Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

[Jonathan Robie]

But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?

We can re-interpret my question "why wouldn't that work today" to mean "if it produced a work with credibility then, why wouldn't it work in similar way today?"

This is similar to what SBLGNT did, and the computer end of this is straightforward.

http://sblgnt.com/about/introduction/

That said, Alan Bunning's text is similar to the Nestle-Aland and is computed according to clearly identifiable rules. The computing end of this isn't the hard part. I assume that a good text-critical scholar is needed to (1) help identify the most relevant parameters and (2) apply human judgment at the end.

Just think about it - NA is kind of a consensus and compromise in itself. We can suppose that people want actual textual criticism and scholarly informed decisions behind a text, whether it's necessary for their purposes or not. Having several ones to choose from (as much as the licences permit) is on the other hand great, but it may make the situation more difficult because if you don't know textual criticism yourself you're unsure about the choice. What would be a better option than to combine more scholarly opinions? Psychologically thinking NA+SBL+TH could feel even more trustworthy than NA alone. The situation isn't the same with combined manuscripts, whatever the real merits would be. And I think it's important to get a text with as few differences with NA as possible while still keeping the work none-derivative.

The NIV text differs in about 219 places. Alan Bunning's in about 500 places. That might be close enough.

I think the biggest difference between then and today is that today anyone with some programming skills can do that, while back then it took a real scholar. That may have been a big factor in credibility, of course.

I suspect it should at least be reviewed by someone most text-critical scholars would acccept as a text-critical scholar.

In practical level I might be interested in doing it. But are all the three texts available for free in a form which makes it possible to normalize them to a common lemma/parsing form to be compared? Plain text comparison is out of question because at least TH uses so much different spellings. Some manual work is of course always necessary.

All three texts are available in digital form, the "for free" part may be an issue. I wouldn't be surprised if it were relatively easy to negotiate legal access for this purpose.

I think the diffs will be available in TANTT. It's not all there yet.

TANTT - Tyndale Amalgamated NT Tagged texts
Greek text created from the SBLGNT+apparatus, following the decisions made by NA28, listing the major editions that also use that form (SBL, Treg, TR, Byz, WH, NA28). Variants are being added from major editions plus the 1st 4 centuries of MSS (from Bunning). All words are tagged lexically (extended Strong linked to LSJ) and morphologically (Robinson based on Tauber plus a few missing details) plus context-sensitive meanings for words with more than one meaning. An independant scholar checked the result against NA28 and pointed out a few differences which were fixed (see the issues in github).

[Stephen Carlson]

But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?

The big problem is network effects. There is a lot of value in everyone working from the same text, and academics have settled on Nestle-Aland. An open text trying to occupy the same niche won't get attention from academics, even if you can find and pay someone to spend two years on producing such a thing. And this is already after SBLGNT and Tyndall House.

ETA: That is why I think a Vaticanus/Sinaiticus project is more viable: it serves a different niche that scholars could get behind. I think the main objection is porting tools, but that's a question of degree rather than kind, since every text under consideration is different from one another and will need porting.

[Jonathan Robie]

But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?

The big problem is network effects. There is a lot of value in everyone working from the same text, and academics have settled on Nestle-Aland. An open text trying to occupy the same niche won't get attention from academics, even if you can find and pay someone to spend two years on producing such a thing. And this is already after SBLGNT and Tyndall House.

The niche I am interested in is this: open data that can be used freely with a variety of tools - some free - to do things that you can't with commercial software. The kind of scholarship that is based on direct access to primary data and the ability to reexamine someone else's analysis, verify it, and build on it. I think these tools are coming. They are in other fields of the humanities and the sciences.

I'm also interested in the niche of serious Bible students who need tools to help them study the text in the original languages but may not own high-quality commercial software passages. That includes quite a few pastors, in the majority world and even in the United States.

It's quite possible that the tools will drive adoption of the text rather than the other way around, assuming we have an openly available text of sufficient quality.

ETA: That is why I think a Vaticanus/Sinaiticus project is more viable: it serves a different niche that scholars could get behind. I think the main objection is porting tools, but that's a question of degree rather than kind, since every text under consideration is different from one another and will need porting.

We're going to need one text to start with, and it would be really helpful if the developers working on tools in this space could agree on one. I'm guessing that might happen now. Some things seem to be changing. It might not be instant.

I think we have some ideas to discuss, and that's helpful.

[Stephen Carlson]

But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?

The big problem is network effects. There is a lot of value in everyone working from the same text, and academics have settled on Nestle-Aland. An open text trying to occupy the same niche won't get attention from academics, even if you can find and pay someone to spend two years on producing such a thing. And this is already after SBLGNT and Tyndall House.

The niche I am interested in is this: open data that can be used freely with a variety of tools - some free - to do things that you can't with commercial software. The kind of scholarship that is based on direct access to primary data and the ability to reexamine someone else's analysis, verify it, and build on it. I think these tools are coming. They are in other fields of the humanities and the sciences.

I think we already have open data, Nestle 1904, Westcott-Hort, RP, etc. The issue quoted above is academic buy-in. Wanting that buy-in requires thinking how academics could benefit from abandoning NA28, and speaking as a guy in the fishbowl, I'm not seeing it. Anything corpus linguistics in my field is a tiny sub-niche.

I'm also interested in the niche of serious Bible students who need tools to help them study the text in the original languages but may not own high-quality commercial software passages. That includes quite a few pastors, in the majority world and even in the United States.

Depends on the tools. Some of them like lexica, morphological analysis, etc. can be decoupled from the actual text, and it becomes more like: here's a tool, apply it to your text (from wherever), and here are the results.

It's quite possible that the tools will drive adoption of the text rather than the other way around, assuming we have an openly available text of sufficient quality.

I admire your optimism. The only thing I can foresee dislodging Nestle-Aland is a massive loss of confidence in the CBGM.

[Jonathan Robie]

It's quite possible that the tools will drive adoption of the text rather than the other way around, assuming we have an openly available text of sufficient quality.

I admire your optimism. The only thing I can foresee dislodging Nestle-Aland is a massive loss of confidence in the CBGM.

Dislodging Nestle-Aland is definitely not a goal. Making room for tools based on linguistic data is the goal. These tools are beginning to be developed, they are in early phases, I think they will demonstrate their value in the coming years. People who saw presentations from ETCBC and related groups at last year's SBL may know what I am talking about. But yes, these tools need to prove themselves and gain adoption before scholars will pay attention.

If it were possible, a freer license for Nestle-Aland would be ideal, something that allows non-commercial use and derivative works like morphologies and syntax trees and discourse analysis. Without that, people developing these tools will have to agree on something else if we want to be able to use all of these resources with the same text.

We'll see what happens in this space. Things might look different a year from now.

[Stephen Carlson]

I'm looking forward to it!

[Stephen Carlson]

Perseus has an open text, based on Westcott-Hort, but I don't see any consideration of it in the OP. Is this worthwhile to the open source folks?

http://ctsstage.dh.uni-leipzig.de/colle ... -testament

[Jonathan Robie]

Perseus has an open text, based on Westcott-Hort, but I don't see any consideration of it in the OP. Is this worthwhile to the open source folks?

http://ctsstage.dh.uni-leipzig.de/colle ... -testament

Are there reasons to prefer WH to Nestle 1904? I think Nestle is closer to NA, and that makes it easier to port NA resources to it.

[Jonathan Robie]

But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?

We can re-interpret my question "why wouldn't that work today" to mean "if it produced a work with credibility then, why wouldn't it work in similar way today?"

This is similar to what SBLGNT did, and the computer end of this is straightforward.

http://sblgnt.com/about/introduction/

This is also similar to what the Berean Greek Bible did:

https://greekbible.org

The resulting text is quite similar to the NA - off by 150 words or so, I'm still working on better counts, and it has headings, glosses, poetry formatting, cross-references, etc.

Anyone have thoughts on how best to judge the quality of the Berean Greek Bible? Is this the best current candidate for a "closest equivalent to NA"?

[Diego Santos]

This is also similar to what the Berean Greek Bible did:

https://greekbible.org

The resulting text is quite similar to the NA - off by 150 words or so, I'm still working on better counts, and it has headings, glosses, poetry formatting, cross-references, etc.

Anyone have thoughts on how best to judge the quality of the Berean Greek Bible? Is this the best current candidate for a "closest equivalent to NA"?

I think this particular point of the Berean Greek Bible is problematic:

"An asterisk has been used to denote a variant word updated from the NE, where both NA and SBL agree."

The high similarity between the BGB and the NA is because the BGB is a work derived from the NA, more precisely, when it agrees with the SBLGNT, replacing the text of Nestle 1904. The fact that BGB comes from two copyright-protected resources makes me think that it is somewhat risky to use it as a free an open text, since the law may consider it as a copyright infringement. Perhaps the German Bible Society is not yet aware of the Berean Greek Bible, and therefore has not prosecuted for it, but that may change if the BGB to become widely used and threaten Nestle-Aland's licensing revenue.