Introduction

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Introduction

The Purpose of This Project

The aim of this project was to learn about making electronic editions of texts generally and XML specifically, as well as to gain more experience working with manuscripts. To that end, I have created an online transcription of the Gospel of John from two manuscripts, designated by New Testament scholars GA 713 and GA 2786.

I transcribed John in GA 713 during the Autumn 2009 term for the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP) as as part of a course on Greek paleography. GA 713 was chosen for two reasons. First, the IGNTP needed a new transcription of it for their edition of John. Second, it provided an ideal scenario for working with a manuscript. High-quality digital images of it are readily available online, allowing to me gain experience working from a good surrogate. Moreover, the manuscript itself is part of the Mingana Collection at the University of Birmingham, so it was available to me to work from directly, providing valuable experience in working with a manuscript in person. As for the manuscript, it is well preserved and written in a clear, confident hand, making it a good starting point for a beginner, as may be seen in the following image, which shows the last page of John.

For the current project, I have transcribed a second manuscript, GA 2786, which was chosen, again, for two reasons. First, like GA 713, the IGNTP needed a transcription of it. Second, unlike GA 713, it presents a number of challenges to the transcriber. Its current whereabouts are unknown, and the only surrogate available is black and white microfilm (or the digital images made from it). Moreover, the text is much more difficult to read, being highly abbreviated and in places damaged and illegible. These factors made for a good contrast to working with GA 713. Below is the last page of John in GA 2786.

The Transcription Process

Each manuscript was initially transcribed according to the guidelines of the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP).¹ Thus the transcription was done in Unicode using the encoding for the program Collate, used by the IGNTP for manuscript comparison. Below is the text from the above page of GA 713 transcribed using Collate encoding.²

|F 351v|
|L|αυτου <V 25> εστι δε και αλλα πολλα α εποι=
|L|ησεν ο ις̅ ενωπιον των μαθητων αυτου
|L|ατινα εαν γραφηται καθ εν
|L|ουδε αυτον οιμαι τον
|L|κοσμον χωρη=
|L|σαι τα
|L|γραφο=
|L|με=
|L|να βιβλια
|L|α=
|L|μην
|L|<K 22> <V 0> ευαγγελιον κατα ιωαννην

The IGNTP transcription focuses on the main text of the manuscript, since its aim is to construct an exhaustive critical apparatus. Alternate readings and corrections are included, but lectionary markings, comments, headings, and other paratextual features are ignored. Moreover, basic textual layout is represented with page breaks and line breaks.

The encoding seen here, however, is for use with the Collate software only, and is in no way designed for displaying texts via the web. Thus for the online version, I re-encoded the transcriptions by hand using XML (Extensible Markup Language) according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a consortium which develops "a general-purpose encoding scheme which makes it possible to encode different views of text, possibly intended for different applications, serving the majority of scholarly purposes of text studies in the humanities."³ As this quote makes clear, the TEI guidelines are highly flexible, and so the transcriber must make choices about what to record based on the transcription's intended purpose. For example, someone interested in grammar might morphologically tag each word. Someone interested in Greek paleography and the rate at which Greek majuscule letters were reintroduced alongside minuscule script might tag each letter as being majuscule or minuscule. The possibilities are almost limitless. Such exercises, worthy though they may be, are beyond the time limit for a term project when two transcriptions of John are involved. I decided therefore to record only features stipulated in the IGNTP guidelines. Below is the same page from GA 713 as above, but encoded using XML.

<pb n="351v" />
<lb n="1" />αυτου </ab><ab xml:id="B4-K21-V25"> εστι δε και αλλα πολλα α εποι=
<lb n="2" />ησεν ο ις̅ ενωπιον των μαθητων αυτου
<lb n="3" />ατινα εαν γραφηται καθ εν
<lb n="4" />ουδε αυτον οιμαι τον
<lb n="5" />κοσμον χωρη=
<lb n="6" />σαι τα
<lb n="7" />γραφο=
<lb n="8" />με=
<lb n="9" />να βιβλια
<lb n="10" />α=
<lb n="11" />μην </ab></div>
<lb n="12" /><div type="chapter" xml:id="B4-K22"><ab xml:id="B4-K22-V0"> ευαγγελιον κατα ιωαννην</ab></div>

Currently, XML is not directly viewable in most internet browsers, but must be transformed into HTML (HyperText Markup Language). I had two main options for this transformation, namely, SDPublisher and XSLT. SDPublisher has the advantage of seeing "XML as a stream as well as a hierarchy," thus making the program "highly suited to processing documents characterized by multiple overlapping hierarchies,"⁴ such as New Testament manuscripts, which are divided by pages and lines on the one hand, and by books, chapters, and verses on the other. However, SDPublisher is primarily designed to handle large amounts of data and numerous versions of a text; since the current project involves only two manuscripts, I chose XSLT.

XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) is a language used for transforming XML into HTML (or other other things, such as another form of XML) using a stylesheet. "The term stylesheet reflects the fact that one of the important roles of XSLT is to add styling information to an XML source document, by transforming it into a document consisting of XSL formatted objects . . . or into another presentation-oriented format such as HTML, XHTML, or SVG."⁶ Thus the stylesheet specifies what each XML element in the source document should be transformed into. For example, line breaks are indicated in my XML source documents with the tag <lb n="x" /> (x being replaced with consecutive line numbers for each page). In HTML, line breaks are indicated by the tag </br>. Thus in the XSL stylesheet one finds the following entry.

<xsl:template match="lb">
</br>
</xsl:template>

This specifies that every XML tag <lb n="x" /> should be transformed into the HTML tag </br>. Thus every XML element is transformed into HTML and made viewable in an internet browser.

Encoding the text and making the XSL stylesheet required diligence, caution, and patience. At varies times, typos made visible a tag which should be invisible, changed the color of all the text from black to red, and made all the text disappear.

Reading the Transcriptions

In compliance with the IGNTP transcription guidelines, the following conventions are used.

Book, chapter, and verse number are indiacted by the entry B4-K1-V1, where B is the book number (4 is John, the fourth book of the New Testament), K is the chapter number, and V is the verse number.
Αn uncertain letter is indicated by a Combining Dot Below (Unicode character 0323). For example, εσε̣ι̣.
Nomina sacra (abbreviated sacred names) are recorded as written in the manuscript (i.e., they are neither expanded nor regularized) and are transcribed with a Combining Overline (Unicode character 0305) above the second letter. For example, ις̅.
Other abbreviations are expanded without notice when letters are represented by a symbol. For example, an overline which represents a final nu is transcribed as ν. However, when missing letters are not represented by a symbol, the letters are placed in parentheses. For example, του ιωανν would be transcribed as του ιωανν(ου).⁵
A word broken across two or more lines is indicated by an equals sign. For example, εφανε=
ρωθη.

For this project, I have also used the following methods for displaying certain information about the text.

Notes on the text are displayed in purple. For example, Verse omitted.
Where corrections were made to the text, the original reading is given first in blue, the corrected reading is second in green. For example, πε ειπε. Where the original and corrected readings are the same, the original text has been traced over by a corrector.
Where the original text is illegible and has been supplied, the supplied letters are brown. For example, λεγει.

The Manuscripts

GA 2786

GA 2786 is a parchment manuscript containing the Gospels in Greek. Dated to the fourteenth century, it measures 21 cm high and 16 cm wide. It contains 226 leaves, with each page featuring between 20 and 23 lines in one column. Unfortunately, the manuscript's present whereabouts are unknown, though a former shelf number was Thira, Prophetu Iliu, 28.⁸ The transcription was made from digitized black and white microfilm provided by the IGNTP.

GA 713

GA 713 is a twelfth-century Gospels manuscript written in Greek. It consists of 363 parchment leaves, measures 19.4 cm high and 15.7 cm wide, and has 16 or 17 lines in a single column on each page. It is located at the University of Birmingham (Birmingham, UK) with the shelf number Cod. Alg. Peckover Gr. 7. There are two large lacunae at 10.28-11.13 and 11.30-41 where apparently some pages were removed from the manuscript. The folio numbering, however, is consecutive over these gaps. This manuscript has the distinction of containing the oldest known portrait of a left-handed evangelist (see folio 282v).⁷ To make the transcription, I worked from high quality digital images available in the University of Birmingham Virtual Manuscript Room (http:// vmr.bham.ac.uk/Collections/Mingana/Peckover_Greek_7/table/) and from the manuscript itself.

Notes

¹ IGNTP-INTF, "Guidelines for the Transcription of Manuscripts Using Unicode," (2010). The guidelines may be downloaded from the IGNTP website at http://www.igntp.org/. For a recent discussion of transcribing and collating New Testament manuscripts see D. C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 95-107.
² For more on Collate, see http://www.itsee.bham.ac.uk/software/collate/.
³ Lou Burnard and Syd Bauman, eds., TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (Oxford, Providence, Charlotte, Nancy: The TEI Consortium, 2009), xxvi. In addition to the print edition, the guidelines may be read online or downloaded at http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/.
⁴ See the website of Scholarly Digital Editions (the developers of SDPublisher) at http://www.sd-editions.com/index.html. The documentation for SDPublisher may be viewed or downloaded at http://www.sd-editions.com/SDPublisher/.
⁵ For a thorough treatment of Greek abbreviations, see Al. N. Oikonomides, ed., Abbreviations in Greek (Chicago: Ares, 1974).
⁶ Michael Kay, ed., "XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0," (World Wide Web Consortium, 2007), online: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/.
⁷ Martin Faßnacht and Ulrich Schmid, "NT.VMR Handschriftenliste," version 1.0 (INTF, 2009), online: http://intf. uni-muenster.de/vmr/NTVMR/ListeHandschriften.php; Lucy-Anne Hunt, The Mingana and Related Collections: a Survey of Illustrated Arabic, Greek, Eastern Christian, Persian and Turkish Manuscripts in the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham (Birmingham: The Mingana Collection of the Edward Cadbury Charitable Trust), 42-51.
⁸ Faßnacht and Schmid, "NT.VMR Handschriftenliste."