TEXTEVOLVE have moved beyond the state of the art by increasing the number of available primary sources. It will take time before the wider significance of these textual witnesses can be fully appreciated. Nonetheless, TEXTEVOLVE's analysis gives us an indication of their likely impact.
Our results show that interest in the Targums, especially in medieval Europe, was more than merely antiquarian. Targums were not just robotically copied as ossified artefacts. Rather, they remained a 'living' tradition. Copyists continued to intervene creatively in the text, rewording, modifying, and expanding it.
This result disrupts traditional approaches to ancient texts. TEXTEVOLVE has shown the need for an approach that values the whole textual tradition, rather than prioritising its start (initial composition) or end (artefact). Drawing on insights from cognate disciplines, it has articulated its approach to textual traditions in terms of 'evolution' (rather than 'deterioration', for example).
TEXTEVOLVE has shown that such an approach is necessary because textual variants can tell us about the function of texts in the communities that transmitted them. Not all changes are mere accidents; some reflect new theological and exegetical engagements with the text.
Analysis of the 'family resemblances' between manuscripts also yielded a clearer picture of how Targum was transmitted. It gave us a better idea of Jewish scribal networks and the processes by which new copies were produced. Manuscripts of Fragment Targum, for example, appear to have been copied from other manuscripts of Fragment Targum, rather than from manuscripts containing the continuous text.
Taken together, these results raise new questions that future research will need to address. Why did Jews continue to use Aramaic long after it had ceased to be a spoken? How and why did they learn it? What kind of authority did the Targums have? When did a scribe feel free to change a text? When did they feel obliged to preserve it unchanged?
These future avenues of research will build on insights into aspects of European history, such as Jewish education and scribal and material culture, that TEXTEVOLVE has generated. Some of the issues raised, such as the social function of non-spoken languages and the transmission of cultural identity, have wide implications and invite reflection beyond disciplinary boundaries. The most intriguing of these concerns the relationship between religious texts and truth claims, for our analysis of the Targums provides an example of religious insights emerging from the creative tension between preservation and innovation in authoritative religious texts.
Many of the results of TEXTEVOLVE have already been disseminated; others will be made available to the wider scholarly community in the near future. Specifically, the team has delivered forty-four presentations in conferences, seminars, and workshops; it has twenty-six journal articles and book chapters published, accepted, or under peer-review; one monograph is forthcoming, four more are being finalised; proceedings from one of the international workshops organised by TEXTEVOLVE have been published and proceedings from the second are now being finalised; another volume aimed at an international academic audience has been co-edited; and preliminary results have been disseminated via various online channels.
