[B-Greek] GNT Copyright issues-what we can use

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon Mar 30 16:40:50 EDT 2009


Carl egrapse:
>This may be slightly off-topic, but surely it is a matter of concern
to many B-Greekers and their ilk.
. . .
> I don't intend to
discuss or invite a discussion of these issues on B-Greek,
. . .

I have an anecdote that is tangential enough to the theoretical
copyright discussion that I thought it might be appropriate for the list.

The Westcott-Hort text is 99++% equivalent to the base NA-UBS text.
The Bible Societies gave me permission to use selections from NA 27 in
our Living Koine Greek materials, but only for the first 500 copies. We
could hardly go to all of the work to record everything from NA27 only to have
our work potentially blocked in the future. So we chose Westcott-Hort. In
doing so I happily discovered that the spelling of Westcott-Hort was
BETTER than NA-UBS, where the latter had respelled W-H not according
to the manuscripts or according to the papyri but apparently according to
what Erasmians could read! (DAYEID, PEILATOS, HLEIAS ktl., even some
less definitive Greek vocab.)

I had also toyed with the idea of doing a "Rahlfs" for the GNT: taking B, alef,
and A and producing a majority text "2 out of three" and subjective readings
wherever there was a three-way split. I did Yakobou that way and it worked
pretty well. Something like this could be done for an "open text" Alexandrian
tradition. Some responsible grad students would be doing all of us a service,
since offering an open-text "Alexandrian" might be a nice compromise. But
it will be very, very close to WH anyway.

As a final piece of this anecdote, let me add that the Robinson-Pierpont
Byzantine text is a wonderful piece of work. It is copyrighted to protect the
text and is offered to all for free use. While I happily lean toward
the Alexandrian
text as best claim to 'original', the Byzantine text is also an
excellent textual
base and has been in use in the Greek speaking lands without a competitor,
ever. Which is not too shabby a claim, either.

So for Greek users, we have W-H freely available, we have Robinson-
Pierpont Byzantine freely available, and if someone wants to do an 'upgrade'
on WH, they could produce a rough and ready "Rahlfian" GNT in relatively
shorttime. We are in pretty good hands.

ERRWSQE
IWANHS


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



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