Basic Research on John’s Gospel in Bohairic (BaRe)

Among the ancient translations of the Greek New Testament, the ones in the Coptic dialects Bohairic and Sahidic are of key importance. They mirror rare variant readings from a very early stage of the textual evolution of the New Testament, which are also relevant for the textual criticism of the Gospels in Greek. The basic research project (BaRe) concerns the Bohairic version of the Gospel of John, which has seen its last critical edition (by George W. Horner) over a century ago. Previous research has raised serious doubts about Horners critical edition because of its editorial practice and principles, using an extremely problematic manuscript as base text. If Horners edition proves as problematic as suspected, this will raise also doubts about his editions of all other books from the New Testament in Bohairic. This would have major consequences for the critical edition (Editio Critica Maior) of the Greek New Testament in general, which uses Horners editions for the variants attested in Bohairic. The project aims at a) putting the reliability of Horners edition to a test, and b) laying the ground for a new critical edition of the Bohairic Gospel of John. Based on manuscript collations (i.e. text comparisions), it is intended to build the basis for computer enhanced automatic comparison, using the Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) of the cooperation partner at the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (Münster). Our activities include transformation of ca 5000 manuscript images into content decoded pages and testing selected passages as to their textual content. The project will provide the experience necessary to deal with Bohairic texts in computer enhanced collation. Thus, this basic research project will pave the way for fully-fledged editions of the entire New Testament in Bohairic Coptic.

Among the ancient translations of the Greek New Testament, those in the Coptic dialects of Bohairic and Sahidic are of central importance. They reflect rare variants of readings from a very early stage of the textual development of the New Testament, which are also relevant for the textual criticism of the Gospels in their original Greek text - and thus for the reconstruction of the authentic wording. The Basic Research on John's Gospel of John in Bohairic (BaRe) project deals with the Bohairic version of the Gospel of John, which was last critically edited by George W. Horner over 120 years ago. However, our research raised serious doubts about Horner's edition because of its editorial approach. Horner has used an extremely problematic manuscript as the basis for the text, while other text variants were classified as deviations. The project aimed to 1) test the reliability of Horner's edition and 2) lay a reliable basis for a new critical edition of the Bohairic Gospel of John. Using extensive manuscript collation (text comparison), the project created the basis for computer-aided automated comparisons using the Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) of the cooperation partner at the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF Münster). For this purpose, around 5000 manuscript scans were converted into content-decoded pages and selected sections were checked for their content. Since the indexing of liturgical manuscripts in the Bohairic dialect is essential for future research on the New Testament and in particular on the Gospel of John, a complete list of the biblical pericopes used in Coptic worship from the 13th century to the present day was compiled. This means that significantly more manuscripts were taken into account than in older studies and thus a significantly broader basis for text comparison was created. As suspected, Horner's edition has proven to be very problematic. As a result, his editions of the other books of the New Testament in Bohairic are in doubt as well - and should not serve as a starting point for future editions. The findings of the project therefore have far-reaching consequences for the critical complete edition of the Greek New Testament (Editio Critica Maior), as this has so far used Horner's editions for Bohairic versions. The project also gained the necessary experience to compare Bohairic manuscripts using computers and thus laid the basis for a fully reliable new edition of the entire New Testament in Bohairic. A side result of the project is a catalog of all Coptic manuscripts in the Bohairic dialect with New Testament content.