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23 February 2010

Greek New Testament Manuscripts

A page from a 10th-century manuscript of the Four Gospels in Ancient Greek, showing the beginning of the Gospel of St Matthew.

The beginning of the Gospel of St Matthew, Add MS 11300 [Gregory-Aland 478], f.8r

As somebody with a Biblical Studies background, I am particularly looking forward to seeing a number of Greek New Testament manuscripts fully available on the web this summer. The first phase of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, will include no less than one majuscule from the 7th century, 33 minuscules from the 10th-14th centuries, and 16 lectionaries from the 11th-14th centuries.

I am planning to post on a selection of these over the following weeks.

 

Juan Garcés

Posted by Web Editor at 2:26 PM

Comments

Another 50 digitized GNT MSS - fantastic!

Posted by: Tommy Wasserman | 23 February 2010 at 02:52 PM

I am wondering if the mss will be made available also on DVD.
Scholars are still waiting to get the Sinaiticus images. The project was funded with public money, but the images are still not available. You cannot even download the online crops. It took me a hard time to reconstruct a few ones from screen dumps. This is not a very satisfying situation.

Please make the full images available!

Posted by: Wieland Willker | 24 February 2010 at 07:04 PM

I think all of these manuscripts should be made available on DVDs. Nice blog here.

Posted by: Abraham Lincoln | 26 February 2010 at 01:24 PM

I concur with Wieland's point. If you need to work with a text in ms, one probably doesn't want to wait for each page to download separately, while some teenager on the same exchange is downloading videos! An offline copy would be nice.

Also selling DVD's of the online content (so long as it is done cheaply enough that scholars can afford to buy them!) would also be a possible revenue stream.

There might be issues with DVD's of material which is valuable for ripping off and selling -- some books of hours, perhaps -- but for most text mss, I don't see that there should be a problem.

Lovely image in your post -- thank you! It's really nice as an example of Greek minuscule in the wild. It would be interesting to show to students with some knowledge of Greek and of the Greek NT and ask them to see what they could make of it! It's a very good way to introduce people to manuscript Greek.

FYI: One problem when I clicked on it for something large enough to read; the window had no borders and sized itself to my 1280x800 screen. So I couldn't scroll down and see the bits at the bottom.

Nice blog, tho - thank you!

Posted by: Roger Pearse | 01 March 2010 at 12:57 PM

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