I posted last week about Comparing Text Editions to Determine Common Errors. At the end of that post, I was brainstorming/blathering (the line is fine; I cross it often) about a project/experiment to start with a known text and have a group of folks copy it. Folks would return their copies to me. Then I'd examine the copies to see what sorts of errors cropped up.

I realize some folks have done this sort of thing in classroom settings; others have approached the problem backwards — starting with an intentionally corrupted text and attempting to reconstruct the textual basis.

I'm thinking of something a little different. I have a general interest in manuscript transmission and scribal habits (hence the title of the post). I've read some about this — various articles as well as the standards from Metzger and Aland/Aland — but know that I learn best when I dive in and do stuff.

So, I'd like to think seriously about a project that starts with a known vorlage and copies it. And then it collates the copies against the original. If participation warrants, further generations of copies can be made and then even more fun can be had (MS reconstruction, anyone?); but that would not be part of the original project.

I'd like to offer these general thoughts and guidelines.

First: Only folks with some knowledge of the Greek language are candidates. I'd like to set the bare minimum at one year of instruction in the Greek language and relatively active use. That is, if I took one year of Greek ten years ago and haven't used it since, I'd be ineligible. But if I took a year of Greek ten years ago and still refer to the Greek NT when studying, I'd be eligible. If I've used Greek a lot but typically through Strongs numbers ... well, I wouldn't be eligible. If my only experience is with interlinears ... well, I wouldn't be eligible. I'm willing to make exceptions to those who plead their case, however, so if this interests you please be sure to inquire (see Eighth point below).

Second: The text copied will be an entire epistle as I'd like a large chunk with plenty of opportunity for error. I have to admit alternative motives for the epistle I've chosen. I hope to next year begin an in-depth examination of Second Timothy. Since I will be reading (and re-reading, and re-reading) the copied passage, it makes sense to select Second Timothy so that I will get intimately familiar with the Greek of the letter in the process.

Third: The text copied will not have verse breaks, chapter breaks, accents, breathing marks or punctuation. It will use the characters we're all familiar with, however. I won't be up-casing the text and removing spaces. I'll supply the canonical PDF copy (which will be the Westcott-Hort edition with accents/etc. removed) to those interested.

Fourth: I'll be copying too, don't worry. But I should say that participants will be expected to copy the text; no fair playing scribal tricks on Rico and emending the text. If a text is deemed sufficiently corrupt as to have been submitted in bad faith, I'll simply exclude it from the sample.

Fifth: All copying is to be done by hand (no typing) on clean unruled paper. Ink (any color) is required. Paper size is at your discretion. If you are familiar with scribal habits, you are free to employ such as you see fit (e.g. adding light margins and/or rules in pencil to your paper to assist with the copying process). Manuscript illuminations are optional. Also optional: Make a palimpsest by copying something in pencil first, erasing it, and then writing the Second Timothy passage in ink over the erased portion. Or vice-versa: Second Timothy in pencil, erase, and copy something in ink over the top. (I'm only half joking).

Sixth: All original copies are to be sent to me. I'll provide further information on the expectations and process as well as my mailing address to those who express interest.

Seventh: By returning a copy you are giving me your work. You'll be credited, of course, but I will be free to publish images or excerpts thereof online, in print or wherever I see fit. Conference papers, books, articles, or blathering along on the internet somewhere. If this project commences, I can fairly much guarantee that anonymous images of your copies will be put on the internet. Your name will likely be cited in associated material but not directly with a given MS copy so as to keep the copies themselves somewhat anonymous.

Eighth: If you're interested in taking part, contact me at text geek at g mail dot com. The address is also in the sidebar to the right if you are unable to munge the above into an address. If there are ten (10) respondants willing to take part in this project, then I'll consider it a go and get materials together for distribution.

I'll post more on the project status if there is sufficient interest. If you've made it this far and have a suggestion for the project name, please leave a comment with your suggestion.

Thanks!

Eli pointed me to the Wulfila project after he saw a blog post on Abecedaria. We'd looked at Wulfila a few years back, but they've been doing a lot of work in the interim.

Most interesting to me is the encoding and analysis of the available Bible fragments, from Argentus and Ambrosianus to other smaller fragments. The upshot is relatively decent coverage of the New Testament.

Check it out. Click around. You can get into dictionaries from the text rather easily. The text itself is transliterated and aligned with English and Greek versions at the verse level. There is preliminary morphological analysis and even some lexical form tagging. Links are to a dictionary that is image-only, so you jump to a page that you need to scan to find the article (and the Greek sigmas are lunate in the dictionary, so make sure to take that into account). But still — it makes rudimentary work with the Gothic early version much easier than it would otherwise be.

This brings to mind a quote from Charles Ellicott (c. 1860), from the preface to his commentary on the Pastoral Epistles:

"I have at last been enabled to carry out, though to a very limited extent, the long cherished wish of using some of the best versions of antiquity for exegetical purposes. ... The Latin, the Syriac, and the Gothic, have been somewhat carefully compared throughout these Epistles. ...

"In thus breaking ground in the Ancient Versions, I would here very earnestly invite fellow-labourers into the same field. It is not easy to imagine a greater service than might be rendered to Scriptural exegesis if scholars would devote themselves to the hearty study of one or more of these Versions. ...

" ... the study of the ancient Versions for exegetical purposes may be very earnestly recommended. The amount of labour will not be very formidable, and in some cases we have fair, if not good, literary appliances. There seems good reason for not going beyond the Syriac, the Old Latin, the Vulgate, the Gothic, the Coptic, and the Ethiopic. ... For the present, at any rate, the Syriac, Old Latin, Vulgate, Gothic, Coptic, and Ethiopic are all that need demand attention."

Update (2005-12-22): I forgot to mention that Eli made his own groovy Gothic font called Gotisch a few years back. Of the font, Eli says:

Gotisch is a Gothic font, and by that, I mean a font representing the Gothic alphabet, as written by Wulfila and presumably as used by the Goths. I do not mean “Gothic” as in sans-serif typefaces or black-letter or fraktur typefaces, nor as in architectural forms with tall, skinny windows, nor as in painting your face up all circus-like and wearing tatted leather clothes.

Check it out. 

Awhile back, Bob and I were doing a lot of reading about the founding fathers. Guys like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverner Morris. But our favorite was John Adams. If you're into history and biography, you should get a copy of David McCollough's John Adams. This is what historical biography should be like.

Adams was a prolific letter writer. And just yesterday, I noticed that the Massachusetts Historical Society's Adams Family Papers site has made the correspondence between John Adams and his wife Abigail public.

There are images of the letters as well as transcriptions. Letters from John to Abigail and from Abigail to John are there.

One letter (from Oct. 4 1762, during the Adams' courtship, apparently) gives some insight into the sort of guy that Adams could be.

I've got it, and Eric Sowell (The Coding Humanist) is the source of my woe.

He's got a leaf of the Complutensian Polyglot. So very cool. That thing is almost 500 years old! And it is an awesome work. They don't call it a 'polyglot' for nothin'.

Note I've blogged about the coolness and structure of the Complutensian NT.

I've been listening to a version of the song What Child is This by the band Carbon Leaf.* They offered it as a download in the past, but it appears to be unavailable now.

I'm familiar with the version sung in my church growing up, where the chorus is the same for all three verses of the song. However, this version (and other versions) don't repeat the same chorus apart from the closing line "The babe, the son of Mary".

Take a minute and read (don't skim, don't glance through, but read) these lyrics. The second verse "chorus" stops me in my tracks every time I hear it.

What child is this who laid to rest
On Mary's lap is sleeping
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet
While shepherds watch are keeping
This, this is Christ the King
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing
Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The Babe, the Son of Mary

Why lies He in such mean estate
Where ox and ass are feeding
Good Christian fear for sinners here
The silent word is pleading
Nails, spears shall pierce Him through
The Cross be borne for me, for you
Hail, hail, the Word made flesh
The Babe, the Son of Mary

So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh
Come peasant, King, to own Him
The King of Kings, salvation brings
Let loving hearts enthrone Him
Raise, raise the song on high
The Virgin sings her lullaby
Joy, joy for Christ is born
The Babe, the Son of Mary

* Carbon Leaf have several MP3 Downloads available on their web site. Hit the 'Media' option in the left sidebar/menu, then look for the downloads link.

I realize that I posted a link to Marginal Revolution yesterday, but they've got such good stuff I'm posting another link today.

Here's a link about Fair Trade that explores the concept applied to that most succulent of beverages, coffee.

Lots of little things, nothing worthy of a well thought out extended post (or even a poorly thought out extended post, as is normal here) but all sorts of stuff to mention.

First, Happy Blog-Day to Joe Cathey. He's been going strong at Dr. Cathey's Blog for a year now. I had the opportunity to meet Joe at SBL, and the pleasure was all mine, I'm sure. I'm looking forward to more.

Second, check out the post How Google Changes Information Markets at Marginal Revolution. It is about Google and negative externalities. Some good thoughts there. Check it out even if you don't know what "negative externalities" are.

Third, I note that Ed Cook (Ralph the Sacred River) has listed his second annual Ralphies. He then asks other bloggers for their own lists. I have to be honest and say that I really don't recall seeing any movies released this year. Also, I listen to a very eclectic set of music I cobble together using RealRhapsody. And I haven't read any fiction released this year. With that caveat ...

Best NONFICTION BOOK I read this year: Rhetoric at the Boundaries by Bruce Longenecker. I've blogged on this already. I think this was a favorite read of mine because I got to see how the study of rhetoric could be usefully and somewhat pragmatically applied to the text. And that is huge. Read it if you haven't.

Best FICTION BOOK I read this year: I count the Chronicles of Narnia as one book. I read them earlier this year, and they were (as always) awesome. And no, I don't plan on seeing the movie — I have too many pictures of Narnia and such formed in my imagination to pollute it with someone else's movie version. Lord of the Rings, while I immensely enjoyed the movies, will be different for me the next time I read it; I'll see the movie instead of my own imagined Middle Earth (except for Ghan Buri Ghan and the tree people ... ). I don't want that to happen to Narnia.

And thanks, Ed, for the reference to Millar's The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD 337. I'll have to add it to the list. Thankfully, there are versions available at under 20 bucks! (13 bucks for a used paperback copy, 20 bucks for used hardcovers)

Fourth, speaking of cool books ... anyone wanna buy Rico a Christmas present? (Hey, it's worth a shot!)

Out of curiousity —

Does anyone know of any studies done where the same Greek MS (or MS portion) has been copied by several different people of varying Greek abilities?

It seems to me that if there was a common source text that was copied in controlled environments by "scribes" of varying skill (both skill in Greek and scribal ability) with the goal of creating an accurate copy; comparing the output to the known source to track the sorts of errors encountered might be a valuable thing.

I'm not talking about examining known ancient MSS. I'm talking about getting a group of friends together and simply saying, "Hey, let's hand-copy First John* and see what sorts of errors crop up". Heck, make it easy and skip accents/breathing, just copy the letters.

Anybody know of any analysis done like this? It seems that such an approach — while it wouldn't utilize actual, bona-fide scribes unless you run in such circles — could be valuable in thinking about the sorts of transcription errors and their frequency.

For fun, one could take the experiment a few generations down the way and even have someone "consolidate" MS editions five and six generations removed from original source and then compare the accuracy of the text-critical work.

If this hasn't been done, I'd be interested in thinking further about it. Any suggestions as to source to copy or if you'd like to volunteer to be a test scribe should this experiment occur;** please leave a comment in the thread or email me using the address on the sidebar.

Thanks!

Update (2005-12-16): Whoa, two comments within an hour of posting! That is some sort of ricoblog record, I think. I should expand a bit since I've thought about this some after the initial post. I'm thinking that larger samples than a classroom setting, wider range of skills for copyists (I talked to one guy who said he'd do it, and he's have his kids do it too), wider geographic participation (potentially worldwide, I'd guess) and no time constraints for copying. I'm less interested in an exercise for students and more interested in gathering a decent amount of somewhat real data from folks of all different skill levels copying Greek text that can be used as base for analysis. Interested? Continue using the comments to post your thoughts or send me an email. I'll likely be digesting this over the weekend, so please make your thoughts known!

* First John chosen semi-randomly. I'm curious on thoughts as to whether familiar or unfamiliar text would be appropriate for such a test. I'm also curious about how long of a text to select. It seems a shorter (but not one chapter) epistle such as 2 Thessalonians, 2 Peter, Titus or Colossians might be fun. Or perhaps Mt 5-7 (Sermon on the Mount)?

** If the experiment does occur, I would plan on posting (anonymously) photos/scans of all copied text for others to examine along with some rudimentary analysis. If anyone else produced similar analysis of materials, I'd of course link to it or offer to host it.