Matthew d'Ancona | |
---|---|
Born | Matthew Robert Ralph d'Ancona 27 January 1968 |
Education | St Dunstan's College Magdalen College, Oxford All Souls College, Oxford |
Occupation | Journalist |
Known for | Editor of The Spectator Columnist for The Sunday Telegraph |
Matthew Robert Ralph d'Ancona [2] (born 27 January 1968 [3] ) is an English journalist and editor-at-large of The New European . [4] A former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph , he was appointed editor of The Spectator in February 2006, a post he retained until August 2009. [5]
D'Ancona's father was a Maltese tennis champion of Italian descent who moved to England to study and played youth football for Newcastle United [6] before becoming a civil servant. His mother was an English teacher. D'Ancona was educated at St Dunstan's College, an independent school for boys (now co-educational) in Catford in south London, where he was head boy. He also won an essay-writing competition run by The Observer on the subject of the future of British industry. He went to Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where he took the top First in Modern History for his year in 1989. The same year, he was elected a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
After a year studying medieval confession, d'Ancona joined the magazine Index on Censorship , before proceeding to The Times as a trainee. There he rose swiftly to become education correspondent and then assistant editor at the age of 26.
He joined The Sunday Telegraph in 1996 as deputy comment editor and columnist, before becoming deputy editor. He wrote a weekly political column in The Sunday Telegraph for a decade; the column was "treated as the best insight into Cameronism by Conservative MPs". [7] He succeeded Boris Johnson as editor of The Spectator. On 28 August 2009 it was announced that d'Ancona would be stepping down as editor to be replaced by Fraser Nelson.
While not himself a believer, [8] d'Ancona is also the co-author of two books on early Christian theology, The Jesus Papyrus [9] and The Quest for the True Cross. [10] He has written three novels, Going East, [11] Tabatha's Code [12] and Nothing to Fear. [13] D'Ancona has also written several articles for the British political magazine Prospect .
In January 2015, d'Ancona joined The Guardian as a weekly columnist. [14] He left the paper in 2019. [15] He also writes columns for the Evening Standard , GQ and The New York Times , and a former editor of Tortoise Media. [16]
He is chairman of the liberal Conservative think tank, Bright Blue, a trustee of the Science Museum and a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.
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Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, 7Q5 is the designation for a small Greek papyrus fragment discovered in Qumran Cave 7. It contains about 18 legible or partially legible Greek letters and was published in 1962 as an unidentified text. The editor assigned the fragment to a date between 50 BCE and 50 CE on the basis of its handwriting. In 1972, the Spanish papyrologist Jose O'Callaghan argued that the papyrus was in fact a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verses 52 and 53. While most scholars have been unpersuaded by this argument, a vocal minority continue to support the identification of the fragment as a part of the Gospel of Mark.
Carsten Peter Thiede OCF KStJ was a German archaeologist and New Testament scholar. He was also a member of PEN and appointed a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John. He taught as professor of New Testament times and history at the Staatsunabhängige Theologische Hochschule (STH) in Basel and at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel. He often advanced theories that conflicted with the consensus of academic and theological scholarship.
The "Magdalen" papyrus was purchased in Luxor, Egypt in 1901 by Reverend Charles Bousfield Huleatt (1863–1908), who identified the Greek fragments as portions of the Gospel of Matthew and presented them to Magdalen College, Oxford, where they are catalogued as P. Magdalen Greek 17 from which they acquired their name. When the fragments were published by Colin Henderson Roberts in 1953, illustrated with a photograph, the hand was characterized as "an early predecessor of the so-called 'Biblical Uncial'" which began to emerge towards the end of the 2nd century. The uncial style is epitomised by the later biblical Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Comparative paleographical analysis has remained the methodological key for dating the manuscript, but there is no consensus on the dating of the papyrus. Estimates have ranged from the 1st century to the 4th century AD.
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