What's Wrong with This Picture?




A display of Greek Geek cred


Update 17/11/15

Well, I feel a bit of a fool...

In an email conversation, the author of the book below, Dr. James Grimshaw, associate professor of history, politics, and religious studies at Wisconsin's Carroll University, pointed out that his book was one of a series the publisher had put together; so the cover wasn't unique to his book.

Of course; a series. The "Studies in Biblical Literature" series as mentioned right on the cover! I guess I couldn't see the English forest for the Greek trees. I'm not only a Greek Geek; I'm blind, too. Oh well, I still enjoyed tracking down the text and highlighting it.

Oh, and three cheers for Dr. Grimshaw for taking the time to hit me hard with the clue bat!


Original Post


Cover of James P. Grimshaw, The Matthean Community and the World: An Analysis of Matthew’s Food Exchange, Studies in Biblical Literature v. 111 (New York: Peter Lang Pub, 2008)


I'm right in the middle of an assignment for my Worldviews and Ways of Life paper, the theme of which is "food." Grimshaw's book pictured above is one of the many resources in my bibliography. When I first got it home and looked at it, my eye was immediately drawn to the almost invisible Greek writing in white font behind the title. In the picture above, the Greek is much easier to see than it is on the glossy cover of the actual book; which is a good thing for the purpose of this post.

Anyway, I started to read the Greek and was sure I recognised it—I was certain that it was from the Gospel of John, not Matthew, the very subject of the book! Incredible. I then fired up my Bibleworks and searched the phrase οὐκ ἐξ αἱμάτων ("not of blood"), which you can see just above the author's name. Sure enough, that exact phrase appears only once in the NT, John 1:13. Feeling like Dan Wallace, I studied the entire "fragment" and quickly determined that the Greek text starts at the final word of John 1:8 and ends with the top half of the first four words of 1:15. Here's a snip of those verses with the words shown on the book cover highlighted in yellow.


Wasn't that fun? No?

Oh. I'm such a geek....




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