The Bible and Culture

I'm hoping that it will not come as a great shock to you that there are two sides to the Vtlava/Moldau river, and in Praha one side has more of the old city...see above and one side has more of the new city....So to get around in this very large city of 1.25 million people, we took the usual trams... Walking tours are grand, but man cannot live on touring alone, so we stopped for a nice lunch in an old Czech restaurant which served--- wait for it, pork butt on a spit! The Czech … [Read more...]

The proper transliterated name of the city is Praha, but Westerners have called it Prague forever, and so we will call it both. After the SBL conference in Vienna (which we shall get back to in due course) at the beginning of July, we took the train to Praha, about four hours by slow train from Vienna (which is actually Wien as in Wiener Schnitzel and Wieners (hot dogs etc.). As in Vienna, we had an Asbury graduate, Jennifer Alexander, whom you will see in due course, who is doing ministry in … [Read more...]

The thing about a good quality museum is that you can linger and appreciate it all, without the 'glazed over' effect of being in a huge museum where you simply can't take it all in, and as a result you race from one room to the next looking for key items. This is not an issue at the Albertina. Impressionism was for the most part killed off by the First World War, and what replaced it was Cubism and Abstract art among other things. This museum has a small sampling of the latter, but a clear … [Read more...]

While there are many fine museums to be explored in Vienna, if you are a fan of the paintings of the Impressionists, then you will want to go to the Albertina across from the Mozart cafe and the Opera House in central Vienna. Here's what you are looking for.....The museum is perhaps most famous for the most famous of all modern Austrian paintings--- Gustav Klimmt's The Kiss.....But it is the permanent loan exhibit of a private collection of Impressionist art (and Cubist and … [Read more...]

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The only ancient description we have of the making of papyrus is that of Pliny the Elder in his Natural History Book XIII. He wrote in the latter half of the first century A.D., and while some scholars have questioned whether he had actually seen the process due to some of his remarks, even if he got it second hand, this is valuable first century information...Pliny, Natural History, 13.74-82Paper is made from the papyrus plant by separating it with a needle point into very thin … [Read more...]

Some of the most important early papyri of the NT are the Chester Beatty Papyri housed in Dublin Ireland, EXCEPT for one piece which can be found in the papyrus museum in the basement of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. The small fragment which is found there is from the Gospel of Matthew containing Matt. 25:41-26:39 (Pap. Vindob. G. 31974). And sparing no expense, here it is.....This papyrus likely dates to the third century A.D. The Gospel of Matthew was the most copied … [Read more...]