New Year, New Experiences

Since this is the first entry in my new blog, I thought I would first catch folks up on what's going on. This semester starts my third year at DTS. When I came here to pursue a Master of Arts degree, I had no idea what God really had in store for me. I switched to the Master of Theology program in my first semester and eventually ended up in the New Testament Studies program. I'm excited about what's going on this semester because I'm both getting deeper into my New Testament program and at the same time I'm taking my first semester of Hebrew.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to assist one of my professors, Dr. Dan Wallace, with photographing a couple of New Testament manuscripts for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. One of these was a very old facsimile of a fifth century manuscript and the other was an original Byzantine manuscript of Luke from the tenth to thirteenth century. It was a great experience to get such a close, personal look at these ancient documents and to actually hold and look at a copy of God's word that was hand-written around a thousand years ago. Now I'm in Dr. Wallace's Textual Criticism class (no we don't learn how to criticize the text) and will be able to work with the text in the Luke manuscript that I photographed this summer. This is exciting because the Luke manuscript has never been cataloged and I along with a couple of other students will compare the manuscript with an established, published text to determine if there are any variants in the manuscript.

I have also started my internship this semester. I'll be working with Dr. Hall Harris on several projects, including some Flash development for class notes, teaching in the Center for Biblical Studies, and hopefully some writing projects in the spring. In the CBS course that I'm developing, I'll teach a course on using computer Bible study tools. Hopefully this will help others to use their computers, along with the appropriate software, to study God's word and prepare to teach others more effectively.

Ashley and the boys are doing fine. Ashley is the secretary for the Seminary Wives In Ministry (SWIM) program on campus. She is enjoying it and has been able to meet many other wives through this and a weekly wives Bible study. She is also homeschooling Caleb who is now in kindergarten. He loves school, Sunday school, and being a Spark in the AWANA program at church. Jacob is very energetic and is hooked on the Little Rascals.

A Word for Today
Textual Criticism - The study of manuscripts of a no longer existing written work with the intent of discerning the original.