A man had an accident. He lost his sense of time and emotional capacity. This is his thirteenth attempt to communicate since the accident.

Matthew's sharpening of Jesus' attacks on the scribes and Pharisees is an embarrassment to many Christian interpreters and an outrage to some Jewish ones. It is commonly alleged that Matthew in fact has no particular knowledge of distinctions between the Jewish leadership groups. In a fresh examination of Matthew's treatment of the scribes, the author argues that the first Evangelist is actually at pains to protect the esteem in which the office of the Jewish scribe itself was traditionally held, reserving Jesus' direct criticism for the unenlightened Pharisees.

Important intervention in Middle English studies that challenges widely accepted narratives on the identities of Chaucer's scribes.

John J. Collins's Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most popular introductory textbooks in colleges and seminary classrooms. Enriched by decades of classroom teaching, it is aimed explicitly at motivated students, regardless of their previous exposure to the Bible or faith commitments. The third edition is presented in a new and engaging format with new maps and images. An index has been added to the volume for the first time. In order to enhance classroom use, Collins's major text has now been divided into four volumes, one for each major part of the Hebrew Bible. This volume, based on the new third edition, focuses on prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Here, Collins explores the major and minor prophets and the messages they delivered within each of their historical contexts. The volume also contains the introduction to Collins's major text and is now available with even more student-friendly features, including charts, maps, photographs, chapter summaries, and bibliographies for further reading. Collins presents the current state of historical, archaeological, and literary understandings of the biblical text and engages the student in questions of significance and interpretation for the contemporary world.

Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition and preservation? Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem’s transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems, that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of course, during the poem’s written transmission, several hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf’s analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and modernize the text’s orthography, but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien’s general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

Aidan Nichols opens his major two-volume study of theology and culture with a powerful statement of the 'intelligent conservatism' which he sees, not as one way of being Catholic among others, but as the very teaching of Jesus Christ. The 'intelligent conservative' is, indeed, the 'scribe of the Kingdom' described in our Lord's parable; 'Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a housekeeper who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old'. (Mt 13:52.) Fr Nichols distinguishes three elements in this approach. First, it combines openness to the new with fidelity to the old, and in this sense its enemies are, on the one hand, the followers of the late Archbishop Lefebvre, for whom nothing valuable emerged in the Church after the opening of the Second Vatican Council; and, on the other those progressives who in effect claim that there is nothing of value in the preconciliar Church which needs to be preserved. Secondly, intelligent conservatism, in contradistinction to theological memberlist, adheres to the principle that the special historical revelation given in Jesus Christ and his Church takes epistemological precedence over any other claimants for this exalted position. And thirdly, the conserver dedicated to the kingdom of heaven is not 'a simple Simon; he is, precisely, a scribe, a learned man, a skilful man, an artful man'. Intelligent conservatism, in short, is guided by an habitual sensibility built up in preceding generations and constituting a kind of practical wisdom with which the Catholic tradition and its theological exploration must be creatively continued today.

Extracts from Calvin's commentaries topically arranged.

Betrifft die Handschrift Cod. 167 der Burgerbibliothek Bern.