New Testament Greek Manuscripts, by Reuben Swanson

[João Castro]

Good morning,

I recently adquired New Testament Greek Manuscripts: John. At fist glance, it's a great book. It's well organized and very clear to see the variants. Does anyone has comments about this work? Is there any person willing to continuing the Swanson's Jobs?

[Stirling Bartholomew]

Good morning,

I recently aquired New Testament Greek Manuscripts: John. At fist glance, it's a great book. It's well organized and very clear to see the variants. Does anyone has comments about this work? Is there any person willing to continuing the Swanson's Jobs?

Greetings João,

Quite familiar with Swanson's work. Haven't used it much recently but I have had Gospels and Acts for a long time. Used them extensively. Wieland Willker used to have an errata page for these but I can't find it now. Over a period of 15 years I did some work on Codex Bezae in Acts. Ended up doing a RSV/ESV based translation of the Codex Bezae in Acts.

Could have used something like Swanson while working in the Apocalypse of John. Instead of Swanson, I had a hyperlinked indexed pdf of Hoskier[1] and the aparatus in D. Aune's WBC Commentary on the Revelation. Good resources but a lot more work than using Swanson's format.

[1] Hoskier - Concerning the Text of the Apokalypse, 1929.

Subscript

The reason nobody is continuing to produce these is most people want to be rewarded financially for their labor. There is no money to be made here. People do these things for other reasons.

[João Castro]

Thanks for the coments, Stirling. And thanks for the references. I see the Swanson's work as a great aid for translators. Unfortunatelly, his works ( and many others) are not known here. I believe many publishers don't have interest to bring it here these works because ( like you said) of financial return.

[Stephen Carlson]

Is there any person willing to continuing the Swanson's Jobs?

There was a person willing to continue Swanson's work and he inherited all his materials (mainly microfilms), but there were so many intractable problems with the task that he abandoned it. As far as I am aware, there will be no more.

[Stirling Bartholomew]

Gary S. Dykes has a website which might be helpful.

http://biblical-data.org/4therecord/4_record.html

An Online Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels Wieland Willker
http://www.willker.de/wie/TCG/
http://www.willker.de/wie/TCG/TC-John.pdf

[S Walch]

B-Greek forum member Alan Bunning runs https://greekcntr.org/index.htm , which is sorta like Swanson, though at the moment not nearly as many manuscripts used in the lines.

I myself recently purchased Swanson's volumes on Acts, Luke, and Mark (still awaiting delivery of the final two mentioned) due to wanting to check a few things on Papyrus 45. Been quite handy.

[Jonathan Robie]

Transcriptions for manuscripts are becoming available from the German Bible Society and from Alan Bunning, my guess is that we will see more of this online and in PDFs, generated from data that is now much more widely available than it was when Swanson did his work. And that also has the advantage that it can be visualized in various ways without worrying about the constraints paper imposes on the size of a book.

As mentioned, Alan's site is a down payment on where things are headed. I bet we will see more and different approaches over time.

[João Castro]

Gary S. Dykes has a website which might be helpful.

http://biblical-data.org/4therecord/4_record.html

An Online Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels Wieland Willker
http://www.willker.de/wie/TCG/
http://www.willker.de/wie/TCG/TC-John.pdf

Thank you for more useful references, Stirling.