New Opportunity among Old Manuscripts

Forgive this intrusion into my own blog for a little announcement:

The Center for New Testament Textual Study (CNTTS) at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary has offered me a fellowship to work with them in the coming year. The CNTTS is a research center devoted to the study of the New Testament text in the Greek manuscripts.

My primary activity with the center this fall will be “collating” hand-written Greek manuscripts. Collating is the process of comparing the manuscripts letter by letter, word by word, with a base text. When there is a difference between the manuscript and the base text, I will note that on my copy of the base text. This past summer I worked on a ninth or tenth century manuscript of Matthew and Mark; currently working on Luke now.

Additionally, I will be working on a project sponsored by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung to “index” some of these manuscripts. On the top of each page of your Bible, there is a reference alerting you to what is included on the page below. As you can imagine, handwritten manuscripts did not come with this aid. Also, these manuscripts were written before the versification we use today was added. My job will to be to find the first and last verse on each page so scholars and students in the future can find their way around these ancient Bibles. If you are really interested, you can find some of my work at:

http://intf.uni-muenster.de/vmr/NTVMR/viewer/viewerWolkenkratzer01.php

Then scroll down to manuscript 1014.  Don’t do this unless you are really nerdy!

Along the way, I will share some of what I discover with you.

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