 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(April 2022) |
The Society for the Study of Early Christianity is a professional association of ancient historians and biblical scholars, established within the Ancient Cultures Research Centre (ACRC) at Macquarie University. This assists SSEC in "fulfilling its aims through the study of the New Testament in its times, including its Jewish context, and the development of Early Christianity." [1]
The Society was established by the Vice-Chancellor on 8 May 1987, and a Constitution for the Society was approved by the Council of Macquarie University in December 1987. The society has no ecclesiastical ties, however it collaborates on academic occasions with Christian and Jewish theology colleges and communities. The current president is Alanna Nobbs. The society circulates three newsletters a year outlining their activities.
The society lists its aims as: [2]
The Society supports a number of associated projects including: [3]
Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book.
The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Biblical studies is the academic application of a set of diverse disciplines to the study of the Bible. For its theory and methods, the field draws on disciplines ranging from ancient history, historical criticism, philology, textual criticism, literary criticism, historical backgrounds, mythology, and comparative religion.
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 and whence they have their name. When the fragments were finally 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. Papyrologists Carsten Thiede used an assortment of papyrological techniques and comparative analysis of manuscripts from Egypt, Italy and Masada to arrive at a date of 66 CE for the Magdalen papyrus. The Magdalen papyrus is almost like a twin to P. Oxy 246 which is dated to 66CE. Thiede’s analysis of first century comparisons is established on external, objective grounds and have not been disproven based on external, objective papyrological evidence. For example, the papyrus uses an early style of uncial where the letters are equally thick, noticeable widening on some letters and its bilinear in effort to keep the middle line which are all established hallmarks of first century CE styles. The assimilation of multiple early and mid first century styles further strengthens the case on objective grounds that the papyrus dates to the mid first century CE.
Biblical archaeology is an academic school and a subset of Biblical studies and Levantine archaeology. Biblical archaeology studies archaeological sites from the Ancient Near East and especially the Holy Land, from biblical times.
Paul William Barnett is an Australian Anglican bishop, ancient historian and New Testament scholar. He was the Bishop of North Sydney from 1990 to 2001. He is a prominent historical writer on the rise of Christianity and the historical Jesus. He is currently a fellow in ancient history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and a teaching fellow at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.
Edwin Masao Yamauchi is a Japanese-American historian, (Protestant) Christian apologist, editor and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Miami University, where he taught from 1969 until 2005. He is married to Kimie Yamauchi.
Philip Francis Esler is the Portland Chair in New Testament Studies at the University of Gloucestershire. He is an Australian-born higher education administrator and academic who became the inaugural Chief Executive of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2005, remaining in that role until 2009. From 1995 to 2010 he was Professor of Biblical Criticism at St Andrews University. From 1998 to 2001 he was Vice-Principal for Research and Provost of St Leonard’s College at St Andrews. During the years 1999 to 2003 he served as a member of the Board of Scottish Enterprise Fife. From October 2010 to March 2013 he was Principal at St Mary’s University College Twickenham. He had an earlier career as a lawyer, working in Sydney during 1978-81 and 1984-92 as an articled clerk, then solicitor and barrister.
A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
The Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology are a series of lectures delivered and published under the auspices of the British Academy. The Leopold Schweich Trust Fund, set up in 1907, was a gift from Miss Constance Schweich in memory of her father. It provided for three public lectures to be delivered annually on subjects related to ‘the archaeology, art, history, languages and literature of Ancient Civilization with reference to Biblical Study’. The three papers given by each lecturer are published together in book form, by Oxford University Press. There have been many reprintings.
John Laurence Gee is an American Latter-day Saint scholar, apologist and an Egyptologist. He currently teaches at Brigham Young University (BYU) and serves in the Department of Near Eastern Languages. He is known for his writings in support of the Book of Abraham.
Robert A. Kraft is an American Berg Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is known for his pioneering work in the application of computing to the study of ancient literature and for his significant contributions to the study of early Judaism and early Christianity.
Larry Weir Hurtado,, was an American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity, and Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology at the University of Edinburgh (1996–2011). He was the head of the School of Divinity from 2007 to 2010, and was until August 2011 Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh.
Dirk D. Obbink is an American papyrologist and classicist. He was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016. Obbink was also a fellow and tutor in Greek at Christ Church Oxford, from which role he was suspended in October 2019.
Jewish magical papyri are a subclass of papyri with specific Jewish magical uses, and which shed light on popular belief during the late Second Temple Period and after in Late Antiquity. A related category of contemporary evidence are Jewish magical inscriptions, typically on amulets, ostraca, and incantation bowls.
Hebrew and Aramaic papyri have increasingly been discovered from the 1960s onwards, although these papyri remain rare compared to papyri written in Koine Greek and Demotic Egyptian. The most valuable and religious texts were written on leather scrolls, parchment - such as the literary texts from Masada and Qumran, while papyrus was employed for cheaper, domestic use.
Koine Greek, also known as Alexandrian dialect, common Attic, Hellenistic, or Biblical Greek, was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. It was based mainly on Attic and related Ionic speech forms, with various admixtures brought about through dialect levelling with other varieties.
Professor Alanna Nobbs is the President of the Society for the Study of Early Christianity.