GNT monoply

Patrick Narkinsky patrick at extremehope.org
Tue Sep 12 16:35:00 EDT 2000


On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:

> If it is too much expense or trouble to get the rights to the text of NA27
> one could just use W&H as a base text and have a small team NT scholars make
> a few "corrections" to W&H and this would permit you do break the strangle
> hold that GBS has on the GNT which amounts to a monopoly, since the
> competition is essentially non-existent.

I Am Not A Lawyer (or a Greek Scholar, for that matter).

But is Nestle-Aland really copyrightable?  Is the text (written over 1900
years ago) under copyright?  It seems questionable to me, since there is
presumably *no* original content in the words of the text itself.  This
really skates the edge ...  I suppose it could be argued that NA created
an original work by arranging the text -- however, it seems to me that the
work of the textual critic could be argued to be too mechanistic for that
to qualify as artistic creation.

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Narkinsky					patrick at extremehope.org

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip... 
A:To get to the other ... er .. um .. never mind.

"It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ.  My Hosanna is 
born of a furnace of doubt."       -- Fyodor Dostoevski




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