Years ago, when I was still in seminary, I got in “trouble” for stating, “Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible isn’t nearly as interesting as textual criticism of the Greek New Testament.” I said this not so much out of bias as out of ignorance. If only I had read Ernst Würthwein’s The Text of the […]
Editors use a variety of brackets in Bibles and Texts to indicate material that is missing, reconstructed, or whose authenticity is in doubt. This podcast surveys the different uses of brackets in Accordance’s most commonly-used texts—and how to adjust for them in searches and statistical analyses. Check out more episodes of the Lighting the […]
Hebrew text criticism requires working with texts in multiple languages. Fortunately, Accordance Bible Software and its extensive original language resources makes that task easier. Join Dr. J in this episode as he tackles the age-old problem of Deut 32:34-45. Does it prophesy a Day of Judgment, as the Samaritans argue? Or is it […]
I’ve written before about taking a class in textual criticism under John Polhill, back in the 90s. I knew nothing about the subject beforehand, but the class stands out as one of the favorite of my MDiv studies. One of our textbooks was A Textual Commentary of the Greek New Testament by the late Bruce […]
Two decades later, Bart D. Ehrman’s book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament continues to create debate and dialogue. Ehrman’s later works have even brought textual criticism, a field once reserved to academia, to the lay level. In response to Ehrman’s work, Daniel […]
In the 1990s I took a New Testament textual criticism class under John B. Polhill as an elective in my MDiv studies. Looking back, it remains in my recollection as one of the best classes I experienced during that time. I learned more about the origin and transmission of the New Testament in that course […]
If textual studies are your area of interest, your Accordance Library will not be complete without Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible and The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research. Together, these volumes leave no stone unturned in looking at manuscript evidence and development of the Hebrew Bible and its first […]
When I took a masters-level textual criticism class under Dr. John Polhill in the early nineties, everything we studied was in books about the subject. We read about various textual traditions, but we weren’t really able to look at them side-by-side. We learned about important manuscripts and codexes, but there was simply no easy way […]
In this video, Dan Wallace discusses his history with Accordance (he has been using Accordance since the first beta!). He also names what he considers to be the “must have” Accordance titles needed for textual criticism. Dr. Wallace is professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and founder and executive director of the […]
Last year, almost to the day, I wrote a blog post on our release of Comfort and Barrett’s, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts. In that post I highlighted some of our enhancements to the book, which included creating a separate corpus of morphologically-tagged Greek texts that are contained in the book […]