An Apparatus of the Greek Manuscripts for the Editio Critica Maior

Introduction

The online edition of the Gospel of John may be regarded as one resource, or as a linked series. It contains transcriptions, editions, metadata, external links (e.g. to images) and analytical tools. The last named are currently only available to the editorial team, but will in the future be available for users to see the basis for decisions and to explore the data. It is designed as a companion to the printed volume in the Editio Critica Maior, each serving the user in the way that the format does better. For the online materials, this means in particular giving the user access to the materials on which the print edition is based.

The present electronic apparatus represents the first stage of the creation of the Editio Critica Maior itself. Earlier outputs, reflecting steps in the process of gathering material towards this editorial task, have included a printed edition of the Papyri and a printed and electronic edition of the Majuscules:

• The New Testament In Greek IV. The Gospel According To St. John, Edited By The American And British Committees Of The International Greek New Testament Project, Volume One, The Papyri, Edited by W.J. Elliott and D.C. Parker (New Testament Tools and Studies 20), Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 1995 (ISBN 978 90 04 09940 1)
• The New Testament In Greek IV. The Gospel According To St. John, Edited By The American And British Committees Of The International Greek New Testament Project, Volume Two, The Majuscules, Edited by U.B. Schmid with W.J. Elliott and D.C. Parker (New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents 37), Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2007 (ISBN 978 90 04 16313 3)
• The IGNTP Electronic Edition of the Majuscule Manuscripts of John (first edition 2007; second edition 2013)

Additional resources have been released through the website www.iohannes.com on their completion. These include transcriptions and apparatus for the Latin and Coptic versions, an edition of Family 1, and the transcriptions of the Greek minuscule manuscripts and lectionaries made by the AHRC-funded International Greek New Testament Project: A Critical Edition of the Gospel of John between 2010 and 2015.

This apparatus is the first presentation of the complete evidence for the Gospel of John in the manuscripts selected for inclusion in the Editio Critica Maior. A total of 236 manuscripts (including 22 supplements) are included, making this this most extensive apparatus ever produced of the entire gospel. The principles for the selection of manuscripts, using the Text und Textwert analysis of Chapters 1–10 produced by the INTF and the full collation of Chapter 18 made by the Principio Project, are described in the following article:

• David C. Parker, Klaus Wachtel, Bruce Morrill and Ulrich Schmid, "The Selection of Greek Manuscripts to be Included in the International Greek New Testament Project’s Edition of John in the Editio Critica Maior" in Daniel M. Gurtner, Juan Hernández Jr. and Paul Foster, ed., Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity. Essays in Honor of Michael W. Holmes On the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. (New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents 50). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015 (pp. 287–328). doi:10.1163/9789004300026_015.

Descriptions of how the transcriptions were made have already been provided in the introductory material on the website www.iohannes.com and the printed volumes. Further information on the manuscripts included is given on the Instructions page, in addition to a page with the full List of Witnesses.

The apparatus was generated first by the automatic collation of each verse in each witness using the CollateX tool. The variants were arranged underneath a base text consisting of the editorial text of the 28th edition of Nestle-Aland (with the addition of verses only present in the apparatus). This data then went through a series of stages of editing using the online Collation Editor developed by Dr Catherine Smith of ITSEE as part of the joint AHRC-DFG project, A Workspace for Collaborative Editing. The first stage was Regularisation, the standardisation of orthography, abbreviations and other 'noise' present in the transcriptions but not required for the edition. This exercise also acted as a further check on the accuracy of the transcriptions, with deviations from norms or apparent nonsense readings being verified. Text tagged as illegible or reconstructed could also be revisited in the light of the broader tradition. The procedure established for the Editio Critica Maior was adopted, namely that if a form corresponded to Greek accidence and could be construed acceptably in context, it was retained in the apparatus. The second stage was Set Variants, during which the editor changed the constitution and length of the initial presentation of variation units to conform to standard philological practice. For example, articles and nouns were joined as single units of variation, while readings which had been attributed to the wrong lemma in the base text were moved to the correct position. Where variations involved phrases with different grammatical structures, overlapping variation units were created in order to present the evidence in as clear a way as possible to users. The final stage was Order Variants, when the readings within each unit were rearranged to accord with the principles of the Editio Critica Maior. Each verse was then checked for a final time and approved, until all 881 verses of the gospel (including the incipit and explicit) had been completed. The apparatus was then exported chapter by chapter as an XML file in order to make it available online. In addition to the standard format of a negative apparatus (where witnesses which agree with the base text are not cited), a positive apparatus was also produced to assist with checking each manuscript at each point. This may be accessed at iohannes.com/ECMgreek/positive/index.html; it uses the same conventions as the negative apparatus.

The next stage in the production of the Editio Critica Maior is the establishment of the Initial Text (Ausgangstext). The software developed for the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) permits editors to propose a history of the development of the text at each point of variation. The iterative nature of this process will assist with the determination of the earliest readings in units where this cannot be established securely on traditional grounds. The creation of a complete apparatus with variant units constructed and grouped according to philological principles is a necessary prerequisite for the application of the CBGM: the presence of types of variation which are genealogically insignificant or the failure properly to cite witnesses for overlapping variants would adversely affect the calculations of the relationships of texts.

The final apparatus in the Editio Critica Maior will have undergone further development from the initial version released here. Places where the reconstruction of the Initial Text differs from the editorial text of Nestle-Aland 28 will mean changes in the configuration of lemma and variants. Further data will be added from citations of the Gospel of John in Greek writers and evidence from early translations. Nevertheless, the structure of the apparatus and the presentation of the Greek manuscript evidence is expected to remain largely unchanged. To that end, we make this apparatus available to users as part of the online edition of the Gospel according to John which reflects the ongoing process of the creation of the Editio Critica Maior and also constitutes a significant new resource in its own right.