————————————

The following new reviews have been added to the Review of Biblical Literature and listed on the RBL blog (http://rblnewsletter.blogspot.com/):

John J. Collins
Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7404
Reviewed by Philip R. Davies

David Lyle Jeffrey and C. Stephen Evans, eds.
The Bible and the University
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6773
Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Morrow

Timothy Jay Johnson (this is his Marquette dissertation)
Now My Eye Sees You: Unveiling an Apocalyptic Job
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7514
Reviewed by Scott C. Jones

Jason Kalman and Jaqueline S. du Toit
Canada’s Big Biblical Bargain: How McGill University Bought the Dead Sea Scrolls
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7649
Reviewed by Matthew A. Collins

Edward W. Klink III
The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7491
Reviewed by Theodore J. Weeden Sr.

Daniel A. Machiela
The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon: A New Text and Translation with Introduction and Special Treatment of Columns 13-17
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7425
Reviewed by Benjamin Ziemer

Laura Salah Nasrallah
Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7452
Reviewed by Rosemary Canavan
Reviewed by Lee M. Jefferson

Lawrence H. Schiffman
Qumran and Jerusalem: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of Judaism
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7591
Reviewed by Sidnie White Crawford

Michael E. Stone, Aryeh Amihay, and Vered Hillel, eds.
Noah and His Book(s)
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7661
Reviewed by Emma England
Reviewed by Anthony Swindell

BOOK REVIEW from the H-JUDAIC list:

John Joseph Collins. Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian
Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Grand Rapids William B. Eerdmans
Pub. Co., 2010. xii + 266 pp. Illustrations. $25.00 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8028-2887-3.

Reviewed by Alex Jassen (University of Minnesota)
Published on H-Judaic (October, 2010)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Revisiting the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls

[...]

Into this fray enters John J. Collins’s new book _Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls_. The bulk of its pages carefully assess the merits and drawbacks of many of the prevailing theories on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran. At the same time as Collins deftly critiques sixty years of scholarship, he offers his own vision for the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their relationship to the site of Qumran. Collins is well positioned to undertake both tasks, having long been active in the study of the scrolls. His sobering approach to the material allows the evidence to speak for itself–rather than the phenomenon Collins observes far too often, of scholars speaking for the text (and, of course, saying far too much). In this sense, a good deal of this volume consists of a careful deconstruction of other approaches, many of which are rendered speculative at best by the textual or archaeological evidence. His analysis of the textual evidence is restrained, perhaps too restrained for many. But, in the end, this judicious approach often leaves the reader in agreement with Collins versus the alternatives.

[...]

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GOOGLE’S PLAN with the IAA to put the Dead Sea Scrolls online (noted here) has received endless media coverage, most of it repetitive. But here’s an interesting little photo essay from National Geographic.

JAMES CHARLESWORTH is interviewed by the BBC about the new Google Dead Sea Scrolls archiving project.

Background here.

————————

THREE MORE Dead Sea Scroll fragments have been acquired by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary:

Fort Worth seminary obtains more pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Posted Friday, Oct. 22, 2010 (Star-Telegram)

FORT WORTH — Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has acquired three more fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the seminary announced this week.

The fragments were obtained from a private collector in Europe through a gift from a friend of the seminary, according to a news release. Early analysis shows that the new fragments include two portions of Deuteronomy and one of the Psalms.

[...]

SBTS obtained three additional fragments early this year.

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BOOK REVIEW in BAR:

The Dead Sea Scrolls, A Full History, Vol. 1

by Weston W. Fields

Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2009, 592 pp.
$99 (hardcover)

Reviewed by Charlotte Hempel

This lavishly illustrated volume contains a virtual mini-archive of the momentous events relating to the discovery, acquisition and early publication history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fields interviewed all the living major, as well as some minor, players or their family members in different parts of the world. Among them are Arab nomads, local Arab antiquities dealers, scholars, wealthy collectors and librarians. Fields studied the archives of universities and institutions in various countries and reproduces much of what he has discovered word for word.

[...]

———————————–

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS is coming out in the UK in a week, and a couple of weeks later in the USA. Follow the link for details. The Amazon link is here. Professor Timothy Lim, co-editor of the volume, also has sent the table of contents. I [Jim Davila] have contributed an article on the Scrolls and mysticism.

Introduction: Current Issues in Dead Sea Scrolls Research
Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins

PART I ARCHAEOLOGY OF KHIRBET QUMRAN AND THE JUDAEAN WILDERNESS
1. Khirbet Qumran and its Environs
Eric M. Meyers

2. The Qumran Cemetery Reassessed
Rachel Hachlili

PART II THE SCROLLS AND
JEWISH HISTORY
3. Constructing Ancient Judaism from the Scrolls
Martin Goodman

4. The Origins and History of the Teacher’s Movement
Michael O. Wise

5. Women in Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Tal Ilan

PART III THE SCROLLS AND SECTARIANISM
6. Sectarian Communities in the Dead Sea Scrolls
John J. Collins

7. The Classical Sources on the Essenes and the Scrolls
Communities
Joan E. Taylor

8. Sociological Approaches to Qumran Sectarianism
Jutta Jokiranta

9. Qumran Calendars and Sectarianism
Sacha Stern

10. The Book of Enoch and the Qumran Scrolls
James C. VanderKam

PART IV THE BIBLICAL TEXTS, INTERPRETATION, AND LANGUAGES OF THE SCROLLS
11. Assessing the Text-Critical Theories of the Hebrew Bible after Qumran
Ronald S. Hendel

12. Authoritative Scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Timothy H. Lim

13. Rewritten Scripture
Molly M. Zahn

14. The Continuity of Biblical Interpretation in the Qumran Scrolls and Rabbinic Literature
Bilhah Nitzan

15. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in the Qumran Scrolls
Jan Joosten

PART V RELIGIOUS THEMES IN THE SCROLLS
16. Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Jonathan Klawans

17. Apocalypticism and Messianism
Michael A. Knibb

18. Exploring the Mystical Background of the Dead Sea Scrolls
James R. Davila

19. Wisdom Literature and Thought in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Armin Lange

20. Iranian Connections in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Albert De Jong

21. Was the Dead Sea Sect a Penitential Movement?
David Lambert

PART VI THE SCROLLS AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY
22. Critical Issues in the Investigation of the Scrolls and the New Testament
Jo¨rg Frey

23. Monotheism, Principal Angels, and the Background of Christology
L. W. Hurtado

24. Shared Exegetical Traditions between the Scrolls and the New Testament
George J. Brooke

PART VII THE SCROLLS AND LATER JUDAISM
25. Halakhah between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinic Literature
Aharon Shemesh

26. The Contribution of the Qumran Scrolls to the Study of Ancient Jewish Liturgy
Daniel K. Falk

27. Reviewing the Links between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Genizah
Stefan C. Reif

PART VIII NEW APPROACHES TO THE SCROLLS
28. Rhetorical Criticism and the Reading of the Qumran Scrolls
Carol A. Newsom

29. Roland Barthes and the Teacher of Righteousness: The Death of the Author of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Maxine L. Grossman

30. The Scrolls and the Legal Definition of Authorship
Hector L. Macqueen

Searching for the Better Text

How errors crept into the Bible and what can be done to correct them

by Harvey Minkoff

But does this beloved image of the Peaceable Kingdom contain a mistranslation?

For years many scholars suspected that it did. Given the parallelism of the phrases, one would expect a verb instead of “the fatling.” With the discovery of the Isaiah Scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls, those scholars were given persuasive new support. The Isaiah Scroll contains a slight change in the Hebrew letters at this point in the text, yielding “will feed”: “the calf and the young lion will feed together.”

This is just one of numerous variations from the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In some cases the traditional text is clearly superior, but in others the version in the scrolls is better.

Thanks to the scrolls, more and more textual problems in the Hebrew Bible are being resolved. The notes in newer Bible translations list variant readings from the scrolls, and in some cases, the translations incorporate these readings in the text as the preferred reading. No one has ever seriously suggested that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain anything like an eleventh commandment; but the scrolls do help clarify numerous difficult phrases in the Hebrew Bible, and for textual scholars that is more than enough.

Before we list other examples of how the Dead Sea Scrolls influenced—or altered—Bible translations, we need to understand how ambiguities crept into the text of the Hebrew Bible in the first place. And we must also familiarize ourselves with the ancient versions of the Hebrew Bible on which modern translations rely (for good reason scholars call these ancient versions “witnesses” to the biblical text).

[...]

I won’t quote from or go into the content of his paper, but I wanted to present some of the notes I took from Professor Davila’s remarks after the presentation. He said some interesting things that are helpful for understanding how some Jews, in the couple of centuries leading up to the life of Jesus Christ, thought about the role of the Messiah. My notes are far from a complete and accurate rendering of what Professor Davila said, so please bear with me.

Professor Davila:

Messianism in Second Temple Judaism is a very messy problem because the problem of Jesus is bigger than the problem of messianism when you define Messiah simply as “anointed one” — for the case of Jesus, we also need to look at the early Jewish ideas surrounding divine mediator figures, principal angels, charismatic spiritual leaders, etc.

(See Davila’s article “Of Methodology, Monotheism and Metatron: Introductory Reflections on Divine Mediators and the Origins of the Worship of Jesus” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (Leiden: Brill,1999) and also his online outline Methodology for Studying Divine Mediators)

The idea of a “messiah” encompasses two ideal figures: the Davidic King and the High Priest. However, these two characters became very complex in Second Temple Judaism:

• The High Priest can be eschatological or celestial
• Davidic king ideal can draw from Past — King David or Melchizedek
• Melchizedek can be both eschatalogical and celestial
• and so on…

For the figure of Melchizedek, there are some background issues that need to be addressed — See Gen. 14 and Psalm 110 — these should be considered when studying 11QMelchizedek (a Dead Sea Scroll)

In Gen. 14, Melchizedek is both a king (of Jerusalem) and a priest who offers sacrifice — he was a human being originally (like Jesus).

In Psalm 110 — a “royal psalm” — the only other reference to Melchizedek in the Hebrew Bible — the Davidic king is enthroned at the right hand of God, and made a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek — the Davidic king is a Melchizedek priest sitting at the right hand of God (heavenly ascent, although not explicit, can be read into this)

Melchizedek is a human being who was exalted to be a god, which has connections to Jesus.

In a couple of places in 11QMelch, Melchizedek is called a god — for instance, where Psalms 82 and 7 are cited regarding him(Psalm 110 is probably in the background of 11QMelch. as well).

Anciently, both king and priest were anointed — so Melchizedek is anointed on two accounts. He would certainly be considered an “anointed one.”

Matt. 11:2–6 (Luke 7) and Luke 4:18–19 — Jesus identified himself as being the one anointed by the Spirit as mentioned in Isaiah 61 and then Isaiah 35:5–6.

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (Dead Sea Scrolls) are also of interest. They likely refer to Melchizedek as a priestly angelic figure, which reinforces 11QMelch.

Margaret Barker thinks that Jesus was aware of this Melchizedek tradition — the 70 weeks (10 Jubilee periods) mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls is supposed to have ended at the Great Revolt (according to Gospel writers and Josephus) — the 10th Jubilee was supposed to be “the end” — Jesus was aware that at the beginning of the 10th Jubilee, the Messiah was supposed to be active — he saw himself as the Melchizedek figure.

Qumran seemed to believe in messiahs (plural) of Aaron and Israel. [One of the big questions that was discussed in the student paper and in class was whether Jesus fit either or both of these conceptions of the messiah of Aaron -- a priestly, atoning messiah -- or the messiah of Israel -- the conquering Davidic king. The student had concluded, based on his research, that Jesus didn't fully fit either tradition.]

In the pre-exilic period you had the king and a Zadokite priest under him.  In the post-exilic period, the Jews were under Persian overlords, so there was no king — there was a governor, Zerubabbel, and a high priest, Joshua. Zerubabbel was of the line of David, but not allowed to be king. The people began to want to be independent (ca. 520 BC) and shirk Persian control. In the last verses of Haggai, Zerubabbel is the “messiah” — he will be the true king:

Haggai 2:21–23  1 Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I will shake the heavens and the earth;  22 And I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and I will destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the heathen; and I will overthrow the chariots, and those that ride in them; and the horses and their riders shall come down, every one by the sword of his brother.  23 In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, will I take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel, saith the LORD, and will make thee as a signet: for I have chosen thee, saith the LORD of hosts.

We should note that Haggai seems to be cut short abruptly. Zechariah has similar themes:

Zechariah 6:11–13  11 Then take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them upon the head of Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest;  12 And speak unto him, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD:  13 Even he shall build the temple of the LORD; and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne; and he shall be a priest upon his throne: and the counsel of peace shall be between them both.

The instruction is to set crowns (plural) on the high priest Joshua, who appears to be called here “the Branch”. However, it seems more likely that the Branch should have been Zerubbabel (the Davidic king as a tree was an ancient idea), but he was later omitted in the text. Zerubabbel then disappears from history and the governors are never from the line of David again. The High Priest remains as the ruling figure in Jewish society.

The Qumran texts are looking at this history of kings and priests and the early pre-exilic diarchy (king and high priest ruling together), and saying that this is the ideal. There must be two messiahs — one priestly (Aaronic) and the other a Davidic king (depicted as a conquering warrior). The Qumran texts seem to make the priestly Messiah more important. Why?

Interestingly, the Jewish pseudepigrapha don’t generally mention a priestly messiah. Also, the Rabbinic texts don’t have a priestly messiah, only Davidic. There may be many reasons for this. The Dead Sea Scrolls do seem to  have the two messiahs idea.

4Q285 — “they will kill the prince of the congregation” — this used to be taken as “suffering Messiah” text, but now is not generally accepted as such.

4Q174 — the “teacher of law” is called the “star” that comes out of Jacob

The Book of Revelation should not be ignored in this matter. Jesus is not only the priestly, atoning messiah, he is there depicted as an eschatalogical warrior. Mark 13 and parallels paint Jesus as the Son of Man coming as a conquering figure — this is more evidence for Jesus as the Davidic messiah figure as well.

My (brief) thoughts on this subject:

I believe that the Aaronic (priestly) vs. Davidic messiah dichotomy is post-exilic. The pre-exilic “messiah”, who was the Davidic monarch,  was both a priestly figure (connected to atonement) and a royal warrior figure (connected to the battle against the nations). He was associated with the figure of Melchizedek. The conception of the priestly messiah should likely have originally not been connected to Aaron at all (this is a post-exilic invention), but should have been the priest after the order of Melchizedek, as Christ is described in the Epistle to the Hebrews. I think this is where 11QMelch comes into play — Melchizedek, the ancient example of the ideal priest-king, would have embodied both messianic expectations — the priestly and the royal.  The Davidic kings were anointed following the example of Melchizedek — as both priest and king (see Psalm 110).  This is the pattern that we see in Jesus as the Messiah — he would have been considered to be the two conceptions of messiah in one — the atoning High Priest and Davidic King. However, Christians believed that his role as conquering warrior would only be fully accomplished with his Second Coming. The fact that this role was not apparent during his lifetime may be one of the main reasons he was not accepted as the expected Messiah. Furthermore, the fact that he was not an Aaronic high priest, but claimed to be after the ancient (and repudiated) order of Melchizedek, was probably another reason why the Jewish leadership felt so threatened by his claims.

(For more on the background for these politics of the priesthood, see my post here.)

LDS readers, if you don’t know already, should be pleased to hear that Professor Tov has been to BYU on a number of occasions and has worked with many BYU professors, including Donald Parry, Stephen Ricks, Dana Pike, Noel Reynolds, David Seeley, Andrew Skinner, Kent Brown, and others (those are all that I could remember him mentioning off the top of my head). Many of these have worked with him on the translation and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) and on the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library, a project that BYU produced in an effort to make the DSS available in an electronic format (now part of the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Reference Library of E. J. Brill Publishers (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006)). Professor Tov indicated to me that he has greatly enjoyed working with these BYU professors and commented on their notable devotion to their Church.

Without further ado, here are my notes from his lecture on Thursday, April 15th, 2010.  I would just add that these are my own personal notes and they do not necessarily represent Prof Tov’s comments in full nor his exact wording.

Introduction by University of St Andrews Professor Kristin de Troyer

…We owe the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Emanuel Tov…

Professor Tov’s Lecture: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible

We will be talking about the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (found between 1947 and 1956) and about the Hebrew Bible.

We should know that our modern translations of the Bible are based on the Masoretic text — this is the text that is also used in synagogues and in scholarship.  The Masoretic text, however, comes from medieval times — it is very late.

Therefore, all our commentaries are traditionally based on these late biblical manuscripts. Were we misleading the world? No, the Masoretic text was very good, but it was late.

We’ll go back now 60 years in scholarship, when the first scrolls were found. There were (eventually) fragments of 930 scrolls found near the Dead Sea. They are mostly non-biblical. About 1/4 are biblical.

To cite some examples, the great Isaiah scroll was very complete; The scroll containing Chronicles, however, was only a very small fragment; the biblical scrolls found are of varying size.

(Commenting on the nature/appearance of the scrolls) They were sheets of leather sown together.

There were many scrolls found at Masadah — 23 biblical scrolls and many other non-biblical texts.

(Commenting on the people who formed the Qumran community) The keepers of DSS left the city and went to live a communal life in the desert.

Finding these scrolls of the Bible was a very great opportunity; for the first time we were able to see what this type of scroll looked like.

(On the nature of the biblical scrolls found) For example, 4QGenesis – the text of Genesis found on this scroll is exactly the same as the Masoretic text. The books of the Bible were found at Qumran in different quantities.

There were found 16 or 17 scrolls of Genesis.

• 14 or 15 of Exodus
• 36 of psalms (collections of psalms, but not full biblical Psalter)
• 20 of Isaiah
• only 1 of Chronicles

Everything around these scrolls is mysterious, we know nothing! There are as many theories as there are scholars. We know they are old — they are about 2000 years old. They date from around 250 BCE to about 70CE. It seems that the Qumran community liked the book of Deuteronomy, likely because of its preacher-like style, which the community tried to imitate. They liked the psalms because they must have used them for their daily prayers — they were used as a prayer book. There were many copies of the book of Isaiah, and it had much influence on the thinking of the people there.

Those that went to Qumran took phylacteries with them as well.

We get a good picture of what the biblical text looked like at that period. Among the scrolls we have found the square Hebrew script (Aramaic script) and also the older Paleo-Hebrew script (20+ examples). There is also a cryptic script — which was intended to give a “hidden” message from the leader to his followers. There were also some Greek and Aramaic fragments found.  The Qumran community was living there for approximately 170 years.

There is no scroll of the “Bible” — nothing like a codex — it’s too early for that. There is one example of three books combined; or the  minor prophets combined; but otherwise all books are separate.

4QDeuteronomy is a copy of Deut. 32, “The Song of Moses”– it has some very important content (which will be discussed later).

Some scrolls had only Psalm 119 alone (which means it was probably significant for them as well).

(Professor Tov begins commenting on the history of biblical texts)

It is hard to define what we mean by “original text” — it’s not necessarily what the prophet originally said (for example, if we had a recording of Jeremiah’s words which he spoke in the Temple), but we take into account the long history of how the text came to us.

As important as the DSS are, they are still removed by several stages from the earliest stages of the text.

When we talk about the Hebrew Bible, it is not just the text that we hold in our hands today. The text of the Bible is BOTH  the text we hold in our hands (the Masoretic text) and also the other ancient texts that exist. The Masoretic text is the “received” text — from 250 BCE to today it hasn’t changed much.  It already existed among the DSS, but was not the only version used there. At Masadah, we see the Masoretic text (really the proto-Masoretic text, because it was not yet vocalized). At Qumran, there was something very close to the Masoretic Text — and this is the largest group of texts. This was the proto-Rabbinic text.

There is a very small group of Hebrew texts at Qumran that is close to the Greek Septuagint (LXX). The LXX was produced around 280 BCE in Alexandria and Palestina (although we don’t often remember that it was also in Palestina). Some of the features of the LXX are reflected in these scrolls at Qumran.

The “Song of Moses” (Deut. 32) at Qumran has an extra line not found in the Masoretic Text — “Be happy with him you heavens and prostrate to him all you gods (sons of Elohim).” It speaks of more than one god — the “sons of God”. This is the same as the Greek text, but the line does not exist in the Masoretic Text. It was probably not included in the Masoretic Text because it was probably disturbing to some — for strict monotheists, it sounds very polytheistic. There are other places in the Masoretic Text (e.g. in some psalms) where this idea was not censored, but here it appears to have been. That is why the Masoretic Text is a shorter text here.

There is also, at Qumran, a shorter version of the Book of Jeremiah than what we have in the Masoretic Text. There are some Qumran texts that are close to the Samaritan Pentateuch as well. There are some texts that use a very different type of spelling from the Masoretic Text. There are other “non-aligned” (not similar to any known version) texts as well.

The Masoretic was a major text at Qumran (in quantities), but was not the only text — we need to look at all the texts in order to get the big picture.

Question and Answer Period

(Question regarding which biblical texts were found and when ? )

Answer: Check Discoveries of the Judean Desert, no. 39 — it gives a chronology of all the scrolls.

All the books of the Bible are there, except Esther.

(But that doesn’t mean that this was their “canon” of Holy Scripture) I haven’t mentioned Jubilees, Enoch, ben Sira, Temple Scroll (paraphrase of Deut.), etc. (other religious texts that are not included in our Bible). We do not know if these were part of their “canon” — we simply don’t know. They do quote Jubilees, Enoch, etc. in their own writings, so that may mean that they were considered authoritative. They probably used the familiar books of Hebrew Bible — plus others.

(Question from President Daryl Watson, LDS Stake President of the Dundee, Scotland Stake — Were there more polytheistic texts at Qumran than the one you mentioned?)

Answer: Yes, there were many more — look at Ps. 29:1, Job, etc.  If you look at Anchor Bible Dictionary under “polytheism” or something similar, you should find an explanation of the situation at Qumran.

There were some ancient utterances that talked about plural gods, but these things were brushed aside in later biblical thought.

We can see that censorship is at work in our biblical text, that what we have is not the original form. A censor, maybe a Pharisee, censored these things out.

You could also see Bart Ehrman, for example, who shows that certain strains of Christianity censored the New Testament text for theological reasons.

Announcement by Prof Kristin de Troyer

There will now be an Emanuel Tov Scholarship at the University of St Andrews for PhD students doing text criticism of the Bible.