Harry Y. Gamble

Thoughts: This short "guide to biblical scholarship" glossed over some of the reasons certain books, and not others, were chosen for the New Testament canon. This is a very heavy topic with lots of scholarship, and this book tended to disagree with most of the specific theories in favor of the broader theory that there's no evidence that any specific movement had a great impact on the formation of the New Testament canon, but added all together they DID have an impact. I found this book rather dense at times. It assumed prior knowledge of the topic, which I'm only beginning to study.… (mer)

Can we hear it for 1506?

If you're thinking, "What?" -- join the author of this book. Because the manuscript known as 1506 would surely have influenced Harry Gamble's presentation, had he only noticed it.

The idea of this book is very good. Although we today think of the New Testament as a unit, in the manuscript era, it tended to be copied as five sections, Gospels, Acts, Paul, Catholic Epistles, and Apocalypse. (Although the Acts and Catholics almost always went together, and they were often joined with Paul.) Before those five sections coalesced, the individual books would have circulated separately. So each book would have a separate textual history -- that is, the text would have evolved and been copied and recopied and miscopied in a different way. Every book deserves its own individual study like this one.

Or, rather, its own individual study unlike this one, because there are real reasons to think Gamble has the history wrong. One is the contents of the aforementioned manuscript 1506, which has a peculiar ending of Romans. Another is the manuscript 1739 and its relatives, which Gamble cites but without much knowledge of the nature of the family. Admittedly they are only two manuscripts out of many hundreds. But they are very important manuscripts indeed. And they have not been properly used or studied. It really makes you wonder what else Gamble has missed.

There is good, useful information in this volume. Textual critics should have it. But they should be very alert that there is a lot more to be said about the issue.… (mer)