Philosophy.

This page states the working philosophy beneath tabyo-davidis: what I take Scripture to be, how the text on display is chosen, and what a translation and its notes owe the reader.

Framework: The Universal Text.

The question "what is Scripture?" is not first a question about manuscripts but about recognition: Scripture is what the community of believers, i.e. the Church, has recognised and transmitted liturgically (or ecclesially) as such, in all its tongues: Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Latin, and the rest.

The core axiom of my hypothesis-view is that this universal text is, in fact, a singular text: across languages, regions, and Vorlagen, the agreement is the overwhelming phenomenon, and the residue of divergence minor or non-existent. Where a manuscript or a local form does stand apart, that divergence is real but non-universal. If it is a corruption at all, it is a corruption in that strand, but not of Scripture, since Scripture is what the Church has universally acknowledged.

Every text, in whatever region or era, speaks with authority exactly insofar as it conforms to the universal text. In other words, a regional reading has no claim to that footing unless the Church adopts and recognizes it. This is why the Fathers and early philologists of the Church often compared copies, usually from other regions, against the whole: a reading is not weighed by the age of one witness but by what the entire company of witnesses carries. St. Augustine addresses the referent-problem of Matt. 27:9 with the same movement, declining a minority reading even when it would ease the difficulty:

However, let others adopt this method of defence, if they are so minded. For my part, I am not satisfied with it; and the reason is, that a majority of codices contain the name of Jeremiah, and that those critics who have studied the Gospel with more than usual care in the Greek copies, report that they have found it stand so in the more ancient Greek exemplars. – St. Augustine of Hippo, Harmony of the Gospels 3:7

With respect to preservation, nothing in this paradigm requires a letter-for-letter or syllable-for-syllable identity between any one manuscript and the autographs (even though I don't think it would be entirely baseless for one to hold that the initial text has been preserved letter-for-letter or syllable-for-syllable as the universal). What I do hold, and what the evidence supports, is that the form and state of the text itself has remained the same; that the universally attested text is the initial text, the published one, transmitted from the beginning, and everywhere received. Thus, the criterion for 'authenticity' (a nuanced term) as well as the safeguard of the text is simply universal recognition. As Anastasius of Sinai, the seventh-century Byzantine Chalcedonian monk would put it:

For even if someone attempts to adulterate the books of one or even two tongues, immediately his fraud is disproved by the other seventy tongues. At any rate, be aware that some attempted to delete the drops of blood, the sweat of Christ, from the Gospel of Luke and were not able. For those lacking the section are disproved by many and various gospels having it; for in all the gospels of the nations it remains and in most of the Greek. – Anastasius of Sinai, Viae Dux 22:3

Implementation.

Two published editions underlie what the site displays: the SBL Greek New Testament for the Greek, the Berean Standard Bible for the English. I use them under their licences (see Sources). They are chosen as base-texts: academic and recognised yet publicly available texts that cover the New Testament, so my work is less about low-level collation and translation. Wherever they coincide with the universal text – the overwhelming majority of verses – they stand untouched. Wherever their textual judgment reflects modern eclecticism rather than the universal text, my text attempts to follow the latter instead; where possible, it is accompanied by a note with an apparatus and the rationale.

The site sets the two texts row by row because their alignment is the point. The English exists to keep the Greek legible, and it is meant to be judged and verified, verse by verse, against it. I prefer to keep the translation literal, as the aim is closeness, and not smoothness.

A Note.

The project is not complete, and in fact, it is never meant to be complete and polished; kindly consider the project as an amateur philologist's attempts at visualising a textual-paradigm.

– David.