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Sometime since I last visited, the Vatican Museum has substantially upgraded its website. The site now features a conveniently static central area to display a high-resolution image of a given piece in the collection.

HT: AWOL

Via the blog of Michael Hyatt, former CEO of Thomas Nelson, John Dumas highlights three skills to develop in order to be more satisfied with what’s gotten done amid everything that has come along in a given day: productivity, discipline, and focus.

According to SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed., §§1, 3, 4.3.6, supports the use of “ibid.” From those descriptions, conventions look to be the same as for the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., §14.29.

As an easy (and free) reference for students, SBL also provides a Student Supplement to the SBLHS.  One of the courses I’ve been teaching has a comparatively heavier emphasis on getting to know the nuts-and-bolts of SBL style. And a keen-eyed student, pointed out that page 4 of the Student Supplement has consecutively numbered footnotes 78 and 79. Both notes are for the same source, but the second (note 79) does not use the “ibid.” notation.

The Review of Biblical Literature contains Jason Myers’s helpful and appreciative review of Teresa Morgan’s Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (OUP, 2015).

There are a pair of references in Cranfield’s ( affiliate disclosure) and Moo’s ( affiliate disclosure) Romans commentaries to comments by Ambrosiaster about the origin of the Christian community in Rome, and I’ve been curious to give this reference a look. Both authors cite the reference as found in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia latina, vol. 17, col. 46 (Cranfield, xiii, 17n2; Moo, 4n7).

For December 2016, Logos Bible Software’s free book is Tremper Longman’s How to Read Proverbs (IVP, 2002). The accompanying volume for $1.99 is Longman’s How to Read the Psalms (IVP, 1988).

The 2017 Stone-Campbell Journal Conference is welcoming proposals for papers. The conference will be held 7–8 April at Johnson University, in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The newest volume of TC has been released, containing eight book reviews and the following articles:

• Gregory R. Lanier, “A Case for the Assimilation of Matthew 21:44 to the Lukan “Crushing Stone” (20:18), with Special Reference to 104”
• Aron Pinker, “A New Attempt to Interpret Job 30:24”
• Georg Gäbel, The Import of the Versions for the History of the Greek Text: Some Observations from the ECM of Acts
• Katie Marcar, “The Quotations of Isaiah in 1 Peter: A Text-Critical Analysis”

HT: New Articles and Reviews in the TC Journal — Evangelical Textual Criticism

Access to the Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting is open and available online. JJMJS is:

a peer-reviewed academic open access journal, published electronically (immediate free online availability) in co-operation with Eisenbrauns, with support of McMaster University and Caspari Center….

The journal aims, uniquely, to advance scholarship on this crucial period in the early history of the Jewish and Christian traditions when they developed into what is today known as two world religions, mutually shaping one another as they did so. JJMJS publishes high-quality research on any topic that directly addresses or has implications for the understanding of the inter-relationship and interaction between the Jesus movement and other forms of Judaism, as well as for the processes that led to the formation of Judaism and Christianity as two related but independent religions.

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Apparently, name badges and tote bag tickets for this year’s SBL meeting will be distributed by email:

In an effort to cut down on lines for badge reprints at registration, name badges will no longer be sent via postal mail. Instead, check your e-mail in early November for a special link that will allow you to print your name badge and tote bag ticket to bring with you to San Antonio. If you bring these items to the Annual Meeting, you will not need to stand in line for registration.

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The SBL annual meeting mobile apps are available for both Android and iOS. In each case, after the app installed, I opened it and started looking around for a minute or so before the app pulled in the current conference program version.

In How to Write a Lot ( affiliate disclosure), Paul Silvia provides his own progress monitoring system as an example (39–45). Since finishing the book last month, I have been adapting Silvia’s database format to a Google Docs spreadsheet that will track some additional data in addition to the data that he finds helpful. Since it has been helpful thus far, I thought I would make it available with some sample data.

Leonard Greenspoon has a helpful review of the third edition of Emanuel Tov’s Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (Eisenbrauns, 2015). Particularly useful are Greenspoon’s observations about changes in this edition over against the previous one.

In November 2016, InterVarsity Press has posted an interesting clarification to its situation in relation to the Society of Biblical Literature annual meetings. According to the post,

InterVarsity Press Publisher Jeff Crosby has confirmed that the Society of Biblical Literature’s Council, at its next meeting on October 29-30, is taking up the question of IVP Academic’s right to exhibit at the 2017 annual meetings of the jointly-hosted AAR-SBL. That conversation is a part of a larger discussion the SBL Council will have regarding its protocols and standards for exhibitors at its events.

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SBL Press has some helpful clarifications about citations in the footnote-bibliography, or traditional, style.

This month, Logos Bible Software has Craig Keener’s New Covenant Commentary volume on Romans available for free. The companion deep-discount volume is Gordon Fee’s on Revelation, also from the NCC.

Peter Gurry reflects on the “logical impossibility” criterion that feeds into the Editio Critica Maior’s account of “variants”:

The Editio Critica Maior defines a “variant” as a reading that is both “grammatically correct and logically possible.” If it doesn’t meet these two criteria it is marked with an f for Fehler (= error). Neither criteria is completely objective, but then most of the errors so recorded in the ECM are pretty obvious gibberish. Occasionally, however, one finds cause…

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Via the ETC blog and Peter Gurry, Elijah Hixson has an informative overview of Codex Rossanensis’s presence in recent news.

The following is a guest post from Elijah Hixson. Elijah is currently writing his doctoral thesis on Codex Rossanensis and two other purple codices at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Paul Foster. When I saw last week that Rossenansis had recently be restored I asked Elijah if he would give us a…

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Larry Hurtado has kindly made available the pre-publication version of his essay “YHWH’s Return to Zion: A New Catalyst for Earliest High Christology?” in the recent God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright, edited by Christoph Heilig, Thomas Hewitt, and Michael Bird (WUNT 2/413; Mohr Siebeck, 2016).

The Center for the Study and Preservation of the Majority Text has a website dedicated to its edition of the Greek New Testament. The website also provides a copy of that edition as a free PDF.

The Byzantine Greek New Testament (BGNT)The Byzantine Greek New Testament (BGNT), is a new scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament. The BGNT base text is compiled from a consensus of readings from the Byzantine Kr or family 35 textform. It will serve as the comparison base text for both our online and future printed edition…

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This month, Verbum has Joseph Fitzmyer’s Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Paulist, 2009) available for free. The $0.99 companion volume is Fitzmyer’s Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method (Paulist, 2008).

Microsoft Word ties footnote anchors in the main text and footnote numbers at the start of footnotes to the same style. Consequently, it’s difficult to get full-height footnote numbers followed by a period (cf. Chicago Manual of Style, SBL Handbook of style).

The process for getting this result discussed at Word MVPs does not seem to work in Word v16. But Word’s InsertFootnoteNow function can be intercepted to add the following macro commands to produce this result:

Noet has Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed free in the month of January. A taste of Maimonides’s ethical reflections is also available for $0.99.

The Internet Archive has full-text PDFs of Alban Butler’s twelve-volume set, Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints (Thomas Richardson, 1842–46):

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Volume 5
• Volume 6
• Volume 7
• Volume 8
• Volume 9
• Volume 10
• Volume 11
• Volume 12

Today, Logos Bible Software has Louis Berkhof’s Introduction to the New Testament for free.

Today’s Advent givaway by Logos Bible Software is Geerhardus Vos’s Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline.

Via AWOL, the University of Illinois has a number of open-access theses and dissertations in Classics.

For today’s Advent freebie, Logos Bible Software has volume 2, part 1 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics ( The Doctrine of God).

Craig Keener shares the following humorous diagram:

Jim Davila provides information about a Hezekiah seal impression find.