Monday, October 17, 2005
What tasks need to be performed?
A natural question for evangelical textual critics to ask is 'What tasks most need to be performed?' One useful task might be to create a running textual commentary on the whole Bible. This could be a long-term goal (at ars longa vita brevis). A more manageable goal would be simply to create a location/public repository for textual comments, or perhaps a biblical text with hypertexted comments. Does anyone have any idea as to how such a public repository could be managed?
I suppose you could create something similar to Wikipedia. I haven't any idea how difficult that is to manage, but it seems relatively easy to clone.
ReplyDelete(P.S. I followed the links here. From Google. While looking for a review of Donald Guthrie's NT Theology. No kidding. Weird.)
Major congratulations on being the first person to come to this site through a search engine. It was only set up on Friday. As far as I can tell Google still isn't registering it, so I'd be very interested to know where it is linked from. However, it is great to see how Aberdeen students get around!
ReplyDeleteThere is, of course, besides Metzger's commentary the online textual commentary of Wieland Willker, and a lot of textual commentary lies buried in innumberable commentaries. But I suppose the same: A textual commentary should (or could) in principle performed as the Linux or OpenOffice software,with a compiler in chief...
ReplyDeleteOn the other side, a work like that may become a mere patchwork, if there are not strict regulations how this is to be performed on every variant etc.
Martin, are you volunteering? I understand the problem of 'patchwork', at the same time, the alternative danger that great ideas are lost may be greater. One of the strengths of the evangelical position is, arguably, at the level of the big picture. If therefore a range of comments could be brought together this would have the advantage of letting evangelical perspectives be seen together. At the moment there are a large number of evangelical textual critics, but there is no organisation between them and so a general view of the best of their work is not easy to find.
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