter of Paul actually looked like in the first century. I have a love/hate with Nestle-Aland. Mostly I hate it because it makes us forget that we are not reading a manuscript that exists, but a modern composition.

Did you know that Erwin Nestle intended this to be the case? He wrote in the introduction to the 25th edition that his book was set up with the sigla and apparatus for those scholars "who want to concentrate on the text itself, without noticing the variations." He said that scholars "will easily get used to overlooking these signs."

Did you know that the Nestle-Aland edition is not a full critical edition? It doesn't contain all the textual variants. In fact, to my knowledge, we do not yet have an edition of the manuscripts with a full accounting of all the variants.

I understand that there is a project in Germany that is ongoing to solve some of this trouble. If any of you have further information about this project, or other publications, that are working to give a full account of the manuscripts, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. Let's pass around this information this month, and get on top of what is going on in textual criticism these days!