桃   花   源   

 Peach Blossom Shangri-La 

 大家盡一點力來創造一個人間樂園 ∞ Let's all help to create a Shangri-La 

 

First two paragraphs of the Preface of a book titled "The Latin New Testament - A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts":

"The Latin tradition supplies some of the earliest sources for the history of the New Testament text. Moreover the Bible was read and studied in this language for over a millennium by some of the world’s most influential scholars and theologians. The manuscripts which transmit the text also provide a window on intellectual culture, book production, and religious practice across the centuries. Their evidence is supplemented by biblical quotations in Christian texts from Antiquity until the Renaissance.

The present volume seeks to offer an orientation to the early history of this tradition, a guide to the resources available for further study of the Latin New Testament, and an account of its significance for the biblical text. Recent developments in the field are such that the introductory chapters which have served for several decades are now in need of updating and expansion.1 Berger’s Histoire de la Vulgate, written well over a century ago, is often still cited as the only monograph to cover the whole Latin Bible even though it has both temporal and geographical limitations. Some of the information in specialist studies has yet to reach a wider audience. Almost all publications on the New Testament continue to employ an outdated set of sigla for Latin manuscripts. In a climate of renewed interest in biblical textual criticism and manuscript study, fuelled in part by the ever-increasing numbers of fully-digitized codices available on the internet, the time is ripe for a new manual which will enable further work to take proper account of previous scholarship. In fact, the approach adopted here goes beyond previous surveys, largely structured around the description of key manuscripts, by integrating the evidence of Latin Christian writers. This results in a more continuous historical approach, illustrating the spectrum of the development of the New Testament text in Latin."

 

The Latin New Testament - A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts (Houghton)