Prolegomena to the Edition
The Digital Critical Edition of the Coptic Old Testament ultimately consists of 40 editions of individual Biblical Books.
Each edition of a Biblical Book consists of two main parts:
Digital Diplomatic Editions of all the relevant manuscript witnesses
Digital Critical Edition of the text of the relevant Biblical Book
Prolegomena to the Digital Diplomatic Manuscript Editions
Our Critical Edition is born digital, i.e., all its assets and elements were created and managed within a Virtual Research Environment starting from digital images of manuscript pages.
Format
The first major task was to virtually reconstruct the ancient codices from the fragments preserved in libraries all over the world. This task resulted in digital editions of these codices in which a digital reproduction of each extant page is accompanied by its diplomatic transcription. The latter contains all visible traces of letters and is published line by line online in HTML format. The diplomatic transcription itself was created in an online text editor that produces TEI-XML.
Text Presentation
As we use the digital transcriptions to create critical apparatuses to Biblical books, we transcribed our codices utilizing semantic token segmentation according to modern standards rather than mimicking the spacing of the letters and the interpunction and morphological dividers as found in our manuscripts. We attempted to reproduce superlinear strokes, trema and morphological dividers on a functional rather than a graphical level. Illegible and partly legible letters were encoded following the Leiden convention.
Corrections and other Encodings
Corrections were recorded and obvious errors were flagged in the transcription. The former are marked by blue letters or tokens in the digital manuscript editions. Hovering over blue elements in the text will display tooltips that give our analysis of the transcriptional situation at that particular place. The latter are flagged by a superscript *n* after the erroneous form. Hovering over the *n* will show the note.
More encodings, such as, e.g., rubrications, liturgical notations, etc., especially in lectionary manuscripts, are also indicated by different font or background colors. Hovering over such portions in the transcription will show a tooltip that explains the color coding.
Quality Control
Quality control was exerted by having a second pair of eyes revise the initial transcription of the main editor who could then in turn review all the suggested changes to the initial transcription. Eventually a final transcription was produced that both researchers involved were content with. Those final transcriptions became the official published diplomatic transcriptions.
Together with the images and the transcriptions our digital diplomatic manuscript editions contain a number of metadata for each individual manuscript that is presented in the Catalogue view.
Prolegomena to the
Digital Critical Edition of the Sahidic Bible
Our Critical Edition is a Fully Integrated Digital Edition (f.i.d.e.) which means that it allows the user to trace every single reading of every manuscript witness from the critical apparatus via the digital editions of the codices all the way back to the manuscript image from which the transcriptions of the codices were produced. This makes our work fully transparent and gives our users all the information necessary to explore alternative interpretations of the data.
The first major task was to virtually reconstruct the ancient codices from the fragments preserved in libraries all over the world. This task resulted in digital editions of these codices in which a digital reproduction of each extant page is accompanied by its diplomatic transcription. The latter contains all visible traces of letters and is published line by line online in HTML format.
The Apparatus Criticus
The second task was to create a digital apparatus criticus. This is achieved by means of a collation tool that takes all the extant digital transcriptions of an individual verse, e.g., Isa 53:1, and compares them against a base text. With the help of editorial interfaces we were able to manipulate the variation exhibited by the tradition according to our editorial principles so that the apparatus conveys all the evidence in an organized and transparent way.
Each case of textual variation was assessed concerning its orthographic, grammatic, and semantic connotations and encoded accordingly.
According to our taxonomy textual variation can fall into four different categories: “Noise”, “Mistakes”, “Orthographics", “Proper Variants”.
On the most basic level differences in recorded diacritics (trema) and superlines and differences in ⲛ-/ⲉⲛ- are considered “Noise” and were regularized/standardized. In each case the suffix -r is added to the manuscript siglum in the apparatus and a tooltip will show the transcribed text when placing the cursor over a siglum with this suffix.
Readings that are obvious errors, involving omitted or added letters or syllables, were added to the standard reading and flagged with an “f” (for “Fehler”) against the corresponding manuscript siglum. Again, a tooltip will show the transcribed text.
Note: Different, even odd, spellings in place and proper names were kept as main readings.
Readings that are considered legitimate alternative forms, such as, e.g., ⲧ︥ⲛ︤- ⲧⲉⲧ︥ⲛ︤-, ⲙ︥ⲛ︤ -> ⲛ︥ⲙ︤ were not regularized/standardized but are presented as “Orthographic” alternatives with an -o against the variant designator, e.g., ao.
“Proper Variants” are differences that bring with them a change of lemma, expression and/or meaning, or a transposition of words. Sometimes, such differences include odd spellings or peculiarities that we consider to be “mistakes”. Yet, the difference is such that the “correct” spelling would result in a proper variant. In such cases, the reading is left as it is, but the qualifier ‘f’ for ‘Fehler’ is added to the variant designator, e.g., bf.
Note: If one places the cursor in the digital edition over a manuscript siglum with an “r” or a “V”, a little floating window appears with the reading of the manuscript. If one clicks on any manuscript siglum in the digital apparatus the transcription of that entire manuscript page is displayed. One more click will make the corresponding image of the manuscript page appear in order to make our textual decisions transparent.
The main readings (a, b, c, etc.) presented in the apparatus are what we consider legitimate variants that constitute in their entirety what is left of the textual transmission of the Sahidic Bible.
The Edition Text
The critically reconstructed edition text represents our best approximation to the Sahidic text that was translated from the Greek. As such it is an eclectic text. It follows modern conventions when it comes to delineate morphological units and employs standard Sahidic “handbook style” conventions as far as the use of trema and superlines are concerned.
The Greek Text (LXX)
We attempt to reconstruct the underlying Greek text by means of comparing our edition text and its variants with the text tradition of the LXX as available to us in the Göttingen LXX editions (Gö). In cases where the Sahidic text can be aligned with the main Greek text of Gö we print the siglum LXX with it and display the Greek in the hover over tooltip. In cases where the Sahidic text likely goes back to a Greek Vorlage that is found in the Gö apparatus we reference this element with the siglum LXXap and give its Greek text in the hover over tooltip. In rare cases where we feel compelled to suggest a Greek original that is not available in the extant Greek LXX tradition we utilize the siglum LXXsa (= Greek Vorlage of the Sahidic) and give the hypothesized Greek reading in the hover over.