Electronic Transcriptions of New Testament Manuscripts and their Accuracy, Documentation and Publication

Abstract

The adoption of digital tools to edit the Greek New Testament has fundamentally changed the methodology of creating such an edition. In the past, data was painstakingly gathered in the form of collations of manuscripts against a standard printed text, which were then combined to create an apparatus of readings.1 The base text used for collation was a fixed point against which everything was measured; once the apparatus was constructed, the individual collations were no longer required. In contrast, electronic editing software (in particular, the widely-adopted Collate program and its successors) is based not on a single apparatus but on multiple files, each of which consists of a complete electronic transcription of a single manuscript witness.2 The apparatus is compiled automatically from these files, using an algorithm to improve alignment and creating meta-files to assist with the normalisation of the data. This has at least four distinct advantages over the previous method: the performance of the mechanical task of compilation by a computer is much quicker, less susceptible to human error, reproducible and reconfigurable. A collation can be re-run from the same files with different settings or a different selection of witnesses. It is therefore the complete electronic transcriptions rather than