Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TiNT (Titles of the New Testament: A New Approach to Manuscripts and the History of Interpretation)
Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2023-11-30
This project addresses questions relating to the transmission and ontology of the New Testament, using its complex titular tradition as a way to focus on its paratexts as key to its understanding. We are working to demonstrate that the New Testament is a complex collection of thousands of manuscripts produced by many people from many time periods and locations. Each manuscript is a fragment of the whole, and examining paratexts creates new avenues for exploring the big questions of the discipline. The main problem that we are addressing concerns how scholars use and conceive of the most primary resources of the discipline. This approach is important because it gives us a more complex perspective on ancient sacred literature and creates new ways for working with ancient and medieval cultural heritage documents. Our objects are threefold: (1) to digitally edit every form of every title in every Greek manuscripts; (2) to use this new information to carry out research on topics like scribal habits, ancient textual scholarship, art history, textual transmission, and reception; and (3) to create a comprehensive edition of every inscription and subscription title in the Greek tradition as part of a larger concurrent editorial project in New Testament studies.
To date we have created over 13,500 complex annotations on the New Testament's Greek manuscripts, combining metadata, textual transcription, and image markup. These annotations serve as the base data for a search tool we are developing, a tool that will enable us to create new information for old disciplinary questions. We have also carried out research on the manuscripts and traditions we have encountered, presented our research at multiple scholarly venues, and are working toward larger publication projects. We have partnered with museums, monasteries, software developers, and computer scientists to carry out this work.
We have progressed beyond the state of the art by emphasising the critical, historical, theological, and intellectual value of paratextual traditions, especially for literary texts as complex as the New Testament. We continue to work to find new ways of engaging our artefacts central to our discipline. Instead of using manuscripts for text critical purposes in this instance (surely an enduringly relevant method), we focus on manuscripts as instances of reception and reading, highlighting the generative value of exploring the transmission of the New Testament as key to understanding its essential ontology.