Loading...Last night someone asked me about my very first book. My answer wasn’t what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience. It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care.
But it’s kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote. It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat. I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again.
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I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master’s degree and my PhD, a number of times on the blog.
When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, I knew already that I wanted to specialize in the study of the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I went to Princeton Seminary because because Metzger was the country’s leading expert in this field, and one could argue the leading expert in the world (some Germans would contest the point!).
While doing my Master’s thesis for Metzger I read widely in the secondary literature on textual criticism, and came to be highly influenced by a scholar named Gordon Fee. Fee is an interesting and important figure. As it turns out, he is a very committed Pentecostal Christian, who preaches and evangelizes. But when he’s not doing that, he’s doing scholarship, and he’s an amazing scholar. He is also the author of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and Discovering Biblical Equality, among other works. At the time of my master’s work, he was one of the top textual critics in the country, right behind Metzger (the generation, or so, behind him).
One of the things Fee had worked on was
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Some years ago I found a copy of your book on Didymus the Blind online and bought it. Quite literally, it’s all Greek to me! But it was interesting to see what such a dissertation looked like, and what you academicians have to work on.
Dr.Eharman did you know this about Zeus and his Eagle?
According to the myth, Zeus saw and fell in love with a beautiful mortal youth by the name Ganymede. Ganymede was abducted by Zeus from Mount Ida. When an eagle transported the youth to Mount Olympus. On Olympus, Zeus granted Ganymede eternal youth and immortality as the official cup bearer to the gods, in place of Hebe, who was relieved of cup-bearing duties upon her marriage to Herakles
Aëtos was a beautiful boy born of the earth. While Zeus was young and hiding in Crete from his father Cronus who had devoured all of Zeus’s siblings, Aëtos became friends with the god and was the first one to swear fealty to him as new king. But years later, after Zeus had overthrown his father and become king in his place, Zeus’s wife Hera turned Aëtos into an eagle, out of fear that Zeus loved him.
THIS guy answered my ? on Quora- Wasn’t Yahweh God the father and Jesus Christ the Son? , off of one of your entries:
it would be very interesting if the reporter at one of your debates reinterviewed one of the then students of his/her views.
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James Pettis
· 6h
Yes, the Father and Jesus are Yahweh. (Hint: that’s a plural subject.)