The end of the year is a good time to realize what you have done during the year. In order to keep the target and timetable in mind this is especially true for large projects like the ECM of the Apocalypse. This year there were two major tasks in the focus of our daily work: 1^st the completion of the collation of test passage and the preparation of the “Text und Textwert” volume, 2^nd the starting period of transcribing Apocalypse manuscripts.

The collation of test passages

It is to say that the collation work is done. Only a few manuscripts are missing, but they are sealed in top secret chambers. I presented some outputs of our collation at the SBL meeting in San Diego with regard to the Apocalypse Byzantine traditions. So the work on the "Text and Textwert" volume is going well and will be completed shortly. We have only to do some checks in order to eliminate the last errors so that the reviews do not cause too much work for the readers.

The transcription of Apocalypse manuscripts

In order to organize the transcription of Apocalypse manuscripts we wrote a manual with many illustrations and graphics how to do a Apocalypse transcription. Looking at Rev 22:18-19 we are warned not to omit or add any word of the transmitted text of each manuscript. The German version of our manual is still in translation into English and will be completed as soon as possible. It should be an self explaning guide to transcribe Apocalypse manuscripts easily in the NT.VMR transcription editor. This was necessary because we take into account some specific phenomena and have to deal with special challenges like the transcription of numerous commentary manuscripts. The transcription of the Apocalypse lemmata out of a commentary manuscript provides some specific technical skills until the transcription looks like this:

We also take into account all punctuation marks from all manuscripts that we transcribe. First experiences show that it's a good way to consider punctuation marks as letters and transcribe them directly into the editor. A subsequent incorporation of them into the transcription in a second operation was indeed more faulty. They are independent characters which make only minor problems. For example one of these is to decide whether a kind of dot is a “middle dot” a “high dot” or something else.

The complexity of manuscripts argues against a simple and general solution, but the following definition seems to be helpful: a normal dot (which is very rare) has to be located only at the bottom of a line, a middle dot (it occurs mostly) lies between the first and third part of a line and a high dot stands clearly in the top of a line:

In addition to these details, it is certainly interesting to know that the first transcriptions have already been done or currently arise. The following manuscripts are transcribed for the first time or are in progress:

P18 P24 P85 P98 P115 046 0163 0308 18 42 61 69 82 93 141 175 177 250 325 424 452 459 506 616 620 627 628 699 920 1006 1611 1652 1734 1740 1849 1854 2048 2049 (our training, but a copy of the TR) 2050 2052 2079 2087 2138 2329 2361 2408 2582 2723 2814 (in total 49 manuscripts, but many fragments).

So we can say: The project is so good in time and goes well on!