Fri Aug 23 00:16:49 1996

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Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 12:12:14 +0800 (WST)
From: Timothy John Finney 
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Subject: Transcribing mss, Colwell's 70% etc.
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D.C. Parker, who knows what he is talking about, wrote:

> The move towards electronic formats is important.  But I must add a
> word of caution.  Little of the MS evidence (especially the papyri and
> fragmentary majuscules) is unambiguous.  You can't just sit down
> and collate it.  There are endless details of reading and interpretation.
> It takes a lot of experience, and even then some things have to be
> left to the judgement of a full-time papyrologist.

As an advocate of the digitisation and dissemination of New Testament text
critical resources, one might expect me to reply to Dr Parker's statement. I 
will try not to do any ax(e) grinding or hobby horse riding.

I have come to the conclusion that all manuscript evidence has an
associated degree of uncertainty. Even a tau which you are absolutely
certain is a tau has some small probability of being a gamma or something
else. Levels of certainty range from almost 0 to almost 100 percent, but
that should not stop us from trying to transcribe these important
resources to make them widely available at last. The TEI transcription
system provides for the attachment of a certainty level to any word,
letter, jot or tittle, as well as the transcription of just about any
writing phenomenon imaginable (that was one of the developers' aims). Web
based electronic transcriptions have the potential to allow peer review
including rectification of errors and discussion of points of dissension
to happen in a far more convenient way than in the print based system. 

Comparisons with the Dead Sea Scrolls have been made in the last 
few days. One can buy microfilms of them now. But not so the New Testament 
mss. I know that some are available, and I also know that some are 
completely inaccessible. I know where they are but for one reason or 
another I am not allowed to see them. Difficulties of access are aggravated 
for those living in out of the way places like Australia.

Dr Parker is right when he says that some points of transcription call 
for a lifetime of learning to resolve, but I urge interested people to 
get their hands dirty with transcription, nevertheless, and to give their 
transcriptions to ENTMP at the end.

The fact that Erasmus did not do a very good editorial job on his first
edition of the Greek New Testament is widely known. Yet its publication
using the then new printing technology shook the world's foundations. The
same kind of opportunity to make currently obscure and inaccessible
documents more widely available lies before us now. I do not advocate a
poor editorial job. However, the presence of a relatively few points of
ambiguity and even errors (which could be readily fixed once detected) in
electronic transcriptions would not prevent an electronic New Testament
mss corpora from being enormously useful to the field. 

With respect to Colwell's 70 percent rule, a possible application of
electronic transcriptions is their use to look for a more objective way to
measure association among NT mss with a view to mapping the transmission
history of the NT. I am now using an electronic collation and a numerical
taxonomy program to do this. It is possible to define a boundary using 
the much more intellectually satisfactory notion of a 95 percent 
confidence level, as is conventionally used in many analytical studies.

I am aiming to finish this study by the end of the year and will let 
you know what happens.

One last totally unrelated point. I read in a recent Offline article by
James Adair that it is now possible to use a piece of material the size of
a seed to obtain a carbon date. Perhaps it is time to snip a piece off P64
and send it to the physicists! You could take lots of photos of the little
piece (without writing of course) for posterity. And why stop at P64? 

Best regards,

Tim Finney
Associate Director, ENTMP
finney@central.murdoch.edu.au
Baptist Theological College
and Murdoch University
Perth, W. Australia

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