Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: July 27th, 2018, 6:40 pm The best way forward as I see it is support from granting agencies. Many of your examples, Dag Haug, Perseus, climate science, etc., all had government grant support. European grant agencies are beginning to insist that the results they fund be open. Unfortunately, this approach requires political support for funding humanities in an increasingly post-Christian, secular world.

The current critical text is funded by UBS, which relies on donations and a business model that wants to recoup their costs through product sales. Getting this text to be truly open will require them to adopt different funding source.
Yes, this would almost have to be done on a grant or by donations.

One interesting thing that is changing: there are at least some people in traditional Bible societies that are very interested in becoming more open. And some donors who want to see that happen.
Stephen Carlson wrote: July 27th, 2018, 6:40 pm I don't see much buy-in from academia. The whole system is structured to professionalize the discipline and freeze out the amateurs. (Heck they even freeze out PhDs who can't get tenure-track jobs!). The barriers to entry are high and expensive, and I'm afraid purposely so. The peer-review standards are such that if you don't have access to a university library (the main subsidy for humanities scholars), it is impossible to write an article that will pass peer-review. You talk about "data," but mastery of the secondary literature is the primary hurdle for peer-reviewed publication. This philosophy of course is fundamentally incompatible with open scholarship.

Another major obstacle to open scholarship is that copyright terms have become so long that the public domain has stopped growing for most of the past 50 years. With the old 28-year term, lots of scholarly editions entered the public domain when they were still current. Not so anymore.
That's quite generally true of publication, but not of corpora. In corpus linguistics, there are quite a few open corpora that are used by multiple researchers. A great deal of the software they use is freely licensed.

The papers are often published in traditional academic publications. And yes, that can be frustrating, I don't have access to a university library unless I drive in to campus, online access would be tremendously helpful for many things I do. But that's a different problem.
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: July 27th, 2018, 8:00 pm On the substance of the proposal, what about an edited transcription of an ancient text like Vaticanus (B)? (I think Porter has suggested a similar solution). It would be open, as in long out-of-copyright. And it is a trusted text of the 4th century.

Sure, historical critics might not be as enthused with it (though it can be supplied with an apparatus to the NA, THE, RP, TR, etc.), but for linguistic purposes it is arguably superior to an edited critical text, since it reflects linguistic choices by actual members of the speech community.

Vaticanus isn’t extant everywhere, but we do have Siniaticus, which is. So there’s that.
We have discussed that. One problem is that most of the resources we would like to use with it were created with a modern critical text, which is also what most people read.

Eventually, it would be cool to have both.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Stephen Carlson
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: July 29th, 2018, 7:32 am We have discussed that. One problem is that most of the resources we would like to use with it were created with a modern critical text, which is also what most people read.
This sounds like a generic argument against any but the Nestle-Aland text, which is not open.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: August 5th, 2018, 2:10 am
Jonathan Robie wrote: July 29th, 2018, 7:32 am We have discussed that. One problem is that most of the resources we would like to use with it were created with a modern critical text, which is also what most people read.
This sounds like a generic argument against any but the Nestle-Aland text, which is not open.
If a text is very similar to the Nestle-Aland, modulo spelling, then it doesn't take much to adapt. The number of differences is often reasonably small - Alan Bunning's current prototype text has about 500 differences.

And of course, there are other resources like PROIEL, based on Tischendorf.

But it would be nice to have one text that is similar to the Nestle-Aland so we could port resources to a common text. And Sinaiticus is probably not similar enough.
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Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Now when we have at least three modern scholarly critical texts - NA, SBLGNT and Tyndale House GNT - would it be reasonable to mechanically create a "Majority of Modern Critical Greek New Testaments", MMCGNT, selecting text by majority vote?
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: August 5th, 2018, 1:18 pm Now when we have at least three modern scholarly critical texts - NA, SBLGNT and Tyndale House GNT - would it be reasonable to mechanically create a "Majority of Modern Critical Greek New Testaments", MMCGNT, selecting text by majority vote?
Producing a critical text could be done in a variety of ways from the original texts or later editions. Doing the first cut algorithmically makes sense, I imagine you need a text critic to edit the results and use human judgment.

I think that part is easier to figure out than getting enough street cred for the text that people can use it for translations and academic work.
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RandallButh
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by RandallButh »

You might want to carefully read through Maurice Robinson's 55 page discourse on the Byzantine text.

The Robinson-Pierpont edition is a real text and differences in NA27 are footnoted for any concerned. It has a commons licence that is very workable.
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

RandallButh wrote: August 6th, 2018, 2:03 pm You might want to carefully read through Maurice Robinson's 55 page discourse on the Byzantine text.

The Robinson-Pierpont edition is a real text and differences in NA27 are footnoted for any concerned. It has a commons licence that is very workable.
All of this is true.

Do you think we could ever get the Cool Kids to use a Byzantine text?
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Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

On the other hand RP represents different school of TC. SBLGNT has some numbers about agreements/disagreements here: http://sblgnt.com/about/introduction/. For example, agreements/disagreements between SBL/RP: 969/5,959. And SBL/NIV: 6,312/616. What this means in practice is that it's more difficult to follow a modern translation with RP than with some other critical text. Or think about audio GNT. The listener could follow the audio which is based on the Open Source text, reading any modern printed critical text, but it would be more difficult with RP printed text. And if the audio is based on RP, it would be difficult to follow with NA, SBL or THGNT.

Also no new modern translation wants to use RP (there may be rare exceptions). Same thing with commentaries. If the problem of academic credibility of a GNT edition is left out, modern exegetical commentaries could use an Open Source text as the base, because they discuss TC anyways and can make their own corrections. I just can't imagine they would be willing to do that with RP which is too far from scholarly consensus.
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by James Spinti »

Why not the Tyndale House one? What's the license on that one? I haven't been able to discover one, but it is electronic.

James
Proofreading and copyediting of ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies monographs
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