This volume fundamentally re-examines textual approaches to the New Testament and its manuscripts in the age of digital editing and media. Using the eccentric work of Herman Charles Hoskier as a shared foundation for analysis, contributors examine the intellectual history of New Testament textual scholarship and the production of critical editions, identify many avenues for further research, and discuss the methods and protocols for producing the most recent set of editions of the New Testament: the Editio Critica Maior . Instead of comprising the minute refinement of a basically acceptable text, textual scholarship on the New Testament is a vibrant field that impinges upon New Testament Studies in unexpected and unacknowledged ways. -- ‡c From publisher's description.

The book is going through its biggest revolution since Gutenberg. Thanks to computer tools and electronic publication, the concept and realisation of critical editions are being rethought. David C. Parker looks at how new methodology changes what an edition is for and how we use it, using the example of the New Testament texts.

The book is going through its biggest revolution since Gutenberg. Thanks to computer tools and electronic publication, the concept and realisation of critical editions are being rethought. As so often in the history of scholarship, editors of the New Testament are making a vital contribution to these changes. In this book, originally the Lyell Lectures in Bibliography at Oxford, David C. Parker explores textual scholarship, in particular the idea of the edition. He argues that textual scholarship has had an important influence on the meaning given to the term 'New Testament'. Starting with the observation that a text is a process, not an object, he proposes a new way of understanding the relationship between manuscripts, the texts which manuscripts contain and the work they represent as the basis for critical scholarship. This leads him to challenge the idea of a 'Greek New Testament manuscript', and thus to reconsider the nature of the New Testament as a collection of works and the nature and purpose of critical editions. By studying new tools for studying how manuscripts are related to each other, he shows how the modern digital edition of the New Testament has overcome the impasses created by the failure of Lachmannian stemmatics to deal with the problem of contamination. Exploring the emergence of the critical edition in modern scholarship, Parker discusses the ways in which a digital edition advances scholarship and gives the reader more opportunities both to scrutinise the quality of the edition and to access the raw data on which it is based. The whole book uses New Testament research as a paradigm of wider changes in textual scholarship.

New Testament textual criticism is an important but often overlooked field of study. Results drawn from textual studies bear important consequences for interpreting the New Testament and cannot be ignored by serious students of Scripture. This book introduces current issues in New Testament textual criticism and surveys the various methods used to determine the original text among variant readings. These essays from Eldon Jay Epp, Michael Holmes, J. K. Elliott, Maurice Robinson, and Moisés Silva provide readers with an excellent introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism.

The problems with the Bible that New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman discussed in his bestseller Misquoting Jesus—and on The Daily Show with John Stewart, NPR, and Dateline NBC, among others—are expanded upon exponentially in his latest book: Jesus, Interrupted. This New York Times bestseller reveals how books in the Bible were actually forged by later authors, and that the New Testament itself is riddled with contradictory claims about Jesus—information that scholars know… but the general public does not. If you enjoy the work of Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong, you’ll find much to ponder in Jesus, Interrupted.

Challenging Contextuality: Bibles and Biblical Scholarship in Context provides a new and innovative contribution to the study of biblical texts by bringing together current approaches to biblical interpretation. The volume sets the agenda for the future of the field and provides a synthesis of approaches to date. In doing so, it aligns itself with the broadly shared hermeneutical conviction that contextuality is a catalyst for interpretation. This applies in equal measure to approaches and methods that are often framed as 'traditional' or 'mainstream' (e.g. the methodological canon of the historical critical approach as the offspring of the European Enlightenment) and those that are often dubbed 'contextual' (e.g. forms of feminist or 'indigenous' interpretation). The volume grounds contextual biblical interpretation within the broader landscape of biblical studies, and the chapters are all interested in the contexts in which bibles are read. Rather than a series of examples of contextual biblical interpretation, this book is concerned with what it means to do contextual biblical interpretation, how contextual biblical interpretation challenges biblical scholarship, and what chances there are for this mode of inquiry. What contexts are engaged and elucidated when it comes to bible-use? What contexts are made visible and invisible? How can different contexts be theorized and understood? The volume argues that it is not context that matters, rather, contemporary contexts should be a challenge and a chance for biblical scholarship, its present and its future.