Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Tregelles's Greek New Testament Released!

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I am ever so pleased that we are finally able to issue our transcription and the images of the Greek New Testament by Tregelles. The project was made possible within the Tyndale House, Text and Canon Project. We put some sort of introduction together on a dedicated website (all found here), including the images of the original, printed version. The transcription should be relatively easy to incorporate into most Bible programs, and the smarter than average geek may be able to link directly to the relevant image of the print page (this would mean access to Tregelles's critical apparatus). For this reason we encoded the page numbers. For reasons of citation, we even included a title page on the site.

There are two versions, distinguished by the edition number after the acronym (and yes, I couldn't resist the temptation: Tregelles's [Greek] New Testament). TNT is the transcription as is, TNT2 contains a large number of corrections of printing errors in the actual text and normalisation of accents (in total around 450).

There are no problems with copyright connected to the two texts. We used for a substantial part NA27 as our base text for the initial adaptation, and the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft kindly informed us that they had no issue with this. From our part we release the text under the attribution, non-commercial, share-alike licence as formulated under the Creative Commons 3.0 protocol.

Later we may even publish some pictures of the rousing party we are about to embark on here at Tyndale House!

14 comments

  1. Thank you for this contribution. I downloaded TNT and TNT2, and saved a copy of the Introduction. When I selected the link for the Tyndale Unicode Font Kit, however, I received the following message - "The system cannot find the file specified."

    I look forward to seeing and using this excellent tool.

    Good work, gentlemen.

    Steven Whatley

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  2. Here is an address to download just the Cardo font. I installed it and the TNT doc looks fine now.

    http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html#DownloadLink



    be well,
    Steven Whatley

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  3. Great work, Dirk! Marion must be proud!!
    –Henry

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  4. This text is available for the LaParola Bible study program. If you don't already have the program, you can download it from http://www.laparola.net/program/. When the program is installed, the Tregelles text can be added to the program using the Update command of the Tools menu.

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  5. "It was in the first half of the 19th century that the first Greek New Testament was printed that was based not on the traditional Greek text, but on the testimony of the oldest manuscripts (Lachmann, 1831)."

    I'm a little unclear on why Griesbach (18th cent.) wasn't mentioned here instead. In 1854 Tregelles himself published "An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament, with Remarks on its Revision upon Critical Principles, together with a collation of the critical texts of Griesbach, Scholz, Lachmann and Tischendorf with that in common use."

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  6. Do you have any stats on TNT's variance from NA27?

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  7. Congrats. And: pictures of the party! We want pictures!

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  8. Daniel Buck asked: "I'm a little unclear on why Griesbach (18th cent.) wasn't mentioned here instead." - As far as I can see, the text of Griesbach contains more Byzantine readings than Alexandrian readings, so it seems to be nearer to the traditional text than to the oldest manuscripts.

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  9. "Griesbach contains more [distinctive] Byzantine readings than [distinctive] Alexandrian readings, so it seems to be nearer to the traditional text than to the oldest manuscripts."

    Griesbach's 1774-7 NT was the first to put the Alexandrian readings cited in Wettstein's margin into the text itself. And remember, all this was before most of the distinctive readings of Vaticanus were available.

    But the question was not about Alexandrian readings, but the oldest readings. In many cases since 1831, the oldest reading has turned out to be the Byzantine one (see changes NA25>26). And Alexandrian readings for much of the NT are now available in far older mss than they were in 1831.

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  10. This is excellent, and I'm particularly pleased with the use of a CC license. It would be nice to encourage more of this kind of content under a license that allows for it's use and remix while protecting the hard work of the scholar that created it. (I've always thought CC attribution, non-commercial, share-alike was the perfect option for this kind of material!).

    bob

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  11. This is rather humorous:
    "It turned out harder than imagined to avoid transcriptional errors. . . These two transcriptions where then compared against each other . . ."

    We trust the text itself underwent closer scrutiny than the introduction.

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  12. Any plans to include Tregelles' marginal readings in your transcription? An edition without the original marginal readings would seem to give an exaggerated idea of the level of certainty that Tregelles considered his text to enjoy, don't you think? I couldn't find any reference to his marginal readings in your Introduction.

    Tregelles himself says:
    "A reading given in the margin without any mark is an alternative reading ; that is, one as to which the authorities are divided between what stands in the text and what is thus placed in the margin. These alternative
    readings may, in some cases, require a more detailed consideration; some additional ones may need to be specified, and more definite conclusions may at times be given. (Introductory Notice , pp. vi-vii)

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  13. Thank you for this incredible resource. I have been working on integrating the data into the Open Scriptures project. In processing the data, I found potentially two typos:

    In Mat.26.55, the paragraph break <PB> uses the Greek B instead of the Roman B; that is in lowercase it is <pβ> not <pb>.

    And in 1Co.16.24, there is a potentially erroneous <Subsc = >

    One more question: why is the text published in a .doc file instead of a UTF-8 .txt file? It is much easier to work with .txt files.

    I tried finding a place to contact the team about these corrections, but there doesn't appear to be any contact information on the website.

    With utmost appreciation and thanks!

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  14. I have compiled the two Tregelles texts into a BibleWorks format and it is freely available on the unofficial BibleWorks blog. Many thanks!!

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