Krister Stendahl Working on the Textual Apparatus

Life Magazine (26 Dec 1955) featured an article by Alfred Eisenstaedt on Harvard Divinity School, “Harvard Revival. Back in touch with life of the churches its Divinity School gains a new vigor.” The article includes a curious photo of a group of three scholars working on analyzing textual variants in the New Testament using the latest high-tech, the Harvard Lab’s computer. I think this model might be Harvard Mark IV (built by Harvard engineers in 1952 under the supervision of Howard Aiken) or perhaps Rand´s Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). Perhaps one of our readers can tell us which it is.

The doctoral student sitting at a desk is Rev. John W. Ellison who subsequently completed his thesis on “The Use of Electronic Computers in the Study of the Greek New Testament” (Harvard Divinity School, 1957).  Ellison also used UNIVAC to create a concordance of the NRSV text (published in 1957).

The scholar leaning over the desk is the Swedish Bishop and Harvard Professor Krister Stendahl. I don’t know who the third guy is, perhaps a computer technician. Does any reader know?

A former student of mine asked, when he saw this picture, “What is that big machine?” I replied that it is a textual apparatus.

Another pioneer in this field was Vinton A. Dearing, who wrote a program for the IBM 7090 to record and analyze variant readings. The results were published in Methods of Textual Editing, (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, 1962).

Fischer’s Prescience in 1970 on the Use of Computers for Textual Criticism

I just read an article by Bonifatius Fischer on the use of computers in New Testament studies. What makes it interesting is that it was written in 1970. Here are a couple of points that stood out to me. I especially liked this quote near the beginning:

It is strange in general that the use of a computer is taken in the public mind as a proof of scholarly thoroughness. Why does the same not hold for the use of a fountain-pen or a typewriter, especially an electric one? 

Fischer does not think computers hold much promise for questions of authorship. But he is enthusiastic about their use for textual criticism.

After so much pessimism we come at last to a field where the computer is of great importance to the student of the New Testament, indeed where it opens up a new dimension and makes possible what hitherto the scholar had not even dared to dream of: that is, in textual criticism.

He distinguishes between manuscripts “with all their peculiarities” and the “purely abstract sequence of readings” that can be fed into computers.

In textual criticism a strict distinction must be made between the logical, abstract, order and the concrete, historical, order: one might say, between the abstract textual criticism of variants and the concrete study of the tradition which is rooted in the historical environment. The various manuscripts with all their peculiarities and casual errors belong to the concrete, historical, order, and with them the whole indirect tradition in quotations, translations, etc. In the logical order there corresponds to every manuscript a particular series or combination of readings, which are quite abstracted from space and time, from the question of what is true or false, original or derived, given or received. This is not the current distinction between the manuscript and the text it transmits: the text itself is here a purely abstract sequence of readings, not a historical object. So in the logical order we have only sequences of readings, not real but only nominal manuscripts. But these and all their mutual relationships can be represented in quantitative, mathematical, terms in set-theory by means of Venn diagrams. The same holds good for all the groups or sub-groups of these ‘nominal’ manuscripts. And since they can be mathematically represented, they can also be grasped and processed by a computer. 

Especially interesting is that near the end of the article he anticipates the basic procedure both of the CBGM and Stephen Carlson’s use of cladistic software for Galatians: the computer provides the basic structure of the textual forms and the human editor gives it direction by making judgments about the “truth or falsity of the readings.” In hindsight, it may seem fairly obvious, but this was 1970 and computers were using punch-cards.

Two stages must be distinguished. In the first the relations between the manuscripts and the texts are defined on the basis of all their readings, irrespective of whether these readings are true or false: this stage is a purely mathematical process which can be done by a computer—indeed in so complicated a case as the New Testament it should be done by a computer. Then follows the second stage, the proper task of the textual critic, the judgement of the truth or falsity of the readings, the recension of the original text and perhaps also of its more important subsequent forms, and the reconstruction of the history of its transmission. This is a task that only a man can perform: it is beyond the capacities of a computer. But it rests on the firm basis that the computer supplies.  

Source: Fischer, Bonifatius. “The Use of Computers in New Testament Studies, with Special Reference to Textual Criticism.” JTS 21.2 (1970): 297–308.

John's gospel in Coptic

Over at Alin Suciu's blog, you can read my official announcement of the launch of the Coptic portion of the IGNTP John database. I am grateful for the collaboration of Brice Jones (McGill University ), Elina Perttilä (University of Helsinki) and Alin Suciu (University of Laval) who assisted with the transcriptions, as well as Hugh Houghton and Catherine Smith (ITSEE, Birmingham) who are responsible for the technical aspects of the project. In the coming months, the display should be improved, hopefully allowing for the Coptic translations to be viewed in parallel. Hopefully, the Sahidic will appear within a year or two.

Computers and Ancient Language

Two new articles show how computers can potentially assist in paleography and linguistics:

The first follows an Israeli acheivement which could potentially create a "Google-like search engine" for corpora of manuscripts and which could also be used to match fragments dispersed across modern collections. Those of us who have spent time with such manuscripts will realize the limitations to such technology.

The second involves a lost language from the Indus valley. A mega-civilization there may have predated the great societies of the Ancient Middle East. Mathematicians have used algorithms to discover regular patterns in the surviving cuneiform-like texts; hopefully, these discoveries will lead to the unraveling of the language, its texts and the history of this lost civilization.