Dead Sea Scroll Forgeries in Your Favorite Bible Software?

Dead Sea Scrolls in Accordance

Over at the Lying Pen of Scribes blog, Årstein Justnes has posted a list of forged Dead Sea Scrolls that have made their way into modules for Accordance, BibleWorks, and Logos. Among other problems, Årstein points out that their inclusion in this software “has statistical implications.”

Now before you go and toss your PC out the window (if you have a Mac, go right ahead), Martin Abegg adds some important context in the comments:

Good. This is a necessary step in the process. But allow me to make a couple of comments.

• First, my mandate when constructing Dead Sea Concordances 1-3 was to include all of the documents in Emanuel Tov’s “Lists.”
• Second, we have a bit of guilt by association at foot in this list—3 are marked “forgery” the rest are painted with the same pollution brush although marked probable forgery or unprovenanced—but assuming for the sake of argument that they are ALL forgeries, these fragments account for 0.17% of the morphological forms in the biblical data and 0.02% of the non-biblical. Or in other words, 179 of 103,383 and 32 of 174,917 morph forms respectively. Certainly we would hope for 0 elements of “pollution,” but this hardly amounts to the possibility of “major statistical implications” as suggested in the post. I have no doubt that misreadings in the editions is at least as problematic as outright fraud.
• Finally, my procedure from this point on: my past position has been that I add nothing to the data until I have a peer-reviewed publication in hand. I have had to modify this position as a result of the recent debate: I will for the present allow everything in Tov’s list to remain but I will add nothing of the new publications (not even my own Nehemiah fragment!) until a peer-reviewed debate brings some degree of assurance as to what to remove and what to add.

Årstein thinks all the fragments he lists are forgeries adding in the comments that “most of them are just as problematic as the unfamous Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” He also clarifies that the statistical implications are mostly to do with how many DSS manuscripts we have for various Biblical books.

Certainly something to be aware of if you use these modules.

New Testament Manuscripts Image Collection

Rick Bennett told me he has blogged the other day about a new Accordance module, "New Testament Manuscripts Image Collection" over at the Accordance Blog:

We used the Scripture ranges provided to us (with some modification), created e-texts for the facsimile introductions, and then interleaved the high-resolution images taken by the CSNTM. The end result is the first of its kind: a fully indexed, locally stored collection of high-resolution images of four facsimiles (including one pseudo-facsimile), and one original manuscript of the Greek New Testament.

The module costs $179.00 and includes images of the following codex facsimiles: Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus (pseudo-facsimile), Washingtonensis, and the original Codex 2882. These are also freely available at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM).

I think it is nice with all sorts of resources in textual criticism, but of course images of the real MSS are preferable to facimiles (e.g., Codex Sinaiticus). Nevertheless, we get here a convenient way of looking instantly at the manuscript evidence in connection with the study of a certain text in the Greek New Testament.

Update: Pete points out in a comment that the module includes links to the online images of Codex Sinaiticus

Accordance Users Conference and Textual Studies Sale

Accordance will host a users conference with "nationwide invitation" (although I assume it is a worldwide invitation since I received it). This is the first "Users Conference" and it will be held in the Dallas, TX area in September 24-25, 2010. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Martin Abegg, leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar.

See the full announcement here.

Further, during April to May 9, Accordance offers a 20% discount off their usual price on textual studies modules:

Critical editions and tools
* CNTTS Apparatus (whole NT), $80
* Tischendorf's 8th edition, $40
* The Mac Bibel Studienbibel including the GNT NA 27 apparatus and the BHS apparatus, $119
* LXX Swete Apparatus with text (when complete will cover the whole LXX), $88
LXX Cambridge Apparatus, more in depth but never completed, $48
"LXX Apparatus add-on" including both Swete and Cambridge, $120

Göttingen Text and Apparatus: Torah and Ruth to be released soon (not on sale).

Textual commentaries and notes:

* Comfort's Textual Commentary, $36
* Metzger's Textual Commentary, $28
* NET Notes (available with the NET Group), $30.
* MT-LXX Parallel aligns the Greek and Hebrew texts word for word, $80

Unfortunately, the digital versions of Bezae, Vaticanus, Washingtoniensis and the GNT Papyrus module are not on sale.

More details about the Textual Studies Sale here.

Searching for Nomina Sacra with Accordance

Over at the Accordance Blog, Rick Bennett has posted on "The Search for ‘Sacred Names’." In this post Rick summarizes the paper he presented at the SBL in Rome (which I blogged about here).

In his excellent SBL paper, Rick demonstrated how Accordance with the GNT-Pap module - a digitized version of Comfort and Barrett, now extended with some new papyri, 𝔓118-121, and 𝔓123, can be used to search for and analyze the distribution and form of nomina sacra.

I have just been using this module myself when I searched for some nomina sacra, although I used the first version which has been updated since then. Of course I compared the results with the printed edition (and images and other sources). I did spot some errors and limitations along the way, that I have reported to Accordance.

Errors is to be understood here as deviances from the printed version of Comfort and Barrett (2d edition), not as de facto errors (which unfortunately occur too). I found three errors relating to P45: Luke 11:11 (wrong brackets); Acts 11:8 (wrong brackets); Acts 16:18, Comfort and Barrett abbreviates IH XP in the printed version, but the digital version has IH XY. I think these errors occur both in GNTPAP-C and -M. I suspect that the wrong bracket formatting, [ ... [ or ] ... ], occur at several places in the module, not just in the transcription of P45, and I assume that these could be searched for rather easily by folks like Rick Bennett who knows practically everything there is to know about search strings (needless to say that he has helped me a lot with those).

One limitation that still remains in the latest version is the possibility to exclude hits that occur within conjectural text set in square brackets. Rick tells me that the developers will do something about that in a future version. For now one has to sort that out manually. Some other limitations that were included in an earlier version of this post have now been dealt with in the current version of the module (which I don't have for the moment).

In sum, the software is very useful for this kind of research. The fact that one gets hits in the reconstructed passages is a limitation, but in the end, the most important thing is that all the factual hits are there, and it is clearly better to get more hits and exclude irrelevant ones, than to miss some cases.

Update: the above post has been edited since some of the limitations that I brought up are not relevant for the latest version of the module. Thanks to Rick Bennett for updating me :-)