[B-Greek] Suggestions for TCG 2004
Wieland Willker
willker at chemie.uni-bremen.de
Thu Nov 27 02:24:51 EST 2003
Stephen C. Carlson made some suggestions on his "Hypotyposeis" website
for my forthcoming TCG 2004:
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie/TCG/index.html
He wrote:
1. While I appreciate Willker's rendering of a suitably qualified
judgment for each textual variation unit, I keep forgetting what a 1 is
supposed to mean and what a 2 is supposed to mean. It may be clearer if
the decision is made more directly intelligible by printing the text or
the label of the text he favors rather than what appears to an
arbitrarily assigned number.
2. Willker labels the first line for each textual variation unit
containing the standard, critical Greek text (the lemma) as BGT, which
stands for Bibleworks Greek Text. Since I am not a user of the
Bibleworks software, I don't associate the critical text with
Bibleworks, so this acronym is rather opaque to me. Various alternatives
could be used, e.g. NA or N-A for Nestle-Aland, UBS for United Bible
Societies, or even TXT for txt.
3. The second line, which contains an alternate reading under
discussion, is often labeled BYZ, for Byzantine or Majority text-type.
This labeling of the alternate reading as BYZ puts a lot of prominence
on the (a?) Byzantine reading, even though the Byzantine text-type is
not quite so important in many critical theories, including my own. To a
certain extent, all text critical commentaries must assume some
underlying theory, but, if they are to be useful to a larger group of
people, their notation should not appear to favor any one particular
theory. Perhaps a label like ALT1, etc. for first alternative is more
neutral.
4. Finally, the large one-megabyte PDF files for each gospel could be
split into two or three smaller pieces to make it easier to quickly look
up a particular variation.
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Here are my comments:
1. Basically ok. But "rating: 2" = "alternatives to NA secondary" is not
too difficult to keep in mind. I think I explained this in the
introduction. To repeat a reading here would be rather redundant. I
could change it into "Rating: NA correct" or something. Is this
important?
2. also agreed, though as a fan of Bibleworks I would like to maintain
this link. The Bibleworks texts are the best, possibly error-free. If it
is not too much of a problem I would like to keep "BGT". You only have
to keep in mind that "BGT" means" NA-27. Btw. why is not everybody using
Bibleworks? :-)
3. What has the label "Byz" to do with a textcritical theory? I don't
see this as a problem. It IS the reading of the Byzantine text, so I
think the label is ok. It is helpful to see at a glance where the
Byzantine text deviates from NA. I understand though what you mean, it
is, that it is often NOT the Byz text ALONE that supports a reading.
4. Possible. Disadvantage is that if you search for something you have
to check several files. Probably I HAVE to do it sooner or later because
the files get bigger and bigger.
What do you all think? You can convince me, if the feedback is uni sono.
Other comments?
Best wishes
Wieland
<><
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Wieland Willker, Bremen, Germany
mailto:willker at chemie.uni-bremen.de
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie
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