Session: Working with Biblical Manuscripts

Intriguing new digital imaging technology is unveiling previously illegible and even unseen text and images on ancient documents and art. Known as multispectral imaging (MSI), this space-age technology has been applied by scholars at the Center for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (Provo, Utah) with astonishing success to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the carbonized scrolls of Petra and Herculaneum, and ancient Maya murals. These initial successes at capturing the original ink, pigments, underpainting, and other details from deteriorating antiquities—and electronically preserving the resulting images for future study and widespread appreciation—have attracted international interest and bode well for the continued use of MSI technology in working with damaged or illegible manuscripts of the New Testament.

MSI offers several advantages over conventional photography. By responding to ultraviolet and infrared light, the image detectors in multispectral cameras reveal information that is concealed from the human eye. Multispectral imaging divides invisible portions of the light spectrum into a number of frequency bands and records each of the images separately, typically as a set of monochrome images. Multiple images of the same scene, each viewed at different wavelengths, are then combined to form a multispectral image cube. This data cube can then be processed to extract otherwise inaccessible information from the document.

Besides helping to restore or clarify data embedded in ancient manuscripts, this technology gives scholars and researchers the freedom to work on-site without the need to chemically process infrared film. High-quality images can be quickly captured, verified, and stored, and results can be readily transmitted to appropriate parties. This exciting work has great potential to bring to light significant readings that have been lost or obscured for centuries.

The Münster Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung, Peter Robinson's Scholarly Digital Editions (Leicester, UK), and the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, cooperate in preparing the 28th edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece, known as Nestle-Aland, in digital form. Luc Herren and Klaus Wachtel will present the First Letter of John as a pilot project of the new edition.

The edition will have four main parts: the NA28 text, the NA28 apparatus, full transcriptions of the consistently cited witnesses, and a new apparatus based on the transcriptions. The Nestle-Aland apparatus will be accessible from the text by mouse click. Clicking on a word in the Nestle-Aland text will open the new apparatus, if there are entries referring to that word. Another kind of link will connect the Nestle-Aland apparatus to the transcriptions. The full context of a variant in a manuscript will be accessible by mouse click on the sign of that manuscript in the Nestle-Aland apparatus. The New Apparatus will comprise every variant found in the manuscripts transcribed. Interactive tools will provide user-friendly access to the material. Users will have the option to choose for themselves the witnesses that are displayed in the apparatus.

The WWW provides opportunities for collaboration on the proofing and editing of manuscripts and texts heretofore unknown to scholars. While tools to take advantage of these opportunities are just emerging, there are some early attempts that merit the attention of biblical scholars. This is a very non-technical survey from the user’s viewpoint of the various options for scholars wishing to explore possible collaboration on both manuscript and text projects. Technical resources and references will be made available in a handout for attendees who wish to explore these possibilities further.

OpenText.org is a web-based initiative designed to make available to biblical scholars a range of resources for the study of the Greek New Testament. Formulated around principles of corpus linguistics, OpenText.org is designing and marking a set of texts that allow for concentrated study of the Greek of the New Testament within the context of the Greek used in the Greco-Roman world surrounding the first century. In order to perform such a study, a new discourse model has been developed. Our presentation will describe our corpus of texts, offer examples of the marking scheme that we have developed and are implementing, and discuss this scheme in terms of our discourse model. Focused upon levels of annotation, the discourse model combines insights from register studies with rigorous syntactical and semantic analysis. The opportunity will be presented for others to join the OpenText.org project by becoming members of working groups and making contributions to discussion forums.

The complex history of the NT canon has usually been analyzed in comparison to the formation of the OT canon (both in Jewish and Christian tradition). But late antiquity has many examples of processes very similar to the canonization of the Christian scriptures. The paper gives an overview and typology of such processes and tries to define more exactly the place of the NT canon (as canon) in ancient literature.

Also on a more general level the history of religions knows many different types of canonical scriptures. How can a comparative look at these Holy Scriptures of other religions help to clarify questions about the formation of the NT canon?

How to render Greek foreign words and nomina sacra in scholarly translations and documentary text editions. A critical review of traditional and recent solutions, and practical suggestions.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, J. Rendel Harris published two volumes on early Christian testimony books. He argued that the earliest Christians had collected "Old Testament" passages, which they regarded as "testimonies" to Jesus and the Christian movement. They published these testimonies in written collections for use in debates with Jewish opponents. Patristic scholars, prior to Harris, suspected that such written collections had at one time existed, but none survived. Harris himself argued for their existence on the basis of "strings of anti-Jewish texts" found in the patristic writers. Until now, no exemplars of early Christian testimony books have been found, and Harris' theory has languished due to lack of concrete evidence.

The Coptic Testimony Book drawn from the Psalms is scarcely the Ur Text used by the New Testament writers, for which Harris argued. But it is a completely unambiguous example of a collection of testimonies drawn from the Psalms with minimal commentary. The Testimony Book, housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt, survives in nine fragmentary pages. To judge from the scribal hand this parchment exemplar dates in the ninth or tenth century.

This paper covers the history of the originally disassociated fragments, their identification as parts of a single text, the reconstruction of their codex order, and examples of the author's literary method.