Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony

Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament

Digital Edition of the Coptic OT

Project Description

The Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament is a long-term project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. It fills a huge lacuna, as no modern edition of the Bible in Coptic exists. The project aims to provide a complete documentation of the manuscript evidence, digital editions of all OT manuscripts, critical editions of all OT books, corpus-linguistic analyses and translations into English, German and Arabic.

Digital Workflow

Digital workflow of the Coptic Old Testament project Interactive workflow from cataloguing manuscripts to digital and print edition. Cataloguingof Manuscripts ImageProcessing IndexingBiblical Content Transcribing Collationof Witnesses Standardisationof Variants CriticalApparatus Digital / PrintEdition
Cataloguing of Manuscripts

Manuscripts are identified, described and connected with stable catalogue metadata.

With Cooperation Partners

Selected Publications

Project-related publications by team members

Forthcoming

Atanassova, Diliana and Frank Feder (forthcoming). ‘Die Bedeutung der biblischen Lesungen und der sahidischen Lektionare für die Edition der sahidischen Bibelübersetzung – Eine Zwischenbilanz’, in: Felix Albrecht, Frank Feder, Martin Karrer (eds), Liturgische Traditionen: Ihr Nutzen und Stellenwert für die biblische Editionswissenschaft / Liturgical Traditions: Their Use and Value for Critical Editions of the Bible, Antike Schriftauslegung / Ancient Scriptural Interpretation.

Atanassova, Diliana and Lina Elhage-Mensching (forthcoming). ‘The Anaphora of Saint James in a Sahidic Euchologion of the late 10th century’, in: Stefanos Alexopoulos, Harald Buchinger, Daniel Galadza (eds), The Liturgy of St James. Origines – Contexts – Reception in East and West, Münster.

Lina Elhage-Mensching (forthcoming). ‘“A great rock that twenty men could not push away”: an interesting marginal note in an Arabic Holy Week lectionary of the 14th century’, in: Journal of Coptic Studies 28 (2026).

Lina Elhage-Mensching (forthcoming). ‘The Owner Family of a Sahidic–Arabic Holy Week lectionary: Arabic and Bohairic marginalia in the 14th century codex sa 16L’, in: Proceedings of the 12th International Congress for Coptic Studies, Brussels, 11–16 July 2022.

Suciu, Alin (forthcoming). ‘Islamic Influence in Coptic Book Culture: A Bohairic Codex of the Gospel of John from the White Monastery’, in: Intellectual History of the Islamicate World.