Scaling an Ancient City and Sneaking a Peek at a New Greek New Testament
Or: What an apologetics professor enjoys doing between semesters
Other than my family, pretty much everything that I enjoy happened in the fifth century A.D. or earlier.
Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. If something’s not at least a thousand years old, I lose interest fairly quickly. And so, my ideal vacations are spent in locations or with objects that are ancient—which is why this winter break was nearly perfect.
Over winter break, I hiked the ruins of a Maya city that began to be built in the third century A.D. After that, I spent some time with a team that’s putting together a new Greek New Testament.
All very old. All very good.
The adventures started in a series of natural freshwater wells and caves that the Maya saw as gateways to the underworld. We swam the caves and the channels that the Maya dug centuries ago, then we dried off in an abandoned encomienda from the sixteenth-century.
From there, we went to Aké in the state of Yucatán in Mexico—a Maya city with structures built sometime between Emperor Decius’s persecution of Christians in the mid-third century and the papacy of Gregory the Great in the early seventh century. After listening to lectures about Maya history and culture, my daughters and I scaled the temple and the city treasury. I was interested to learn that, although the ancient Maya do seem to have engaged in some human sacrifices, these practices may not have been as widespread among the Maya as they were among the Aztecs.
When we returned to New Orleans, I met Elijah Hixson, a scholar I knew from when he was a Master of Divinity student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s working on a fascinating Greek New Testament project sponsored by Biblica, and he invited me to spend some time with the committee as they were reviewing textual decisions in Matthew’s Gospel.
Constructed from manuscripts instead of starting with a preexisting base text, the Biblica Greek New Testament and textual commentary will be freely available to any individual or organization, which will provide global Bible translators with a useful tool for their work. Much time was invested comparing textual variants and examining digital scans of Greek manuscripts. Dr. Bill Warren has an outstanding command of the manuscript evidence—and he not only welcomed me to the proceedings but took us to Fiorella’s for po’boys.
I love teaching, and I am so eager to start teaching again this week. But, for me, a break between the semesters doesn’t get much better than ancient temples and Greek manuscripts. Winter break is over, but I am grateful and content.
