Houghton, H. A. G. ed. Early Readers, Scholars and Editors of the New Testament: Papers from the Eighth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament

This book presents the reader with a breadth of approaches to the field of textual criticism on the New Testament.It begins with an informative introduction to the modern goals of textual criticism and is followed by a collection of ten papers from the March 2013 Colloquium on Textual Criticism at the University of Birmingham.The individual papers are not centered on a single theme, thereby positively offering readers exposure to various methods and studies.They can be summarized as follows.2Chapter 1, "' : Does Luke 1:2 Throw Light onto the Book Practices of the Late First-Century Churches?,"1-15: Thomas O'Loughlin contends that Luke 1:2 refers to how ancient books were copied, disseminated, and cared for in the ancient world.He begins his case with the phrase in Luke, , which O'Loughlin glosses as "servants of the word."O'Loughlin believes that Luke is referring to keepers of libraries.Apparently Luke has in mind people who were highly literate and served the early church by authenticating and preserving church documents.Authentication would have been important in the early stages of the Christian communities with no previously established libraries.The paper argues against the more common position that Luke refers to the eyewitnesses of the earthly work of Christ who later became servants of the church as teachers, such as the apostles.O'Loughlin does a fine job exploring the lexical evidence and the historical transmission of texts.He acknowledges that not all will be convinced by his argument, but it is a wellresearched article addressing some interesting ideas of how early Christian documents were preserved.3 Chapter 2, "The Gospel of John and Its Original Readers," 17-25: Hans Frster and Ulrike Swoboda offer a very short paper addressing the the implied audience for the Gospel of John.While a substantial debate with many variables, the authors suggest that collocation analysis and text criticism should caution scholars denying the possibility of a Jewish audience being intended.Unfortunately, the paper admits to only being a preliminary proposal, and full conclusions were not presented.4 Chapter 3, "The Eusebian Canons: Their Implications and Potential," 27-43: Satoshi Toda explores the potential use of the Eusebian Canons for textual criticism and New Testament studies more generally.Toda offers a fascinating article with plenty of research and historical studies.Focusing on the passion episodes in the Gospels, Satoshi comes to some suggestive conclusions.First, she believes the Canons demonstrate that the author of the Gospel of John did not make use of Mark (33).This contention runs contrary to mainstream views within Gospel studies.Second, the relationship between Matthew and Mark should be considered independently from relationships with Luke or John.Again, her suggestion has significant ramifications for approaches to Synoptic studies.Lastly, she finds that since the Canons only have 233 sections for Mark, it indicates that Eusebius's manuscripts ended with Mark 16:8.These three suggestions alone make Satoshi's article worth reading.