Bart Ehrman to speak at MTSU Friday, Feb 18th

If folks are in or near Murfreesboro (about 40 miles south of Nashville) this weekend, this will be worth your time.

The Middle Tennessee State University Department of Philosophy
is happy to announce a lecture by

Professor Bart D. Ehrman
"Misquoting Jesus: Scribes Who Changed the Bible and Readers Who May Never Know"

Friday, February 18 at 3:30
State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building

The lecture is free and open to the public. Professor Ehrman will be signing copies of his books immediately following his lecture.

Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Professor with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among Professor Ehrman's fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
He is the author of over twenty books. Among his most recent are a Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), an assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press), and three New York Times Bestsellers: Jesus Interrupted ( an account of scholarly views of the New Testament), God's Problem (an assessment of the biblical views of suffering), and Misquoting Jesus (an overview of the changes found in the surviving copies of the New Testament and of the scribes who produced them). His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

The lecture is part of the annual Applied Philosophy Lyceum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with appreciation to the Distinguished Lecture Committee.

Anjou Bible from Peeters

I just got an email about this, so I figured I would pass it on:

The Anjou Bible
NAPLES | 1340
A ROYAL MANUSCRIPT

The Anjou Bible, now kept in the Theology Faculty’s Maurits Sabbe Library of the University of Leuven (Belgium) is a superbly illuminated manuscript created at the Royal Court of Naples in the turbulent fourteenth century. At this time much of Central and Southern Europe was governed by the successful dynasty of Anjou, which continued to expand its territories and encouraged artists and writers like Giotto, Simone Martini, Boccaccio and Petrarch. In 1328, after the death of her father, Joanna of Anjou became the official heir to the prosperous Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. Several years later her grandfather, Robert I, gave Joanna and her young fiancé Andrew of Hungary a precious gift, which became known as the Anjou Bible, a manuscript that is priceless from a historical and art-historical point of view. In addition to Bible texts and splendid miniatures, it contains a wealth of historical information about the house of Anjou and the book’s origins. One of the artists responsible for the magnificent painting was Cristophorus Orimina, the leading illuminator in Naples, who signed the work. The Anjou Bible has now been carefully conserved and studied: the research findings are brought together in this book. Essays by some of the most noted experts in the field describe how the arts were promoted at the court of Robert I of Anjou and also shed light on the Bible’s genesis and on all the research methods and results. This book is richly illustrated and contains all the illuminated folios of the Anjou Bible.

"By any definition, it is one of the supreme Bibles of the Gothic period."

Christopher de Hamel - Corpus Christi College, Cambridge



Table of Contents
The Anjou Bible. A Masterpiece Revealed
Essays
• The Anjou Bible in the Context of Illustrated Bibles
John Lowden
• The Anjou Bible. A Treasure from the Maurits Sabbe Library in Leuven
Frans Gistelinck
• Patronage, Art, and the Anjou Bible in Angevin Naples (1266–1350)
Cathleen A. Fleck
• Painting and Miniatures in Naples. Cavallini, Giotto and the Portraits of King Robert
Alessandro Tomei, Stefania Paone
• The Politics of Art. Imaging Sovereignty in the Anjou Bible
Michelle M. Duran
• A Kingdom in Stone. Angevin Sculpture in Naples
Nicolas Bock
• Cristoforo Orimina. An Illuminator at the Angevin Court of Naples
Alessandra Perriccioli Saggese
• The Anjou Bible and the Biblia Vulgata Lovaniensis, 1547 / 1574
Luc Dequeker
• Arras College Library Leuven. The Academic Habitat of the Anjou Bible for Three Centuries
Pierre Delsaerdt
• Illuminating with Pen and Brush.
The Techniques of a Fourteenth-Century Neapolitan Illuminator Explored
Lieve Watteeuw, Marina Vanbos
• Quantitative Hyperspectral Study of the Anjou Bible
Roberto Padoan, Marvin E. Klein, Gerrit De Bruin,
Barnard J. Aalderink, Ted. A.G. Steemers
• Codicology of the Anjou Bible
Lieve Watteeuw
• Illuminated folios of the Anjou Bible
• Identification of the Illuminated Folios of the Anjou Bible
• Biographies of Robert i of Anjou and Joanna i
• Bibliography
Partners
About the Authors
Photo Credits
Colophon

For orders outside of North America

http://www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=8927


To view our complete leaflet on this title, and to print and mail in an order form, please click here:

http://www.oxbowbooks.com/pdfs/leaflets/Leaflet%20Anjou%20Bible.pdf

To order this title directly through our secure website, please click here:

http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/157274/location/DBBC

Proceedings posted online for the "Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation" Conference

The recent conference, "Invention, rewriting, usurpation: Discursive fights over religious traditions in antiquity," hosted by Aarhus University in Denmark, has posted recordings and videos of the major proceedings and papers for the conference online.

You can access the footage and recordings here.

International conference in Denmark: Invention, rewriting, usurpation: Discursive fights over religious traditions in antiquity

I just found out about this upcoming conference. It is too late to get a paper proposal in to them, but if you are near Denmark, and interested in questions of ideology and canon formation with regard to ancient Scripture, this would be right up your alley. Wish I could attend.

Invention, rewriting, usurpation: Discursive fights over religious traditions in antiquity

International conference 31 May - 4 June 2010

• CONFERENCE PROGRAMME (pdf)

How did ancient religious texts and traditions attain status as normative and canonic? Which ideological and rhetorical strategies were used in the struggle for normative status of specific texts and traditions? The conference will explore these questions under the following five headings:

1. Reuse, Rewriting and Usurpation of Biblical and Classical Texts
2. Invention and Maintenance of Religious Traditions: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives
3. Orthodoxy and Heresy
4. Formation of the Biblical Canon
5. Canons, Classics and Foundation Texts in Antiquity: A Comparative Perspective

Organiser: Centre for the Study of Antiquity and Christianity, Faculty of Theology, Aarhus University

Conference website available here

"Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to Gutenburg" coming to JPII High School in Nashville area

John Paul II Catholic High School in Hendersonville, TN will host a traveling exhibition about incunabular (first-generation movable type) printing and ancient manuscripts this Spring.

The exhibit, entitled Ink & Blood, runs from February 15th through March 4th, 2010. The hours are somewhat erratically arranged, and you will need to purchase the $15 tickets in advance (information about both hours and tickets available here)

As the promoters of the exhibit describe:

Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to Gutenberg is the largest collection ever assembled chronicling Western Civilization as seen through one of its most prominent and carefully preserved objets d’art—the Hebrew, Latin and English Bible.

The collection includes authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, 5,000-year-old clay tablets, Hebrew Torahs, ancient Greek texts, Medieval Latin manuscripts, pages from Gutenberg’s Bible, and rare English printed Bibles.

In addition to the more than one-hundred authentic artifacts, the exhibition includes a working replica of Gutenberg’s printing press featuring live demonstrations of incunabular printing.

From the information and pictures available on the website, it looks to be a pretty interesting exhibit. I, for one, will be making the pilgrimage to Nashville to explore it. I will have a more detailed review to post then. Meanwhile, if you are in the Nashville area, I highly recommend checking it out for yourself.

Typography of the Tetragrammaton through the centuries

Kendall Soulen, at Wesley Seminary, recently sent me the following question:

I'm working on a book on the name of the Trinity that touches on how scribes and printers have handled divine names in sacred texts. There's been a fair bit written on nomina sacra recently, but I haven't seen much on handling e.g. the Tetragram in modern european vernacular translations. Can you direct me to a source that traces the history of using capital type for LORD (HERR etc.) in recent centuries? Specifically, I'm wondering whether Luther introduced the practice, or whether it was already current before him. I would be grateful for any help.

I've been doing a little digging, but I haven't been able to find much information on this practice. If anyone out there reading this can point out some good resources on this question, please leave a comment below. Many thanks.