Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Marc Multilingue

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I've just been reading J.K. Elliott, Christian Amphoux and J.-C. Haelewjck, 'The Marc Multilingue Project', in Fil Neot 29-30 (2002) 3-17. It describes a significant collaborative project to produce ten volumes on the Gospel of Mark, with each version provided with its own volume. Languages covered are Greek, Latin, Gothic, Coptic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac and Slavic. It will attempt to present text forms diplomatically, while also showing the relationship between them.

The edition will set out texts in their relative sequence, starting with D followed by W, since it is believed (by Amphoux) that D may represent the earliest form of the text of Mark we have (I would have preferred P45).

This is clearly a massive and important project, though not one without eccentricity. I love the sentence (co-authored by Amphoux) which says that Amphoux 'has his own, often idiosyncratic theories about this history [i.e. the history of text forms]' (p. 8).

It talks about the research of Didier Lafleur on family 13. A quick Google revealed the fact that Monsieur Lafleur had his doctoral viva a week or so ago. Is there no privacy?

Apparently the Marc multilingue project is officially undertaken by the Société d'histoire du texte du Nouveau Testament about which the WWW knows next to nothing.

Rather strange that the article twice explicitly identifies the Majority Text with the TR, even to the point of calling Hodges and Farstad's edition one of the TR (pp. 4-5). I should have thought that a glance at the end of Romans would have shown that a distinction needs to be drawn here.

At the same time the more that is done to produce critical editions of the versions the merrier.

3 comments

  1. Amphoux is also involved as editor of this series:

    http://www.zebre.ch/edzhtb00.htm

    My impression is that Amphoux and some other scholars are carrying on in the tradition of Jean Duplacy, who once was involved in the preparation for an editio critica maior in collaboration with Aland's intitute in Münster and Fischer's in Beuron (starting in the Catholic Letters), but that there was disagreement over methodological issues and, thus, this branch of mainly French scholars went on in another direction.

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  2. Thanks for the reference and background. Do you have dates for the time of collaboration and when it ended?

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  3. I think it will perhaps be more useful for the versions than for the Greek text.

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