Tue Nov 5 01:27:52 1996

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Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 07:24:37 +0100
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From: jgvalentin@arcadis.be (Jean Valentin)
Subject: Re: versions : what do you expect?
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Hello all greek tc scholars.

I have a very concrete question for you all. Very concrete because the
answer you will give to it may affect the way I'll be working on a
project...

Here it is: What do you expect of a critical edition of a version? Put in
other words, in order for the edition of a version to be
useful/interesting/reliable for your work, what would you like to find in
it?

Could you for example discuss several of those points. Let's take as a
hypothese the edition of an arabic version that hasn't been published yet
(15/20 manuscripts + a handful of lectionaries in Sinai only, I still have
to trace other mss in other libraries). The first mss appear in the XIth
century and reflect a mixture of cesarean text and syriac variants. Then
with the time it's submitted to an increasing influence of the byzantine
greek text and of the other, later arabic version called the "alexandrian
vulgate". As I would like to give NT scholarship access to this text, I
need some feedback about those and other points that you might wish to
discuss:

* Do you need a translation of the text (and, probably of the variants or
some of them) to accompany it? If yes, in what language? Latin, French,
English?
* How can our textual apparatus be helpful to you?
* As it is a very first publication, and there's been few (in fact: not
any) stemmatic work done, do you feel it's more prudent to give the text of
a manuscript with the variants of the others in the apparatus, or try an
eclectic text?
* Do you feel a second apparatus with comparison with greek mss and other
known versions is useful - or do you prefer to do it yourselves?
* Should I directly incorporate the lectionary mss, or publish them separately?
* What would you like to find in the introduction?
* If recensions can be separated, do you prefer seeing them in columns like
in Shanidze's georgian editions, or with the variants of the later
recension(s) simply in the apparatus like in Lake and Briere's ? What if
three or four recensions happen to be found instead of two?
* Is it a good thing if there are longuer annotations to try to show the
origin of a variant?
etc, etc... Just tell me everything you think about, and if you disagree
with each other, it's also interesting for me to know why!

If you use several versions in your work, please tell me what helps you in
those publications, and what may confuse you or make them less accessible
to you. In your use of the versions, what are the good and bad features of
the publications you use? What makes that the edition of a latin, syriac,
armenian, etc... or arabic version ?

Also, it's a known fact that some versions need to be re-edited. What would
you expect from an edition of the syriac peshitto, for example, as I'm in
contact with people who are considering it?

Thanx for your suggestions!


shlomo w-shayno!

Jean Valentin - Brussels - Belgium

Ce qui est trop simple est faux, ce qui est trop complique est inutilisable.
What's too simple is wrong, what's too complicated is unusable.

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