Michael J Kruger
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199566365
- eISBN:
- 9780191740985
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566365.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
As scholars explore the state of the early New Testament text, the inductive study of the extant manuscripts we possess is the natural place to begin. However, there are also other lines of ...
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As scholars explore the state of the early New Testament text, the inductive study of the extant manuscripts we possess is the natural place to begin. However, there are also other lines of potentially fruitful inquiry. One area that has been largely overlooked is the attitude toward that text that is actually expressed by Christians in the earliest literary sources, i.e. statements about how they viewed their sacred writings, how they understood the transmission and preservation of these texts, and how they would have responded to changes or alterations in the text. It is important that we consider such historical testimony not only because it often antedates the papyri and even many patristic citations, but because it establishes a critical historical context for our overall understanding of textual transmission in the earliest stages of Christianity.Less
As scholars explore the state of the early New Testament text, the inductive study of the extant manuscripts we possess is the natural place to begin. However, there are also other lines of potentially fruitful inquiry. One area that has been largely overlooked is the attitude toward that text that is actually expressed by Christians in the earliest literary sources, i.e. statements about how they viewed their sacred writings, how they understood the transmission and preservation of these texts, and how they would have responded to changes or alterations in the text. It is important that we consider such historical testimony not only because it often antedates the papyri and even many patristic citations, but because it establishes a critical historical context for our overall understanding of textual transmission in the earliest stages of Christianity.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198187271
- eISBN:
- 9780191719028
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187271.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter discusses the forms of survival of writers, poets, and their writings after their death. It details the last days of Keats with Severn, among other authors. For an author to have ...
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This chapter discusses the forms of survival of writers, poets, and their writings after their death. It details the last days of Keats with Severn, among other authors. For an author to have ‘entered the world’ of print proves that his or her text has already been broached by that world. Certain effects of a work's publication, such as the actual or anticipated responses of its readers, may be detectable in the pressure-points of particular textual changes; others will not, such as the way in which individual acts of reading add a little extra ‘thickness’ and ‘noise’ to the work's developing social life. The author, then, is not dead, as was once thought, nor is he or she left lingering in a serenely uninterrupted afterlife, but is instead as porous and shifty in print as some philosophers of identity consider each of us to be in person.Less
This chapter discusses the forms of survival of writers, poets, and their writings after their death. It details the last days of Keats with Severn, among other authors. For an author to have ‘entered the world’ of print proves that his or her text has already been broached by that world. Certain effects of a work's publication, such as the actual or anticipated responses of its readers, may be detectable in the pressure-points of particular textual changes; others will not, such as the way in which individual acts of reading add a little extra ‘thickness’ and ‘noise’ to the work's developing social life. The author, then, is not dead, as was once thought, nor is he or she left lingering in a serenely uninterrupted afterlife, but is instead as porous and shifty in print as some philosophers of identity consider each of us to be in person.
