IVP - Addenda & Errata

What's In Your Codex, O Theophilus? (Part Two)

Well, we return again to our Theophilus and his codex. Why did the early Christians adopt the codex for their scriptural texts? Was there an initial impulse that set it off? We need to hang a sign over these thoughts that reads “We Don’t Know, But… .”

In addition to the practical considerations surveyed in the previous blog, there is the intriguing theory that a certain significant early Christian set the precedent of using the codex: Paul. If even the author of 2 Peter (a late dating would be 70-110) knew of Paul’s letters as a collection (“all his letters”) and regarded them as Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16), might they have been bound in codex form? Might this codex then have taken on some sort of iconic meaning?

What's In Your Codex, O Theophilus? (Part One)

Recently I’ve been reading Charles Hill’s Who Chose the Gospels? and rereading some of Larry Hurtado’s The Earliest Christian Artifacts. Both of these are excellent books with various interesting facets. And both have something to say about a topic that has intrigued me over the years: that the early Christians were very early adopters of a new technology, the codex, or book, as opposed to the scroll, or roll.

Demythologizing Bultmann

There are two things that every student of theology should know about Bultmann. The first is the proper meaning of the term demythologize.

I sometimes find writers—even ones who really should know better—implying or stating that Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologizing was a kernel-from-husk operation. That is, Bultmann was attempting to strip away the husk of myth that encapsuled the historical kernel of Jesus in order to grasp the historically certifiable facts. This is critically mistaken and editorially annoying.

Spicing Up the ATA

In the book industry we call it the ata, “about the author,” the little blurb on the dust jacket (or in the catalog or on the website) that gives a snapshot of the author’s life or some relevant portion thereof. Academic ata’s are the most predictable and dry of the ata’s. They basically try to establish the academic creds of the author—“got her PhD there, teaches here, has written this and that.” It feels transgressive to go beyond that—“has ten kids, drives a cobalt blue BMW, roots for the Bears”—conventional wisdom says that kind of stuff would diminish the stature of the author. We couldn’t take the author seriously.

But maybe expectations have changed in this day of Facebook and tweeting and all. Shouldn’t we be prying open a little slit in the fence around the academic author’s life? There’d be risk in this—some of our readers might get the wrong idea when they learned the author likes to sip bourbon while playing poker. But who knows? Maybe we’d gain more readers than we’d lose.

In our publishing house, it’s the editor who generally writes the ata. And the editor doesn’t want to stick his or her neck out by being overly creative with the ata. We might embarrass the author and lose the opportunity to publish their next book.

Nevertheless, for some authors whose reputations are established, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to kick in some human interest. If it’s not People magazine stuff, at least a bit of Facebook profile. In the spirit of cowardice, let’s try this on some dead authors who can’t kick back: And besides, except for one, they're not our authors!

Gimme an R! Gimme a C! Gimme an S! What's It All About?

I have before me the handsome first volume of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture, brought to us under the general editorship of Timothy George. This volume is on Galatians and Ephesians and is edited by Gerald Bray. It is numbered 10 in the New Testament series. All told, with the thirteen volumes on the Old Testament and fifteen on the New Testament, there will be twenty-eight volumes. Galatians and Ephesians is a great pair of books to start off this series!

When we first proposed this series as a worthy successor to the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, some met the idea with understandable caution: “Don’t we have Calvin’s and Luther’s commentaries?”

Scribes Have Culture, Authors . . . Not So Much

I’ve been revisiting some books on ancient scribal and literary production—books like David M. Carr’s Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, Karel van der Toorn’s Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible and William Schniedewind’s How the Bible Became a Book. It’s become clear that in thinking about “publishing” texts in the ancient Near East in general we need to clear away some modern conceptions of authors and editors and recast others. So if authors and editors want to have A Year of Living Biblically (or maybe Babylonially), here’s how it’s going to look: