Further Arguments for the Verb in Eph 5.22

I’ve blogged a fair bit about Eph 5.22 over the years, culminating in my argument for one of the longer readings in NTS back in 2021. Today, Joey McCollum of Australian Catholic University has a new article out in JSNT extending my argument. He gives much more attention than I could to the internal evidence and concludes in favor of the third person plural imperative. It’s especially helpful to have his thoughts on the function of the third person imperative, a question I only barely touched on in my essay but one that commentators especially need to consider.

Here’s the abstract:

This study revisits a contested textual variant concerning the presence, placement, and person of an imperative directed at wives in Eph. 5.22. Most previous treatments of this variant have decided the matter (typically in favor of the reading without an imperative) on the basis of manuscript support and transcriptional arguments about how readers and copyists of the text would have changed it, but the intrinsic probabilities of what the author would have written based on his argument and style have generally been neglected. This study fills this gap by assessing the intrinsic probabilities of the variant readings in Eph. 5.22 using discourse and information structure, the pragmatics of the Greek imperative, and stylistic observations in Ephesians. As a result of this analysis, the reading with the highest intrinsic probability is shown to be τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτασσέσθωσαν, which bolsters the recent case made by Gurry (2021) for the same reading.

Thankfully, the article is open access too. Read it here.

The CBGM of Acts for Download

Greg Paulson of the INTF in Münster has notified me that the CBGM for Acts can now be downloaded here. 

Greg has also made a tutorial how to install it and a brief introduction to how the CBGM works (very nice red circle in the image, just like the ones I use in my powerpoints, but no speech bubbles though).

 

In this connection, I would also like to mention Joey McCollum's crash course on the CBGM here and his own “Open CBGM” resource page here. 

 

Finally, my and Peter Gurry’s fuller introduction to the CBGM is now available with a 30% discount (code AM2020 at checkout, good to 31 Dec), in paperback ($15.40) or hardback ($25.90).

More Guest Lectures on TC

We’ve uploaded two more videos to our TCI YouTube channel from my ThM TC course. You can find all the guest lecture videos here (not all are recorded).

The first new video is from Joey McCollum on identifying textual clusters and is based on his recent AUSS article on the same topic. The second is by Clark Bates on the origin of Greek minuscule. Clark is soon headed off to Birmingham and we wish him and his family well, especially as they adjust to life with no sun and temps below 110°F. Thanks to both for sharing their research with us.

Joey McCollum

Clark Bates

Joey McCollum: Introducing the open-cbgm library

The following is a guest post from Joey McCollum. Joey is a research associate at Virginia Tech, a co-editor of the Solid Rock Greek New Testament (with Stephen Brown), and one of the translators behind Max and Moritz in Biblical Greek (with Brent Niedergall, Dave Massa, and Steve Young). I’m very happy to share with you his independent work to produce an editable version of the CBGM. The changes he introduces are worth discussing and I hope that conversation can begin here on the ETC blog.

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1. Introduction & Goals

The open-cbgm library is an open-source software implementation of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM).  In this guest post, I’d like to highlight how the open-cbgm library has accomplished the following objectives.

When I began the project back in October 2019, I had a few goals in mind. First, I wanted it to be open source, so that others could use the CBGM from end-to-end independently, study the code to understand what’s going on “under the hood,” or copy and modify the code to suit their own needs. Second, I wanted the library to fit into existing workflows with other text-critical tools. Third, I wanted to implement features that other textual critics have expressed an interest in seeing in the CBGM. And finally, I wanted the library to be fast—specifically, fast enough to handle the daunting task of constructing a complete global stemma for a book of the New Testament.

2. How It Works

Regarding the first goal, I’m pleased to say that the software is now freely accessible on GitHub at https://github.com/jjmccollum/open-cbgm. It works on Linux, Mac, and Windows computers. Platform-specific instructions on installing and using it are available on the GitHub page.

Towards the second goal, the open-cbgm library works with inputs in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML format, a digital humanities standard used by transcription and collation tools developed by the Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) and supported in the INTF’s Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) workspace. The TEI guidelines offer natural ways to encode lists of witnesses, variation units, and collation data, and the TEI graph-related elements lend themselves well to representing local stemmata of variant readings (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Representation of a local stemma in TEI XML. The “directed” graph type indicates that specified edges are one-directional. The “node” elements correspond to readings, and the “arc” elements to proposed genealogical relationships between prior and posterior readings. Note the inclusion of subvariants (the defective reading cf) and ambiguous readings (zw-b/d).

The idea is that with minimal modification (the addition of local stemmata to variation units), the output of existing tools could serve as the input to the open-cbgm library. To my knowledge, no one else has encoded local stemmata using TEI XML, so my hope is that the practice will catch on. It seems more convenient, consistent, and compliant with known standards to have all of the input data in one place.