Category: Activities

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Presentation at the 2020 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting

It’s been several years since I’ve had a proposal accepted for the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I’m excited to announce that this year—presuming we are able to meet in Boston, MA, in person in late November—I’ll be presenting on the topic ‘Muddy Paper in Plastic Bags: Practicing Textual Criticism’ for the program unit Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context. I’ve written about the activity that I’ll be discussing in this paper/presentation. See these posts:

  1. ‘Making textual criticism fun! Hopefully.’
  2. ‘Pictures of my textual criticism activity’

I’m excited about this. I hope it’s live in Boston because (1) I have never been to Boston; (2) I enjoy this conference because I’m a geek; and (3) by November I’m going to be sick of presenting things online if that’s the way it goes.

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Lego Temples

Whenever it comes time to talk about the First or Second Temple (depending on whether it’s my Hebrew Scriptures or Christian Scriptures class) I invest my student by means of a class period playing with Lego. In fact, I up the ante by offering bonus points to whichever class ‘wins’ a competition where I take pictures of the temples, put them in a Google Form, and have our faculty and staff vote for the best.

In order to guide my students, I use recreations of these temples, usually produced by Faithlife, like this one:

Here are samples of the temples created this week (I give students about an hour to do this):

Super-tall Jesus featured!
Look’s like this semester’s winner in the making.
Pandering to faculty by adding them! Sometimes this works.

It’s a fun exercise. Faculty and staff have come to look forward to my email each semester where I have them vote. Obviously, most of my students love playing with Lego for an extended (block) class period. It’s a win-win!

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Pictures of my textual criticism activity

Yesterday, I mentioned that I’m experimenting with a new activity that is designed to teach my students the basics of textual criticism. Honestly, this year’s a bit of a test run. I haven’t built many lessons around the activity but I had an extra day in my calendar that allowed me to try something new. One class did the exercise yesterday and three more will do it today.

In this post, I want to share some pictures of my preparatory work so you can visualize it. Yesterday, I (1) printed the translations (see that there’s some diversity so the wording is different); (2) tore the edges; (3) went outside and rubbed the paper in the mud; (4) tore up the paper further and put them in baggies that I hid around my classroom area. Each group needed to find a baggie, reconstruct the paper the best they could, type out what they think the text says (I chose Mark 16 so some with have the longer ending and some the shorter), and then they had to compare and contrast their results. Here are the pictures:

Five different translations to simulate various manuscripts with their differences in wording, including one text in Spanish that represents a ‘Latin’ translation of a ‘Greek’ (English) text.
The initial damage.
Rubbed in mud.
Further damage!
Baggies to be hidden.

Finally, as a class, I wanted them to create their own standardized version from their different manuscripts but I ran out of time. In future versions of this class (Spring 2021!) I may add a class period prior to this exercise to talk more about the development of the Bible and then one afterward so we have time for them to create their standardized version.

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Making textual criticism fun! Hopefully.

Today and tomorrow I’m going to try something new. I want my students to have a basic idea of how they get their Bible but I want to do it in a way that is interesting and interactive (especially since Tuesday and Wednesday classes are our long ‘block’ periods of 1 hour 15/20 minutes rather than the normal 45 minute periods). Several years ago I heard of an activity that James D. De Young of Western Seminary used (I didn’t take his class) and I’m going to adopt and adapt some of his ideas.

First, in my activity English language translations will represent the Greek texts and Spanish will represent Latin. (Since my students don’t read Greek [some know Latin] I have to do it this way, obviously.) This way they can imagine the idea of a text’s mother language and then its secondary translation language.

Second, I’ll have them play the role of archaeologists. I’ll take six printed texts, cut them up, and put them in baggies that will be hidden near my classroom. I’ll create a map on the board so they know where to look.

Third, since the text will be damaged, they’ll need to ‘reconstruct’ it so it makes sense. This gives them a chance to play the role of papyrologist. I’ll make sure that some parts of some documents are missing completely so when it comes time to reconstruct, they’ll have to rely on other groups.

Fourth, not only will there be English and Spanish texts but the English text will be from mostly different English translations, but translations similar enough to mimic how close many ancient texts might be to one another. For example, I’ll be using the NRSV (2 x’s), RSV, and KJV. I’ll throw in one Spanish language text from the Dios Habla Hoy translation and then one tricky English paraphrase: The Message.

Finally, once each group has reconstructed their texts, they’ll have to debate over the version that they will produce as their official text.

Hopefully, in a oversimplified but interesting way, this will get them thinking about how they got their Bibles. If you’re interested in the document I’ll use to guide them, here it is:

How Do We Get Our Bible? Textual Criticism ExerciseDownload