Hebrews Carnival August 2009

Starting off the month of August Jared Calaway in his post Sword-in-Mouth Disease continued with his musings on the sword/mouth imagery that is found in several ancient sources including Hebrews.

Jared has also posted some reflections on Ken Schenck's book Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews.

Stephen Hebert continues his series on the textual variants in Hebrews 2:9. In Part 4 he continues to examine the internal evidence in favor of χωρις, rather than χαριτι. χωρις is more in accord with the vocabulary of Hebrews than χαριτι. Furthermore, it is the more difficult reading, since a scribe would more likely have changed χωρις to read χαριτι. It appears then that the external evidence and the internal evidence conflict with one another. In Part 5 he deals with the methodological issues involved in using patristic citations.

In other postings on textual criticism, Peter Head first deals with a textual variant in Hebrews 1:1, "God spoke to our fathers." He then deals with textual variants in Hebrews 1:3, "the word of power."

And finally, Tommy Wasserman reported an announcement by Claire Clivaz on the registration of a new fourth-century, papyrus fragment, P126, containing Hebrews 13:12-13, 19-20.

Scot McKnight gives his recommendations for commentaries on Hebrews. No qualms about this list. See also the recommendations in the comments section.

Peter Lopez announced in his post, Hebrews Bible Study, that he will be teaching a Bible study on Hebrews at his home church and that he will be blogging about his experience. The comments section has some discussion about commentaries. He offers his study notes on chapter 1 and chapter 2, as well as his reflections on week 1 of his study.

Also going around the blogs this month was a clever little video produced by Aaron Rathburn introducing Hebrews 1:1-4 with a Star Wars theme.