Subject: new reviews on TC

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1996 10:01:23 -0400 (EDT)

Three new book reviews have appeared on the pages of TC in recent days, 
and more are on the way.  These are the books that are reviewed:

Reuben J. Swanson, ed., New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings 
Arranged in Horizontal Lines against Codex Vaticanus

Raija Sollamo, Repetition of the Possessive Pronouns in the Septuagint

Barbara Aland and Joel Delobel, eds., New Testament Textual Criticism, 
Exegesis and Church History: A Discussion of Methods

As with all of the articles published in TC, these reviews are available
in two Web-based forms (where necessary): one that renders Greek and
Hebrew (and other languages) with transliterated characters and another
that uses the original script. 

I encourage those of you who are currently working on reviews for TC to 
submit them in a timely fashion.  Remember that one of our goals is to 
have reviews of books on textual criticism available to readers as soon 
as possible after the publication of the book.  Again, I will ask 
scholars on the list who are writing books dealing with textual criticism 
to ask their publishers to send a review copy to Leonard Greenspoon, our 
book review editor, at the following address:

Leonard Greenspoon
Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization
Creighton University
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, NE   68178
USA

In addition, we would appreciate anyone who has contacts with publishers 
to ask them to send relevant books to Leonard for distribution to 
reviewers.  As always, we are also looking for articles on any aspect of 
biblical textual criticism, and contributions from members of the tc-list 
are welcome.

Jimmy Adair
General Editor of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/TC/TC.html <-----

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From: "Sipil{ Seppo" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 15:00:10 EET DST

Dear listmembers
The dean Raija Sollamo has kindly requested me to send the following 
message to the list. If you would like to discuss with her, please 
note that she is NOT a member of this list and that her e-mail 
address is added in the end of her message.

-------------- forwarded message --------------------------------

Review of David L. Washburn's review of my book "Repetitions of the 
Possessive Pronouns in the Septuagint". Septuagint and Cognate 
Studies Series 40. Scholars Press 1955.

I was very happy to see a review of my book so soon and, of course, I 
was very delighted with David L. Washburn's high evaluation of it. 
Unfortunately, he has misunderstood one of my main results. David L. 
Washburn writes in his review: "Sollamo shows ... that repetition of 
possessive pronouns in lists of two or more nouns is not a Hebraism 
at all; it is perfectly good Koine Greek. Authors such as Polybius, 
the Ptolemaic Papyri, Pseudo-Aristeas, Philo and Josephus repeated 
the pronouns more often than not." This is not correct. I have 
demonstrated that there is only one case involving the repetition of 
possessive pronouns by the Koine authors, namely Bell. Iud. 1,558. My 
examples are not taken at random from Koine authors. I have presented 
my text corpus on p. 7, and it has been scrutinized thoroughly. My 
examples are all that appear in this text corpus. As a result I state 
on page 17: "Firstly, the normal LXX practice of repeating the 
possessive pronoun with coordinate items proves to be a Hebraism." I 
understand that it is not very common to criticize a review. I would 
consider it very unfortunate, however, if wrong information 
concerning my book was spread among the scholars. 

Yours sincerely,

Raija Sollamo
University of Helsinki
e-mail: [email-masked]

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From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 17:57:46 -7

> possessive pronouns by the Koine authors, namely Bell. Iud. 1,558. 
>My examples are not taken at random from Koine authors. I have presented 
> possessive pronoun with coordinate items proves to be a Hebraism."

Yikes!   And I even had that sentence underlined.  My lapse here was
due to a statement on page 16 that was developed earlier in the
chapter: "...repetition of the possessive pronoun with coordinate
items is grammatically a perfectly correct mode of expression..." 
I'll make the necessary correction and re-issue the review.

As for the "random" comment, I believe Prof. Sollamo has 
misunderstood my use of the term.  When I said "examples taken more or less at 
random from Koine authors" I was referring to her selection of 
passages to study and to the selection of authors themselves.  The 
book gives no criteria for choosing these particular authors (other 
than the fact that they wrote in Koine) nor for the passages chosen 
from among these authors' writings, so I gathered that their 
selection was "more or less" random.  This in no way suggests that 
the passages themselves were not "scrutinized thoroughly."  They most 
certainly were.

A cc of this has been sent to Prof. Sollamo.  I thank her for the 
correction.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur/home.html
"Just reach out, and He'll reach in..."