The Principal Pauline Epistles A Collation of Old Latin Witnesses

Preface

Much of the Old Latin evidence for the New Testament has been newly edited

over the last century.The Itala volumes of gospel manuscripts initiated by Adolf

Jülicher in 1938 were completed by Walter Matzkow and Kurt Aland, including

a second edition for each of the Synoptic Gospels.1 The Vetus Latina edition

which began in 1945, combining the text of all surviving manuscripts with an

exhaustive collection of biblical quotations from writers of the first eight Christian

centuries, has so far covered the Catholic Epistles (Thiele, 1956a??1969), the

Pauline Epistles from Ephesians to Hebrews (Frede, 1962a??1991), the Apocalypse

(Gryson, 2000a??2003), John (Burton et al., 2011a??) and Mark (Haelewyck,

2013a??2018), with work on Acts in progress.2 The only New Testament writings

not to have benefited from a new edition are the four principal Pauline

Epistles: Romans, 1 & 2Corinthians and Galatians. Projects to edit Romans

and 1Corinthians in the Vetus Latina series were abandoned after the publication

of introductory fascicles in the 1990s.3 This means that, notwithstanding

the material gathered in the Vetus Latina Database, the standard edition has

remained Pierre Sabatiera??s pioneering work of Old Latin biblical scholarship

from 1743, based on a single manuscript in the Pauline Epistles and pre-modern

editions of patristic writers.4

In 2011, a European Research Council Starting Grant enabled Hugh Houghton

to assemble a team at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing

(ITSEE) in the University of Birmingham to investigate the earliest commentaries

on Paul as sources for the biblical text (the COMPAUL project). In

order to assist with analysis of the numerous early Latin expositions, full electronic

transcriptions were produced of the four principal Pauline Epistles in

three types of material:

1) Manuscripts identified as having an Old Latin affiliation;

2) Existing scholarly reconstructions of the Pauline text of individual early

Latin commentators;

3) Early collections of biblical testimonia.

These were then automatically collated to provide a representative sample of

early Latin readings which might be reflected in commentaries and their textual

tradition. Although the publication of this data was not part of the original

plan for the COMPAUL project, it soon became evident thata??until the appearance

of the corresponding volumes of the Vetus Latina editiona??making this

material more widely available would be of service to scholars in a variety of

fields.

The majority of the transcriptions were made by Kreinecker and MacLachlan,

with Houghton also contributing and taking responsibility for proofreading.

After conversion to XML by Smith, these files were published in full online at

https://www.epistulae.org, along with databases of patristic quotations also prepared

by the COMPAUL project. Specific details of contributors and the sources

used are given in the header of each electronic transcription. The preparation

of the apparatus coincided with a major transition in digital editing software.

The preliminary collation of plain text files of 1Corinthians was the last project

in ITSEE to use the COLLATE program,5 while early work on Galatians provided

one of the first opportunities for trialling the online editing environment developed

by Smith, in which the CollateX software developed by Ronald Dekker for

the Interedition consortium was deployed.6 The present collation is based on

the projecta??s final XML transcription files in this Collation Editor within the

Workspace for Collaborative Editing. Smith was responsible for processing the

transcriptions into the required format and making the initial apparatus available

in an interface which enabled Houghton to edit and check the collation.

These processes are described in more detail in the Introduction.