"Working to tell the story of the path of Christian Scriptures in and through Ethiopian book culture."
"The goal of our project is not to provide a critical edition of an Urtext of a tradition. Instead, ours is a mapping project, setting forth the contours of the textual history of each book, with a representative text from each of its major recensions."
It has taken a full decade to develop our team and our method, complete with workflow, and computer programs. Now, the big story is coming clear.
The goal of the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) project is to reconstruct the history of the text of the individual books of the Ethiopic Old Testament. Each study is based on the transcriptions of 30 to 40 copies of one biblical book. The texts of all the manuscripts are aligned into columns based on shared roots, from which statistical data is generated based on shared readings of the manuscripts. The data is then processed to create dendrograms, to identify clusters of manuscripts, to determine the best representative manuscript of each cluster, and to create lists of the distinctive readings of each cluster. The distinctive readings are then analyzed philologically to characterize each of the clusters and their shared variants. With this information, we are in a position to describe the major clusters of manuscripts, the stages of the text, and then, to present the major text forms that arise across time in Ethiopia.
Click on the links below to find out more about the project:
