When I graduated with my ThM, I was sick of school. I had been in school since I was about four years old. It was time for a break. I've been feeling that school itch again recently, but I'm actually getting to scratch it a little now. I am enrolled as an auditing student in the New Testament textual criticism class at DTS. It is being taught by my favorite seminary prof and former mentor, Dan Wallace. Yesterday was my first day.
If you are at all interested in the manuscripts of the New Testament, here is where you become very jealous of me. Dan, in his work for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, has discovered a number of manuscripts! Some of these were thought to be lost but have now been found. Others were never known about...but are now found. All in all, there's about thirty manuscripts that they now have digital images of that the western world doesn't know anything about. Nobody has studied them. Nobody has collated them. New ground here. I can't tell you where they found them. I can't even really tell you anything about them except what I just mentioned. I asked, and that's all I am allowed to say. But as you can see, this is pretty exciting stuff.
So, getting to the fun part, the class is going to help examine and collate parts of the manuscripts. That's right. We're going to see these things and read them! We're not just dealing with the theory of textual criticism. We're dealing with the real deal here. I am so very excited about the opportunity. I will have more freedom to write about the manuscripts and where they came from in the future after a public announcement has been made. But until then, I just get to enjoy the fact that I'm getting to do something that very few people get to do.
Now...back to my practice collation of codex Sinaiticus.