ZiprHead

I'm interested in studying some articles from SecWeb, or anywhere else online for that matter, discussing the history of the creation of the christian bible. Stuff like: who wrote the gospels; who assembled the books; etc. Can anyone give me some suggestions?

Thanks

Haran

These websites have some good information:

Devlopment of the Canon
Bible Research

Peter Kirby

Be sure to check out Richard Carrier's The Formation of the New Testament Canon for a good survey.

best,
Peter Kirby

CX

Doesn't anybody read books anymore? I'd recommend The History & Theology of the New Testament Writings by Udo. Schnelle. For a more radical liberal approach try Who Wrote the New Testament by Burton Mack and for a more conservative but still scholarly approach try Luke T. Johnson's The New Testament Writings. Start with the Schnelle book and move on from there.

Peter Kirby

CX: "Doesn't anybody read books anymore?"

Apparently not ... that's part of why I made my ECW site.

If cost is a prohibiting factor, here is my advice: find a university library nearby and ask about becoming a "patron" or otherwise getting to check out books. At a public university this will cost about $50 per year. Then drive down there on Saturday and check out books to your heart's content.

Why would you want to? Improved quality, scope, and freshness of information. The web is great, but so far nobody has come up with a very good way to compensate researchers for publishing online, either in terms of C.V. or money. So scholars will be writing articles for journals and books for academic presses until there is a good reason to do otherwise.

best,
Peter Kirby

adler5

(Cut and pasted from this page. You must give credit to your source! -PK)

the men who worked on the KJV {king james version}depended more on previous English translations of the Bible than on the texts those translations had come from, despite the fact that most of them read Latin and Greek. Also, they were told to consider readability and literary merit to be as important as scholarly accuracy, to make the Bible accessible to the common man (a radical concept at the time). I find it somewhat humorous, based on this point, that some people claim the KJV is the only "inspired" translation of the Bible into English - but i digress.

Anyway, most of the English Bibles in existence then had been published between 1535 and 1568, when no less than five versions were first printed. However, versions as early as William Tyndale's 1525 translation were used in the preparation of the KJV. (Ironically, Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible.)

Tyndale's Bible in fact was extensively used as the pattern for the KJV, and it is because of this that we say the KJV was written using language that was old-fashioned already at the time. Normally, one century makes a noticeable though not large difference in a language (provided you know what you're looking for, of course!) At this time, however, English was undergoing a period of rapid change, and much of the change was grammatical. So much of the language Tyndale used in 1525 already sounded old-fashioned in 1611 - not archaic, but somewhat out of fashion. The use of "thou", for instance, was common in 1525, but by 1611 was falling out of use - but it was used in the KJV none the less, mostly because it sounded good.

As far as the "archaicness" of Shakespeare vs. the KJV, i don't want to sound snobby here but... you can't just take two pieces of literature and say "they both sound equally archaic to me, therefore they are equally archaic." Scholars that work on this sort of thing have to have a deep and broad knowledge of the history of the language they're working on. They look at individual words and grammatical structures, to find ones that can be dated - either when they came into use, or when they largely dropped out of use. It's not the sort of thing that can be done simply be reading them to see which one sounds older, so you must be the judge on the validity so be discerning wen doing your research.

Sources used:
McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English (American Edition). New York, NY, USA: Viking Penguin Inc. (c) 1986.

Strang, Barbara M.H. A History of English. London, UK: Methuen & Co, Ltd. (c) 1970


adler5

Egoinos

You might try www.ntcanon.org as well, and www.johannine.net has links to information on John.

Also these sites collect links on this sort of thing:

Resource Pages for Biblical Studies

Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway

The Jesus Archive