Postdoctoral job opening at ITSEE in Birmingham

Hugh Houghton who leads the COMPAUL project at ITSEE in Birmingham announces a job opening:

There is a vacancy for a postdoctoral research fellow to work on the COMPAUL project at the University of Birmingham, investigating the earliest commentaries on Paul as sources for the biblical text.

We seek a scholar with expertise in classical or biblical Greek, an interest in the New Testament and experience of working with electronic and online corpora. The principal duties will be the analysis of early Greek commentaries on Paul and the creation of a database of biblical quotations.
The research fellow will join an established team working in the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham.

The appointment will start from 1st October 2014, or as soon as possible thereafter. The post is initially for 12 months, with the possibility of extension.

I apologise for the very short notice, but the deadline for applications is: 7th September 2014.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to H.A.G.Houghton@bham.ac.uk
Applications must be made online through the portal at https://static.wcn.co.uk/company/birminghamuniversity/internet.html
A job description may be downloaded from http://www.download.bham.ac.uk/vacancies/jd/44515.pdf

I should point out that this is a terrific chance to join a leading team of specialists in New Testament textual criticism as well as electronic editing.

See also this previous post.

Greek Palaeography in Oxford

This is a guest post by Peter Gurry who just came home from the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography in Oxford:

* * *

Last week was the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography hosted by Lincoln College in Oxford. This year’s program was run by Georgi Parpulov and a small cadre of other instructors.

The program ran for five days and concluded with a review exam on Saturday morning. The students were organized into groups of nine with each group led by a seasoned palaeographer. The majority of time was devoted to deciphering various Greek hands starting with Codex Bezae and quickly jumping to manuscripts from the 8th–15th century (so almost all minuscules). My own group spent time with about 30 manuscripts and I assume most of the other groups were the same. The focus was decidedly on matters of palaeography and codicology, so there was very little translation.

Nigel Wilson giving hands-on instruction at Christ Church library.

The late mornings were spent at either Christ Church library or the Bodleian examining manuscripts of roughly the same time period as in our reading groups. We got to examine a number of Psalters and Gospel books but the highlight was seeing a book of patristic excerpts presented to Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) that had been commissioned by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. At something like 2.5 feet tall by 2 feet wide, I was told it was the largest Greek book in the Bodleian’s collection.

Georgi Parpulov explaining codices in the Christ Church library.

The evenings were given to lectures from Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Hugh Houghton (University of Birmingham), Ilse de Vos (King’s College London), and Elisabeth Jeffreys (Oxford).

Nigel Wilson opened the series with a lecture on “The Rewards of Palaeography.” The main reward, he said, was filling in some lacuna in our present knowledge by finding previously unknown texts such as the sermons of Origen found a few years ago or the Archimedes Palimpsest, by finding an older copy of a known text, or of correcting the work of previous scholars.

On Tuesday, Hugh Houghton gave an energetic talk on “Digital Editing and the Greek New Testament” that was meant to introduce the work being done on the Editio Critica Maior. He gave a brief overview of the CBGM and noted its role in helping establish the “earliest attainable text” (his term). He also gave us quick demos of the software currently being used at Birmingham to collate MSS and to construct variation units from those collations. If I heard correctly, the collation software is already implemented on the NT.VMR website, but this was the first I’ve seen of the additional software that they are using to demarcate variation units. One interesting feature I noted was that the software displays a warning message whenever the editor combines variants into a variation unit in such a way that it misrepresents one of the witnesses in that particular unit. It all looked quite impressive in the demo and I’m eager to know more about how it works. I was also interested to learn from Houghton that there are already plans to build a fresh version of the CBGM software at Birmingham as well. It will be worth watching to see what innovations such a project might produce; might we finally see a version that will allow others to construct their own local stemmata? Whether or not we can hope for such a development, there is clearly a very fruitful collaboration happening between text critics and computer scientists at Birmingham and we can all hope that continues. In all, I think Houghton did a great job presenting some of the developments happening in our discipline to text critics working on other texts. I left with the feeling that now is an exciting time to be working in this field.

On Thursday night, Ilse de Vos spoke to us on “Dealing with an Abundant Textual Tradition,” a talk which introduced us to her editorial work on the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem. This collection of 137 questions and answers about Christianity is extant in some 250 witnesses in Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Arabic, and several other languages. What caught my attention was how helpful she has found phylogenetic methods to be especially in tracing the textual transmission of the Quaestiones. Although she hasn’t been able to root her phylogenetic tree yet, she has been able to identify a number of different manuscript groupings and even to connect some of these groups to various translations. For her this has raised the question of whether her critical edition should focus on reconstructing the original Greek text of the Quaestiones or should instead focus on the Greek text from which some of the more interesting translations were made.

A Psalter

The final lecture was given on Thursday evening by Elisabeth Jeffreys on “Editorial Problems in Byzantine Homilies.” Jeffreys is currently working on an edition of the homilies of James of Kokkinobaphos which exists in two remarkably similar copies, often agreeing with each other even at the level of punctuation. It struck me as a good example of the kind of skill Byzantine scribes could achieve.

The week gave me a much greater respect for the discipline of palaeography and a much better sense of how such work is conducted. Particularly with the Byzantine period where so many dated manuscripts are extant, I can see little reason for skepticism about the dates offered by those who specialize in this discipline. All-in-all it was a great week and I would highly recommend that those interested in textual criticism take part the next time around. Many thanks to Georgi Parpulov and the other instructors for putting on such a valuable course.

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.

On-line Lecture "Variants of Evil in the NT"

Chris Keith (Historical Jesus blog) has uploaded my lecture  "Variants of Evil in the New Testament" from the conference on Evil in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. Thanks Chris for organizing this conference!


For my previous report on the conference, see here.

A Beautiful Error in Aland's Synopsis Quattor Evangeliorum

In Kurt Aland's Synopsis [I am using the 4. korrigierter Druck 2005] a gorgeous error appears. In Mark 8:25 the text as printed reads και ενεβλεπεν τηλαυγως απαντα, 'and he saw everything clearly'. There are variants: παντα (not interesting now) and απαντας, 'and he saw everyone clearly'.
However, in the apparatus of the Synopsis this last variant is not given as απαντας (see e.g. in Alexandrinus), but incorrectly as αναστας, leading to a text that says something like 'and he saw clearly after he arose'.



Is the non-existing variant in the Synopsis an error of reading, influence from the wider context, or is this theologically motivated? Can we talk about its intention, its effect, and its reception history? Or is this an example of that most useful and most neglected of text-critical categories, namely 'errors just happen, get over it'?

Birmingham Colloquium

Hugh Houghton writes:

This is advance notice to colleagues and attendees of former colloquia that the Ninth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament will be held in Birmingham on 2nd-6th March 2015.

The theme will be The History and Text of New Testament Commentaries. 

A call for papers and further details will be posted in October, but you are welcome to contact me before then if you have any queries or suggestions.