The Significance of Bilingual Manuscripts for Detecting Cross-Language Interaction in the New Testament Tradition

Project Information

BICROSS

Grant agreement ID: 101043730

DOI

10.3030/101043730

EC signature date 15 April 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 000 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 000 000,00

Coordinated by

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BICROSS (The Significance of Bilingual Manuscripts for Detecting Cross-Language Interaction in the New Testament Tradition)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

BICROSS is an interdisciplinary project linking Greek, Latin, Coptic, Gothic, and Arabic philology, New Testament textual criticism, manuscript studies, ancient history and digital humanities. Biblical manuscripts written in two languages span several centuries of manuscript production, extending back as far as some of the earliest substantial surviving manuscripts of the New Testament in any language. For centuries New Testament manuscripts have been studied from a monolingual perspective which has obscured the fact that textual transmission did not take place solely within the boundaries of a single-language tradition but also across languages. Bilinguals are an ideal test-case for the study of interaction between the various New Testament languages because they provide a verifiable point of contact between the individual language traditions and mirror the overall New Testament tradition in microcosm. Uncovering and establishing the mutual exchange and cross-language interaction require a new multilingual approach to the New Testament tradition.
The BICROSS project has three main objectives: (1) The assessment of bilingual manuscripts as artefacts to detect physical characteristics and typical patterns of New Testament bilingual manuscripts across languages, times and places. The goal is to provide a catalogue of bilingual New Testament manuscripts which includes codocological characteristics of bilinguals. (2) The assessment of bilingual manuscripts as texts by means of a specifically developed platform of digital tools, called the Bilingual Navigator, in order to detect and evaluate cross-language interaction and mutual influence. Given the complexity of such a textual analysis including a variety of languages with individual linguistic features from different language families and the contaminated textual transmission on each language-side of bilinguals, the application of digital tools is expected to facilitate processing and presenting the material in a comparable way. (3) The classification of bilingual manuscripts and their readings in order to provide new explanatory models for the relationship of manuscripts in the overall complex New Testament tradition and to open new horizons for research on multilingual textual traditions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first two years of the project, members of the team have been working toward the catalogue of bilingual manuscripts (objective 1) and digital tools for text alignment (objective 2). The project was successful in finding individual examples of cross-language influence in Greek-Latin bilinguals from the Latin to the Greek, thus against the usually expected flow of influence. Such findings demonstrate that the BICROSS project is on the right track of searching for multilingual cross-language influences and taking bilinguals as a test case.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

BICROSS breaks through the current monolingual limitation by shifting the discipline’s focus to the overall New Testament tradition. Accepting the possibility that each variant reading could have had its potential source in a reading from a different language tradition and may likewise have caused a dependent reading in any of the other language traditions breaks new ground. The project’s bold and pioneering cross-language approach brings a fresh perspective to the discipline’s current search for new paradigmatic concepts to explain the relations of New Testament readings and manuscripts at large. BICROSS develops specific digital tools to process the vast and linguistically complicated manuscript data in order to pioneer an examination of the entire New Testament bilingual tradition on a larger scale than has ever been possible. The results will provide new insights into the formation and transmission of New Testament texts and will influence the understanding of historical, cultural and linguistic exchange in the East and West.
The BICROSS project is situated at a crucial moment in the history of textual criticism. Traditional concepts to explain the great variety of variant readings have outlived their usefulness, even more as they have been based on a small selection of data. The discipline is in need of alternative concepts to address the challenging multilingual and heavily contaminated manuscript tradition. Monolingual limitations in the study of multilingual traditions such as the Bible were valuable while tools and resources were limited to analogue forms. The possibilities in a digital age, however, call for a more appropriate simultaneous study of the material. With its specific focus on cross-language biblical texts the project will strongly contribute to the current paradigmatic shift and promote its progress. By adding the consideration of possible multilingual horizontal textual interaction aims to inform the understanding of the textual history of the New Testament with the potential to provide a new paradigmatic shift in the study of New Testament manuscripts from a monolingual focus to a full multilingual perspective.