Base Texts for Transcriptions Again

In a previous post on “Methodology in Transcribing Greek Manuscripts” I suggested that the use of two different base texts, Nestle-Aland and a Byzantine text like Oxford Textus Receptus 1873, for independent transcriptions of a manuscript might result in the elimination of errors resulting from the use of the same base text where transcribers would risk making the same mistake in trusting their base text too much.

In any case, a reader of our blog, Anthony Pope who for some technical reason could not comment on that post sent me a relevant example I could share of an error  in the Editio Critica Maior of Acts, 28:13 (4) which would likely have been avoided using two base texts:

a περιελοντες 01*. 03. 044. 6. 93. 321. 383. 398. 665. 1127. 1609. 1838. 1842. 2200. 2774

Only the uncials listed read περιελοντες. All the minuscules listed read περιελθοντες, as can be verified from the images on the NTVMR. The error has been reported to the editors and will be corrected in the next revised edition.

Do any readers have other examples or thoughts? Share them in the comments.

News: IGNTP Releases 350 Transcriptions of Manuscripts

Here is a pressrelease from the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP) announcing that 350 transcriptions can be downloaded and are freely available for re-use:

Open Data Release by the International Greek New Testament Project

The International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP), established in 1948, is working towards major new editions of the Gospel according to John and the Pauline Epistles using the latest digital tools.

In a move towards making its data openly available, the IGNTP has now released 350 of its transcriptions of Greek New Testament manuscripts under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, meaning that these files are freely available for re-use.

Dr P.J. Williams, chair of the IGNTP committee, said, “A huge amount of work has gone into these transcriptions, both from research projects funded by the British Academy and Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the work of volunteers from across the world. We are keen that the results of this pioneering effort to make full-text searchable transcriptions of New Testament manuscripts should be as freely available for re-use as possible, enabling others to carry out new research on the textual evidence for the New Testament in addition to our own work on the Editio Critica Maior.”

The transcriptions of John are available to view and download at the website www.iohannes.org/transcriptions. A companion site for the Pauline Epistles is at www.epistulae.org. In addition, further information and links to download multiple files are provided on the IGNTP’s own website at www.igntp.org. The transcriptions are encoded in XML and conform to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative.

8th December 2017

Why It Is Helpful to Include Accents in Transcripts

A real summer topic (with an apparatus error in NA28 thrown in for good measure). When transcribing a New Testament Greek manuscript for exercise, I encourage my students to include accentuation and breathing marks. Of course this slows things down considerably, and accents occur only occasionally in the earliest manuscripts. But they are a source of information and consequently help us in our understanding of scribal behaviour. Let me give you three reasons, each with an actual example.

1) Accents and breathings help us see how the scribe understood the text. Take for example P104 (P.Oxy. 4404), 2nd century.



Twice in Mt 21:35 a relative pronoun is provided with a spiritus asper, and I recall having seen a number of these in Sinaiticus (I think it was in John's gospel). It may be that relative pronouns such as ον were marked out to avoid confusing it with a word-final syllable. There is no doubt that P104 wanted to make things crystal clear.

2) It can help us avoid collation errors. A good example is Ψ(044) in Mk 10:12. The manuscript is cited by NA27/28 in support of the reading αυτη. And indeed these four letters do appear before απολυσασα:



But look at the accents, αὐτῆ ἀπολύσασα, which is not quite like the text αὐτὴ ἀπολύσασα. A second look at the manuscript reveals why. It is not the nominative but the dative we have here, ἠ ταύτην καὶ ἐν αὐτῆ ἀπολύσασα. (iota subscript not in manuscript; we would write αὐτῇ).



The reading itself is not completely clear to me, but certainly it is incorrect to cite Ψ(044) as direct support for the reading 'αὐτὴ'.

3) Accents can help us to think about the prehistory of certain corrected passages. Here is an example from X(033), Jn 1:32. The text in its corrected form gives καταβαίνoν.



The transcript of the IGNTP John project gives the nonsense form καταβαινυν as the original version. One could question this on space considerations alone. But attention to accents steer us in the right direction. Why καταβαίνον instead of the correct καταβαῖνον? I think this is because the scribe of X(033) originally wrote the masculine participle καταβαίνων (which fits the spacing much better), and correctly accented. The -ω- was later corrected to an -ο-, yet the accent remained untouched (Tregelles transcribed the manuscript here correct back in 1850).

These are only a few real-world examples; I am sure there are many more out there which have escaped notice. I don't think there is any excuse not to include accents and breathings by the first hand in transcriptions when these occur only sporadically (such as P104). Admittedly, there are practical considerations in favour of ignoring such signs, given where we are in transcribing the corpus of NT manuscripts. However, tools that we use for transcribing should at the very least have the option to include these accents and breathings.

IGNTP Papyrus Transcriptions Available

ITSEE News:

IGNT Papyrus transcriptions made available through Institutional Repository

Following the release of the Vetus Latina Iohannes transcriptions, the International Greek New Testament Project (www.igntp.org) has made available its transcriptions of papyri which contain the Gospel according to John on the University of Birmingham Institutional Research Archive.

Find the links to twenty-seven papyrus witnesses available from the repository here.