Larry W. Hurtado (1943–2019)

How far can you take one number?

Any review of this book revolves around the answer to that question. Larry W. Hurtado is the single most important work written so far about one of the most vexing questions in New Testament textual criticism: Whether the so-called "Caesarean Text" exists and can be found in early witnesses.

What Hurtado did is take a number of important manuscripts and examine their readings in the Gospel of Mark, comparing their percentage rates of agreement.

This quite show more clearly accomplished one thing: It abolished the link between the Freer Gospels (W) and the "Caesarean" text. But it has often been interpreted as dissolving the whole "Caesarean" text. And that revolves around the question of how much you can derive from one number. The difficulty is, when B. H. Streeter defined the "Caesarean" text, he defined it as the readings of certain manuscripts not found in the Byzantine text. Hurtado compared all readings, not non-Byzantine readings. In other words, Hurtado dissolved something that wasn't even the Caesarean text!

This is an important book; we needed this data. But we need a lot more, and this book doesn't admit that more needs to be done. So by all means look at the numbers -- but be cautious with the conclusions. show less

The author was arguing a position that I was already convinced to be correct. So for me he was kind of "preaching to the choir".

That said, this book is a very thorough argument for early devotion to Jesus and has inspired me to look more closely at early Christion writings.

6/10 (not bad): I'm a big fan of Larry Hurtado's work, but I was disappointed with this book. It's essentially a summary and simplification of his larger works (especially [b:Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity|1162335|Lord Jesus Christ Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity|Larry W. Hurtado|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347597246s/1162335.jpg|1149965]), but at less than 30,000 words, it's just too short (Lord Jesus Christ is more than twelve times the show more size). I'm not against short books, but $16 for 76 pages of text is hardly value for money. show less

In a book this size, it's impossible to agree with absolutely everything. But Hurtado's work is most welcome and mandatory reading for early Christianity!