Project description
Understating the New Testament in its multilingual context
We know very little about the bilingual New Testament manuscripts, even though translations of the Greek texts were made remarkably early. These play a major role in understanding how the biblical text was spread and understood in different regions and cultures. The New Testament text has been examined primarily from a monolingual perspective, overlooking the fact that textual transmission also occurs across languages. The EU-funded BICROSS project will use a multilingual cross-language approach to overcome this monolingual limitation. By developing digital tools to manage the broad and linguistically complex manuscript data, it will study the whole New Testament bilingual tradition more extensively than ever before. The project intends to shed light on the transmission of the New Testament text.
Objective
BICROSS is an interdisciplinary project linking Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Gothic, Armenian and Arabic philology, New Testament textual criticism, manuscript studies, ancient history and digital humanities.
Little is known about the bilingual New Testament manuscripts, although translations occur remarkably early. Their physical and textual characteristics, relations, tendencies and impact remain understudied despite their centrality to the understanding of the transmission of the New Testament and its reception in different cultures. For centuries New Testament manuscripts have been studied from a monolingual perspective which has obscured the fact that the textual transmission did not take place solely within the boundaries of a single-language tradition but also across languages. Uncovering and establishing the mutual exchange and cross-language interaction require a new multilingual approach to the New Testament tradition.
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.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
3000 Leuven
Belgium