Editing the Bible

The Bible is likely the most-edited book in history, yet the task of editing the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts of the Bible is fraught with difficulties. The dearth of Hebrew manuscripts of the Jewish Scriptures and the substantial differences among those witnesses creates difficulties in determining which text ought to be printed as the text of the Jewish Scriptures. For the New Testament, it is not the dearth of manuscripts but the overwhelming number of manuscripts—almost six thousand Greek manuscripts and many more in other languages—that presents challenges for sorting and analyzing such a large, multivariant data set. This volume, representing experts in the editing of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, discusses both current achievements and future challenges in creating modern editions of the biblical texts in their original languages. The contributors are Kristin De Troyer, Michael W. Holmes, John S. Kloppenborg, Sarianna Metso, Judith H. Newman, Holger Strutwolf, Eibert Tigchelaar, David Trobisch, Eugene Ulrich, John Van Seters, Klaus Wachtel, and Ryan Wettlaufer.

John S. Kloppenborg is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author most recently of Q: The Earliest Gospel (Westminster John Knox), The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine (Mohr Siebeck), and the co-editor of Reading James with New Eyes (T&T Clark).Judith H. Newman is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Emmanuel College and holds joint appointments with the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Scholars Press), the co-author of Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (de Gruyter), and the co-editor of The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel (Brill). She has served as the editor of the SBL series Early Judaism and Its Literature.