
Work Meeting with the Berlin Project “The Late Antique Biblical Exegesis of Alexandria and Antioch”
Malte Rosenau
January 31, 2025
For the Göttingen Psalter Project, the year 2025 began with a long-awaited meeting with our colleagues from the The Late Antique Biblical Exegesis of Alexandria and Antioch, a long-term research project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) led by Prof. Christoph Markschies. The academic exchange between both research projects began already in 2022 on the sidelines of the 34th Deutsche Orientalistentag (DOT) in Berlin and resulted in annual meetings, most recently during the workshop Exploring Digital Editions and Tools in Patristic Studies in the 21st Century, organized by the Berlin research project at the Oxford Patristics Conference in August 2024. On January 9, we had the pleasure of welcoming our Berlin colleagues—Annette von Stockhausen, Cordula Bandt, Jacopo Marcon, Barbara Villani, and Prof. Dietmar Wyrwa—for the first time to a work meeting in Göttingen.
The agenda initially focused on mutual presentations of the current research work of both projects. After reports on our Göttingen edition of Theodoret, Interpretatio in Psalmos, the Berlin colleagues provided insights into their digital edition of Severian of Gabala’s homilies in the Patristic Text Archive (PTA), as well as into ediarum, the digital editorial tools of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy (BBAW).
It has long been planned, in addition to a print edition in the series Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte (GCS), to also publish the Göttingen edition of Theodoret’s Commentary on the Psalms digitally in the PTA. This open-access archive of ancient Christian texts maintained by the Berlin project, serves as an ideal publication platform for the Göttingen edition of the commentary. For testing purposes, a complete critical edition of the so-called Protheoria of Theodoret’s commentary is to be created in the PTA’s TEI schema as a first step. Furthermore, the meeting agreed on a stronger digital exchange between the two projects. Relevant texts from Berlin PTA will be incorporated into the Göttingen website, and conversely, the PTA will increasingly link to Göttingen resources such as the Hexapla database or our manuscript catalogue. As a long-term goal, all biblical texts from the Göttingen Septuaginta edition will first be made digitally available on our Göttingen website, and subsequently in the PTA.
The benefit of digital corpara like the Patristic Text Archive is particularly evident for our still-developing Göttingen Hexapla database. In Eusebius of Caesarea, Commentarii in Psalmos, whose digital edition has been published in the PTA since 2020, there are approximately 800 references to the Hexaplaric tradition. The passages of Eusebius’ commentary relevant to the Hexapla can be easily extracted from the TEI data in the PTA’s GitHub repository and will soon be integrated into our database. There are, of course, a few technical challenges.
As can be seen from the above excerpt, the TEI contains apart from the actual quotation and biblical reference also information on the attribution of Eusebius’ Hexaplaric sources—Aquila, Symmachus, or Theodotion. In most cases, the name of the Jewish reviser/translator precedes the quotation. However, the position of the name alone may not always allow for an automatic assignment to the corresponding quotation.
Another difficulty is the creation of links to the Hexaplaric citations in the PTA, as the PTA’s own web app generates URNs for biblical passages on the fly from the XML of the edition. These cannot be reliably calculated by third-party applications, at least not from the XML files alone. It is, however, possible to extract the internal identifiers from the live website and match them to the quotations in our database. We hope to present first results on our website soon.
by Malte Rosenau, January 31, 2025
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