In this blog entry I give an overview on my first analysis of the Wuppertal project after having a detailed look at its entries about the Gospel of Matthew. The Wuppertal project was a major research project a couple of years ago, led by the well-known theologists Martin Karrer and Siegfried Kreuzer. It aimed at collecting all quotations of the Septuagint in the New Testament, by using a manually created database, via digitizing ancient manuscripts. In this analysis I focus on those aspects that were important for my research during the last months.
Surprisingly, I learned that several basic concepts are very similar in both projects. There are, however, a couple of substantial differences. I also learned that I may need to extend my database by important entries that exist in the Wuppertal database, and there is indeed a good reason to add them in my research as well. On the other hand, I found some issues in the Wuppertal database that might be addressed by its authors or maintainers someday.
The major difference between the Wuppertal project W and bibref B is that W uses several variants of the texts. Basically all available manuscripts are listed in the database. By contrast, B uses only a plausible version of the texts. The traditional way to store the Bible verses is to enumerate words in a verse. This is how W stores a Bible verse โ the database calls this a counted text. But in B I chose a different way to avoid a biased decision on where exactly the spaces are meant.
As it is well known, the earliest manuscripts were written in scriptio continua. Thus, it seems more objective to store a book as a continuous script without any spaces and refer to a part of it by its beginning and ending letter positions.
These technical differences between W and B make some differences in multiplying the quotations in the W database: for example, W stores the Matthew quotation taken from Isaiah as two entries, while B stores the passages as one entry. I think B has a more logical and unbiased approach here. In fact, the numbering of verses are sometimes slightly different in the projects. In the example above, W used the numbering Isaiah and Isaiah for the two quoted parts.
