Pub Date : 2019-05-14DOI: 10.1163/9789004399297_013
James Mcgrath
Early in the summer of 2016, interest in the papyrus fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife had begun to wane. Then investigative journalist Ariel Sabar published an article unveiling a great deal of truly fascinating evidence that he had uncovered, related not only to the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife itself, but also the person who we can now say was almost certainly responsible for the forgery. The article told of connections with sex and pornography, scams and financial catastrophes, which made the real story behind the text seem even more sensational than the contents of the papyrus fragment itself.1 Since then, still other new texts have come to light and made news headlines, including purported additional Dead Sea Scrolls, and what has been hailed as the oldest papyrus mentioning Jerusalem.2 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to the latter within days of the news of the fragment first appearing, as he responded to a proposed UNESCO declaration about the purported lack of ancient Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. Meanwhile, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities finally offered its assessment that the lead codices, touted by David Elkington as dating from the time when Jesus was alive, are modern fakes, a conclusion that most discussion of them online had already drawn.3 These and many other examples illustrate how the work of scholarship on ancient history intersects with contemporary concerns,
{"title":"Learning from Jesus’ Wife: What Does Forgery Have to Do with the Digital Humanities?","authors":"James Mcgrath","doi":"10.1163/9789004399297_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004399297_013","url":null,"abstract":"Early in the summer of 2016, interest in the papyrus fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife had begun to wane. Then investigative journalist Ariel Sabar published an article unveiling a great deal of truly fascinating evidence that he had uncovered, related not only to the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife itself, but also the person who we can now say was almost certainly responsible for the forgery. The article told of connections with sex and pornography, scams and financial catastrophes, which made the real story behind the text seem even more sensational than the contents of the papyrus fragment itself.1 Since then, still other new texts have come to light and made news headlines, including purported additional Dead Sea Scrolls, and what has been hailed as the oldest papyrus mentioning Jerusalem.2 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to the latter within days of the news of the fragment first appearing, as he responded to a proposed UNESCO declaration about the purported lack of ancient Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. Meanwhile, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities finally offered its assessment that the lead codices, touted by David Elkington as dating from the time when Jesus was alive, are modern fakes, a conclusion that most discussion of them online had already drawn.3 These and many other examples illustrate how the work of scholarship on ancient history intersects with contemporary concerns,","PeriodicalId":355737,"journal":{"name":"Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114747454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-14DOI: 10.1163/9789004399297_003
L. Lied
At the time of writing this essay, libraries and collections worldwide are slowly, but steadily, in the process of digitizing their manuscript collections and making them available online.1 The Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Vatican Library in Rome, and the British Library in London have been in the process of digitizing their manuscript repositories for quite a while.2 In recent years, several other holders of large manuscript repositories have announced that they will digitize their collections, in whole or in part; among them the National Library of Greece in Athens.3 In addition to the growing digital repositories of major libraries and collections, a series of other online sites have also provided digital images and new tools for exploring manuscripts. Sites, such as E-ktobe, aim to provide digital images and searchable information for all Syriac manuscripts4 and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) has recently launched an online read-
{"title":"Digitization and Manuscripts as Visual Objects: Reflections from a Media Studies Perspective","authors":"L. Lied","doi":"10.1163/9789004399297_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004399297_003","url":null,"abstract":"At the time of writing this essay, libraries and collections worldwide are slowly, but steadily, in the process of digitizing their manuscript collections and making them available online.1 The Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Vatican Library in Rome, and the British Library in London have been in the process of digitizing their manuscript repositories for quite a while.2 In recent years, several other holders of large manuscript repositories have announced that they will digitize their collections, in whole or in part; among them the National Library of Greece in Athens.3 In addition to the growing digital repositories of major libraries and collections, a series of other online sites have also provided digital images and new tools for exploring manuscripts. Sites, such as E-ktobe, aim to provide digital images and searchable information for all Syriac manuscripts4 and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) has recently launched an online read-","PeriodicalId":355737,"journal":{"name":"Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127713611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-14DOI: 10.1163/9789004399297_010
Paul Robertson
In a recent monograph,1 I argued for formal overlaps between several roughly contemporary texts in what I termed a shared “socio-literary sphere”: the letters of the Christian apostle Paul, the Stoic popular philosopher Epictetus’ Discourses, and the Epicurean scholar Philodemus’ On Death and On Piety. Further, certain other writings – Seneca’s Natural Questions, Letter to the Hebrews, and 4 Maccabees – were likewise found to have formal similarities close to Paul’s letters. These findings stood in contrast to several other types of texts often likened to Paul’s letters, such as formal Greco-Roman orations (e.g., Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaic Orations, Dio Chrysostom’s orations) and sectarian Jewish literature (e.g., the Damascus Document), which were found in fact to be quite dissimilar to Paul’s letters. This comparative project was based on a polythetic approach to classification, whereby each text was defined not by essential terms such as genre or ethnicity but by a wide set of non-essential literary criteria. These criteria were inductively derived, formal, second-order characteristics that I hand-coded into spreadsheets and visualized graphically. In this way, providing second-order criteria that I inductively derived and empirically applied, I demonstrated that certain texts should be understood as closely related, based on methods and findings that were transparent, quantifiable, and therefore able to be visualized clearly. I further argued that this type of approach and conclusion was preferable to previous, existing approaches based on more essentialized understandings of literature.2 In other words, I provided second-order theorization, application, and data-based conclusions from the digital humanities around biblical literature in its literary, ancient Mediterranean context.
{"title":"Visualizing Data in the Quantitative Comparison of Ancient Texts: a Study of Paul, Epictetus, and Philodemus","authors":"Paul Robertson","doi":"10.1163/9789004399297_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004399297_010","url":null,"abstract":"In a recent monograph,1 I argued for formal overlaps between several roughly contemporary texts in what I termed a shared “socio-literary sphere”: the letters of the Christian apostle Paul, the Stoic popular philosopher Epictetus’ Discourses, and the Epicurean scholar Philodemus’ On Death and On Piety. Further, certain other writings – Seneca’s Natural Questions, Letter to the Hebrews, and 4 Maccabees – were likewise found to have formal similarities close to Paul’s letters. These findings stood in contrast to several other types of texts often likened to Paul’s letters, such as formal Greco-Roman orations (e.g., Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaic Orations, Dio Chrysostom’s orations) and sectarian Jewish literature (e.g., the Damascus Document), which were found in fact to be quite dissimilar to Paul’s letters. This comparative project was based on a polythetic approach to classification, whereby each text was defined not by essential terms such as genre or ethnicity but by a wide set of non-essential literary criteria. These criteria were inductively derived, formal, second-order characteristics that I hand-coded into spreadsheets and visualized graphically. In this way, providing second-order criteria that I inductively derived and empirically applied, I demonstrated that certain texts should be understood as closely related, based on methods and findings that were transparent, quantifiable, and therefore able to be visualized clearly. I further argued that this type of approach and conclusion was preferable to previous, existing approaches based on more essentialized understandings of literature.2 In other words, I provided second-order theorization, application, and data-based conclusions from the digital humanities around biblical literature in its literary, ancient Mediterranean context.","PeriodicalId":355737,"journal":{"name":"Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128672613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：