Illustrated Manuscripts of the Septuagint

Author(s):  
Maja Kominko

The chapter provides a brief overview of illustrated Greek manuscripts of the Bible, starting from Late Antiquity until the end of the Byzantine Empire. It outlines different, often conflicting, hypotheses on the origins, development, and transmission of the illustrative cycles in Byzantine Bibles. The material is organized according to the diverse biblical textual units preserved in illustrated Byzantine manuscripts. The chapter traces connections between codices, and continuity in the use of pictorial vocabulary. At the same time, it flags diverse approaches to illustrating the biblical text, from literal illustrations through to highly symbolic visual exegesis.

Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert

In the conclusion, the intrinsic deconstructive power of philology is contrasted with external pressures moving philology in different political and religious directions. The positions of the main protagonists differed widely, but they show that the less they were institutionalized, the more freedom they had to present unorthodox theories. As in the case of natural science, biblical philology was a handmaiden of theology, but it could also be used against certain theologies. In the end, the accumulation of evidence regarding the history of the Bible and the transmission of its texts, could not fail to impinge on the authority of Scripture. The problems in the transmission of the biblical text were widely discussed in the decade leading up to the publication of the Theological-political Treatise. Readers of Spinoza were already familiar with the type of reasoning which Spinoza employed in the central chapters of his notorious work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Rosemary Dewerse ◽  
Cathy Hine

Abstract Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-213
Author(s):  
Ludwig Rübekeil

AbstractThis article investigates the origin and history of two names dating from late Antiquity or the migration period. The first is the personal name Tufa, the second is the tribal name Armilausini. The two names can be traced back to a corresponding Germanic loan word in the Latin military language, tufa and armilausia, respectively, both of which are continued in the military language of the Eastern Roman and Byzantine Empire. The names are based on the appellative nouns. Both the appellatives and, even more so, the names turn out to be characteristic products of the multilingual background of the Roman military, as they show several signs of linguistic interference such as lexical reanalysis / folk etymology, morphological remodelling and semantic specialization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-174
Author(s):  
Sebastian Selvén

Abstract This article investigates biblical reception in the works of two popular modern fantasy authors. It stages an intertextual dialogue between Genesis 22:1-19, “the binding of Isaac”, and two episodes, in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King. After presenting the dynamics of what happens to the biblical text in these two authors and the perspectives that come out, a hermeneutical reversal is then suggested, in which the modern stories are used to probe the biblical text. One can return to the Bible with questions culled from its later reception, in this case King and Tolkien. This article argues that the themes touched upon by the two authors are important and hermeneutically relevant ones, sometimes novel and sometimes contributions to exegetical debates that have been going on for centuries.


Author(s):  
Pablo Ubierna

During late antiquity, Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, belonging to the northwest group of Semitic languages, and originally the language of the Kingdom of Edessa and the Oshroene in Upper Mesopotamia, became the literary language of Aramaic-speaking Christians and developed under the mutual influences of both Greek and Iranian. This section surveys Syriac translations of Byzantine Greek texts, from the Bible and homiletics, to theological and ascetic literature, as well as historiographical, hagiographical, and other narrative texts. It thus highlights Greek authors with important corpora in Syriac (e.g. Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, and the Areopagitic corpus), as well as authors and texts no longer extant in Greek (often because of their deviation from Constantinopolitan orthodoxy).


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 157-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirił Marinow ◽  
Michał Zytka

The year 927 brought a peace treaty between Byzantium and Bulgaria, which ended many years of military struggle between both the states. On this occasion Theodore Daphnopates delivered a speech praising the newly concluded agreement. The blame for the accursed war was to put on (already dead) Symeon I (893–927), the then Bulgarian ruler, and his ungodly aspirations to the crown of the Byzantine Empire. It was his personal ambitions that were a real infringement on the God’s earthly order, and it was only and exclusively Symeon, who lead to the appearance of a crack on the House of the Lord. The Bulgarian ruler is referred to as pharaoh, holding the chosen people captive. Symeon is also characterised like various ungodly personages from the Old and New Testament, i e Goliath, Ader, Holophernes or even the Devil himself. It can therefore be concluded that Symeon was a usurper, tyrant, sower of discord, murderer, fratricide, and one who committed sacrilege. Daphnopates explicitly writes about his lies, hiding his true intentions, not fulfilling agreements and instability in his proceedings. So, by means of a variety of hints to ancient history, literature and the Bible the speaker present Symeon as a usurper and an enemy of truth, a servant of Satan.


1970 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Leszae Misiarczyk

This paper concerns the comparison of three twelfth-century biblical manuscripts from Plock, namely the so-called The Bible of Plock and The Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia with two Mosan biblical manuscripts: The Evangeliary of Averbode and the Biblia Universa transcribed in the same period. The first three texts: Beatissimo Papae Damaso (Novum opus), Prologus quatuor evangeliorum (Plures fuisse) and Iheronimus Damaso Pape (Sciendum etiam) – the last one is not included in the Bible of Plock - and Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia are of St. Jerome. In contrast, the introductions to the Synoptic Gospels: Argumentum secundum Matheum, Prologus in Marco and Prologus sancti Evangelii secundum Lucam are not the texts of St. Jerome, as is sometimes mistakenly repeated by different scholars, but were written by Sedulius Scottus, an Irish monk and a poet who lived and worked in a school in Leodium in the ninth century, whereas the introduction to the Gospel according to St. John: Prephatio in Evangelium secundum Iohannem was written by Bede the Venerable. While the texts of Jerome were quite commonly used in medieval biblical manuscripts, the fact that the introductions to the Synoptic Gospels are written by Sedulius Scottus and are present in both The Bible of Plock as well as partially in The Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia is a very strong argument for the Mosan origin of the twelfth century biblical manuscripts of Płock. The comparative analysis of the texts themselves clearly leads to several important conclusions. First, the Bible of Plock and Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia are closer to the version of the text preserved in the Biblia Universa, a codex written in the monastery of Sancti Trudonis, than to the Evangeliary of Averbode. It follows that the sources for the biblical manuscripts of Plock from the twelfth century should be searched at Mosan Benedictine monasteries, perhaps in the very monastery Sancti Trudonis near Liège. Second, the Gospel according to St. Mark generally follows the version of the text preserved in the Biblia Universa and the Bible of Plock but not all the time. It should therefore be hoped that the further comparative studies, especially of the version of the biblical text, will confirm this relationship and will help to determine whether the codex was written in the Meuse River region or is it a copy of the Bible of Plock made on the spot. Thirdly, and this is an extremely interesting proposal, the Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia, not counting minor changes made by a copyist like converting - tium to - cium, is very much dependent on the Bible of Plock. If, as it is confirmed by records of the miracles, the Bible was already in Plock in 1148 or before that date, it is very likely that the Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia, would be a copy of the text made on the spot in a local Plock scriptorium as a foundation of Boleslaw Kedzierzawy and a votive offering for the salvation of his deceased wife Anastasia. The codex would therefore arise after her death, dating back to the year 1158 in Plock in the time of Bishop Werner and would not have been brought by him following his trip to Aachen. These conclusions, for obvious reasons, are only preliminary, as comparison of the texts is not fully detailed and more comprehensive conclusions will be presented only after benchmarking a version of the biblical text of the four Gospels.  


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 656
Author(s):  
Santiago García-Jalón

A close analysis of the text of Gen. 2:8–15, pertaining to the Garden of Eden, shows the structural differences between said text and others from ancient mythologies that mention or describe a paradise. Likewise, that analysis suggests that the data provided by the Bible to locate paradise are merely a narrative device meant to dissipate all doubts as to the existence of a garden where God put human beings. Similar to other spaces that appear in the Bible, the Garden of Eden is, in fact, an impossible place. Throughout the centuries, however, recurring proposals have been made to locate paradise. As time went by, those proposals were progressively modified by the intellectual ideas dominant in any given era, thus leading the representations of the location of Paradise to be further and further away from the information provided by the biblical text.


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