Pied-Piper Teaching Techniques: In which Dr Amy describes how she moves students from no interest in Greek at all to enthusiastically transcribing manuscripts on the VMR

Peter Gurry has encouraged me (over several years!) to share my teaching strategies on the ETC blog, and here we finally are – my first blog article.

I am a strategist by nature.  I look at a situation, decide where I would like things to end up, and then think about the steps for getting there.  In this case, my goal has been to enthuse as many undergrads as possible for the study of ancient Greek, and then beyond that to convince as many as possible to go on and master intermediate textual criticism.

What I do (in various courses):

The following semester courses provide me with a chance to influence students:

• New Testament History and Literature (taken by all NCU students, mostly freshmen)
• Reading and Interpreting Scripture (taken by all NCU students, mostly sophomores)
• Bible book courses (required for BATS majors and Bible minors, taken by others as electives)

All BA students are required to take one year of a language.  NCU does not offer more than one year in any languages except Hebrew, for which two years are offered, and Greek, for which a recently reinstated minor involves 4 semesters beyond the major requirements. 

In NT History and Lit I require the students to learn the Greek alphabet.  To reinforce this, I do not transliterate Greek during the lecture, but expect students to be able to write Greek words into their notes, pronounce them, and recognize (but not reproduce) them on exams.  The lecture material for this course includes several hours on textual criticism, explaining why it is necessary, and including a small TC exercise using English.  Students receive a photocopy of a folio of P75 in their packet of handouts, and some aspects of palaeography, such as scriptio continua, are explained.  There is also a section on Bible translation that points out the importance of understanding the Greek. 

In R&I there are several weeks on TC early in the semester.  The students learn to use the footnotes of their English Bibles to find variation units, and have an assignment where they look for at least two English versions that made differing text-critical decisions, then use the UBS GNT and Metzger’s commentary to understand the arguments for either decision.  Some of the best text-critical exercises in R&I are written by students who never had a day of Greek.  I also show students images of ancient manuscripts as part of the lecture on TC, and give them extra credit for spending time with our facsimile of Sinaiticus. 

In both of these introductory courses, I repeatedly encourage students to take either Greek or Hebrew the following fall.  I tout the advantages: for example, that studying an ancient language makes them stand out on applications for jobs, scholarships, and grad school; that learning an ancient language helps them with writing, grammar, and communication skills, as well as brain development; that the languages enhance their faith.  Why would a believer attend a Christian university and NOT take as many Bible and language courses as s/he can fit into his/her schedule?!

In all of my NT book courses, I read through the entire text of that document in class, spontaneously translating from the Greek while the students follow in their English versions.  I point out variation units that affect translation.  After each paragraph, I ask them to point out differences they notice and raise questions of understanding that arise.  They ask such great questions that sometimes an entire class period is spent reading and discussing the text, rather than in lecture.

All of the above is meant to intrigue students with the ancient text and encourage them to take as much Bible as possible, and either Hebrew or Greek for their required year of language.

My first-year Greek course almost always fills (25).  I teach it inductively, and we read continuous text, beginning with John 1:1 on the first day of class.  Quizzes are mostly on translation, though grammar quizzes also occur.  (Grammar paradigms are not permanently memorized for weekly quizzes, but are instead checked off on a “temporary memorization” list.)  One third of the class time is spent in small reading labs led by advanced students.  Repeatedly during the semester, I talk to the first-years about the value of doing more than one year of language, even if they are not able to complete a Greek minor. 

One class period per semester of first year is dedicated to palaeography.  On that day we meet in a café with mugs of coffee, and 5-7 advanced students teach the first-years at their table how to decipher an ancient hand.  Normally we read P66 or P75 in the fall semester and an easy minuscule in the spring.  The students are astounded that they are able to decipher the hand after just 50 minutes of training.

My last semester with any particular cohort of Greek students is usually fall semester of second year.  Now as a group of 10-12, we continue to read continuous text, spending a significant amount of the class time on palaeography, moving from early majuscules to late minuscules.  We often read the day’s assigned text straight from a manuscript facsimile rather than from the NA28.  At the same time, we look at as many variation units as we have time for.  Since Textual Criticism of the Bible was published, assigned readings help reduce the time needed for in-class teaching of TC, allowing us to move more quickly to the actual practice.  I talk through variation units as we come across them in the text, and then ask the students to do the same.  Some of the pop quizzes require the student to do a spontaneous evaluation of a variation unit, as does one of the five final exam topics. 

Special Courses

NCU has also been generous in allowing me to do a number of unusual courses over the years.  Every two to four years I have taught an entire course (called Topics) on palaeography and textual criticism during the same semester as the Birmingham Colloquium.  In Topics, the students gain significant expertise in deciphering hands and evaluating variation units.  We tend to focus on the topic of the Colloquium, which meant, for example, that the first Topics class wrote a primer on Zuntz’s The Text of the Epistles, while the most recent class studied the versions in greater detail. 

During the last month of Topics, we stage an academic conference, with each student presenting on their research paper – a 20-minute presentation and 10 minutes of Q&A, with extra points for asking good questions, and all students taking turns moderating.

Another special course was a recent Honors Seminar, in which 7 advanced students took on the further study of the text of a Gospel codex assigned to us by the Museum of the Bible.  They did transcription and reconciliation of the text, as well as codicology, a full collation to other MSS, and an evaluation of the results.

I also frequently have students in my home.  Most relevant here are the “Transcription Parties.”  Three to eight students bring their laptops, sign in to the VMR, and begin transcribing an easy minuscule.  I and the more experienced students help them get started and give advice when they run into things they don’t recognize.  Many only do a few hours of transcription, but several have completed entire Gospels.

In summary, my strategy is to first give exposure to Greek and manuscript images, and then to engage Greek students with actual use of the images in palaeography and textual criticism.  What I find is that they fall in love with the language and with the ancient manuscripts, and they keep wanting more.

Methodology in Transcribing Greek Manuscripts

About two weeks ago I participated in a meeting in Volos, Greece, with the groups that are currently editing the Novum Testamentum Graecum Editio Critica Maior (from Münster, Birmingham, and elsewhere). We had a lot of stimulating presentations and discussions. At some point in a discussion I repeated an old suggestion I have made that independent transcriptions of manuscripts which are later reconciled (i.e., compared by software with each other and checked by a third person who resolves any differences between the files in order to create one reconciled transcription) could be transcribed from two different base texts – the Nestle-Aland text and a Byzantine text.

Personally, when I worked on my dissertation on Jude I transcribed some 560 manuscripts, most of which naturally followed the Byzantine majority, and so I used the Textus Receptus (Oxford, 1873) as a base text which I then edited for each manuscript. I did not want to use the Nestle-Aland text as a base text because I reckoned I would have to edit each Byzantine minuscule much more (i.e., more work), and when editing I would also risk introducing errors.

In fact, I transcribed first on paper because the computer tools for transcribing were not as good, and the paper method actually saved me precious time. I used a base text on the left side of the paper and recorded variants by underlining the text that had variation and recording the variant on the right side of the paper. The most common variants were already listed in the right margin so that I could just put a circle around the one attestested by the manuscript I transcribed ... I saved valuable "Münster-time" (yes, in these days you had to go to the INTF in Münster to collate manuscripts, there was no NT.VMR). When I came home I entered everything into the software Collate 2.0 developed by Peter Robinson (who sent me his software and manual for free – Kudos to him, I could not have done this without his software). I learnt the paper-transcription trick, i.e., to have the basetext with prepared variants on paper, from no other than the transcription master Maurice Robinson (who, to my knowledge, has not yet entered his collation data of the pericope adulterae into digitial form, but hopefully this will happen). UPDATE: Maurice informs us in a comment that all data has been digitized and he is waiting for an interested publisher.

In any case, I know that the INTF have used the Nestle-Aland text as a base text for a long time, and at the meeting in Volos someone pointed out that it is actually good that the manuscript to be transcribed differs from the base text – this will keep the transcriber alert and they will do less mistakes and this may well be the case. On the other hand, there was an openness to consider my proposal to use two different base texts for the initial independent transcriptions, at least it could make for an interesting experiment.

Here is my own experience as of today. I have just trained a student how to read and transcribe a manuscript in Philippians with the Online Transcription Editor, not the editor which is integrated in the NT.VMR, but the freestanding OTE (http://www.itsee.birmingham.ac.uk/ote/). There you upload a base text, transcribe your manuscript (using images from NT.VMR or elsewhere) and then export to an xml.file which you name after the manuscript you transcribe. As I was proofreading the first attempts by this student today I found the following seven errors (among others) which would likely have been spotted in a reconciliation where two students had used two distinct base text according to my proposal (NA28 and Textus Receptus):

Minuscule 365

1:27 ακουω (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads ακουσω (= Byzantine text)

2:5 φρονειτε (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads φρονεισθω (= Byzantine text)

2:23 αφιδω (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads απιδω (= Byzantine text)

2:30 παραβολευσαμενος (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads παραβουλευσαμενος (= Byzantine text)

3:6 ζηλος (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads ζηλον (= Byzantine text)

3:10 συμμορφιζομενος (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads συμμορφουμενος (= Byzantine text)

4:15 λημψεως (= base text NA28);
the manuscript reads ληψεως (= Byzantine text).

As I proofread I found another very interesting variant in Philippians 1:14. The manuscript does not read πεποιθοτας (both NA28 and Textus Receptus), but πεπονθότας. If I am not mistaken this translates, "and most of the brothers and sisters, having suffered in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear." This variant is not listed in von Soden's edition. I haven't checked Tischendorf's 8th edition.

The Greek New Testament Produced at Tyndale House: First Steps

Where do you start when preparing a Greek New Testament? Of course you can start absolutely from scratch, by typing in each and every letter and accent manually, with all the associated risks, but somehow this did not appeal very much. So we needed an existing text that we could adjust towards the desired wording of our edition.

What we did was to settle on the text as prepared by Samuel Prideaux Tregelles as our point of departure. The actual procedure was that we started with an electronic edition of the Nestle-Aland 26 / UBS3 text and adapted every paragraph, word, punctuation, and accent to match the print edition of Tregelles. We even asked permission to start out with the Nestle-Aland / UBS text as we wanted to avoid any shade of doubt as to existing copyright arrangements, yet in reply we were told that no permission was needed to create a new text in this way.

Interestingly, when Tregelles prepared his text, he started off with a Textus Receptus and adapted this text so that it matched his own. Especially in cases where Tregelles did not make an explicit decision or weighed the evidence, his text still reflects the TR. I assume that changing the TR to Tregelles included more changes than the NA26 / UBS3 to Tregelles.

It is surprisingly difficult, though, to get everything right. Even though two people worked independently on creating the digital Tregelles, and every difference between the two versions was resolved by reference to the printed Tregelles, a considerable number of errors remained. The whole exercise was a valuable lesson in the psychology of textual work. When starting from the same base text two transcribers of a second text may make at times the same error.

It is our digital Tregelles that functioned as a point of comparison for the SBL Greek New Testament project, and its editor, Mike Holmes, notified us of a good few errors in our transcription that came up in comparing Tregelles with a number of other editions. It is often impossible to see if you have typed a Greek ‘ο’ or a Latin script ‘o’.

There are a number of reasons why Tregelles was chosen as our starting text. One is that by starting from Tregelles we go back beyond Westcott-Hort and their influential and lucid textual theories, but not as far back as the Textus Receptus. We could have opted for the text of Lachmann too, but I think that Tregelles is more explicit, and certainly more accessible, in justifying his methodology and theoretical approach. Another reason is that Tregelles is the most recent critical text that was not included in the triad of texts used to create Nestle’s first edition (Westcott-Hort; Tischendorf 8th; Weymouth [in itself the result of a comparison of editions]) or fourth (Weymouth replaced with Weiss).

Whilst working on the digital Tregelles, we were hoping / expecting that this would lead to a full-scale, fresh edition of the GNT, and this is reflected this in the abbreviations used for the Tregelles New Testament: TNT1 for the text that reflects the print as accurately as possible, TNT2 for the text in which obvious print errors are corrected. The next edition could then be TNT3 (Tyndale New Testament), which gives an instant ‘editional’ pedigree, but it turned out this name was never going to work. Regardless, there is some history behind our text.

For Tregelles see:

S.P. Tregelles, 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 (London: S. Bagster and Sons, 1854).

———. The Greek New Testament, edited from ancient authorities, with their various readings in full, and the Latin version of Jerome (London: S. Bagster & Sons, 1857-79).

———. Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. Vol. 4 of An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, edited by Thomas Hartwell Horne and John Ayre, 12th ed. (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1856 [1869]).

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.

Transcription Practice