PATRISTIC CITATIONS AND BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS

The Vetus Latina Iohannes Project and Beyond

The Vetus Latina Iohannes Project is producing an edition of the Old Latin materials for St
John's Gospel. These materials provide traces and evidence for early alternatives and
predecessors to today's familiar Vulgate Latin translation. The first stage, an electronic
edition of the manuscripts of this Gospel identified as potentially having an Old Latin
element, has almost been completed, while the second stage consists of the collection,
analysis and addition of patristic citations. The patristic citations offer particular scope for the
use of the database and web technologies which we are interested in exploring further.

The project has made electronic transcriptions of the Gospel manuscripts containing texts
with a potential Old Latin element following the TEI guidelines as applied by other editions
which have used the same software to make the edition, namely Peter Robinson's Collate
programme and Anastasia XML publishing package. Specific encoding of features found in
biblical manuscripts has been developed in conjunction with projects producing
transcriptions of Greek witnesses at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in
Münster and the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing in Birmingham.
These conventions aim to reproduce the page of each manuscript as nearly as possible,
recording the original spelling, the use of abbreviations (including indication of the nomina
sacra by a superline over the second letter), formatting with columns, lines, spaces and
running titles, and variations in the form of letters such as capitals or digraphs. The use of
tagging also permits the indication of lacunae or gaps, letters which cannot be clearly made
out, erasures, and corrections to the text. The resulting online edition of the manuscripts is
located at: itsee.bham.ac.uk/iohannes/vetuslatina/. There one can view transcriptions of
individual manuscripts as either a continuous text or with the layout of the page reproduced,
and a synopsis of each verse in all the manuscripts. In the case of the Gospel of John in the
Old Latin Bible, the main text-types are represented by extant manuscripts and the
transcriptions of these manuscripts provide a framework to which the patristic citations may
then be added.

Early Christian Latin writers frequently cite, adapt, reference and discuss the text of the
Bible; since they are using early forms of the biblical text, their evidence can provide
important information about that text as well as offering insight into how the Bible was read
and interpreted in this important early period of its history. For the past century details of
patristic citations and references have been manually collected and updated from printed
editions on index cards by the Vetus Latina Institute at Beuron; these Beuron cards, some
typed, some handwritten, have now been digitally imaged. The Vetus Latina Iohannes Project
has been transcribing the information from the citation cards for St John's Gospel into Excel
spreadsheets so that it can be more easily viewed and assessed; this still produces a flat field
database with limitations in the extent to which data can be sorted, searched, experienced in
context and presented for comparison. Much more could be done to analyze the data and
present it to the scholarly community and the wider public with the citation information
placed in an appropriate relational database connected to a dynamic website with various
selection and search options, including the capacity to search within the citation field. In
particular the citation data could usefully be cross-linked with details of authors, their works
and editions of these works to make more transparent from where the data comes and allow it
to be approached more easily from different standpoints. Various corpora of patristic texts

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have now been digitized and are available online; links with them could show citation
material in context and, where corpora have patristic citations already marked in them, could
allow comparison of how patristic citations have been identified in different editions. A
capacity to search for groups of words within these electronic texts could also be developed
to check and probably supplement the citations already recorded.

Since we hope to go on to produce especially electronic editions of other biblical books

where the evidence from patristic citations is comparatively even more important, an easy-to-
use interface would assist the transmission of the citation card collection, which can be
variable in format and quality, into more consistent database-compatible electronic form and
provide for future addition, correction and expansion of the database. The identification and
description of different citation, adaptation and reference practices especially could be
handled with greater sophistication to reflect the complexity and diversity of this material and
promote the interrogation of how and why biblical material has been cited by patristic
writers.

Patristic citation material is difficult to present effectively in the apparatus criticus of print
editions due to the constraints of the medium; small type and abbreviated author names and
other terminology can make it rather opaque and daunting to approach. Ultimately it would
be desirable to view a biblical verse alongside its manuscript readings, its textual tradition in
various ancient languages and its patristic citations with information about their text, author
and source work. One could basically select, say, a biblical verse or a citation reference
element (e.g. author, work, editor) or a time-period and see all citation and manuscript
evidence related to it. In parallel with the functionality of the electronic edition of biblical
manuscripts, one could then view how a citation was laid out in its source work, perhaps even
in individual manuscripts if digitized images and tagged transcriptions of manuscripts of
patristic works were available, and how it related to other citations in that work. Perhaps it
might even be possible to display graphically the relationships between patristic citations and
the form of text they may represent and manuscripts and other citations which might share
that form of text. Such an interactive website would offer a more flexible, accessible and
transparent presentation of the patristic citation material with scope to suit different interests
and research aims, as well as better allowing and assisting both academic users and the wider
public to explore this material for themselves and assess its particular contribution to biblical
textual criticism. It would also provide a model that could be applied and adapted in other
cases where texts exist in variant forms and where it might be valuable to explore a work in
the context of citations and other references to it.

Dr R F MacLachlan
Research Fellow, Vetus Latina Iohannes project
ITSEE - Institute for Textual Scholarship & Electronic Editing
University of Birmingham
Elmfield House
Selly Oak Campus
Birmingham
B29 6LQ
E-mail: R.F.MacLachlan@bham.ac.uk
Project Office: +44 (0)121 415 8441

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