Annotating the New Testament: Codex H, Euthalian Traditions, and the Humanities

This project investigates a set of Greek New Testament manuscripts that contain one or more of the letters of the apostle Paul, the Catholic Epistles, and Acts from the New Testament. Many manuscripts containing these works include a range of annotations and prefaces (known as paratexts) called the Euthalian apparatus (or the Euthaliana). The Euthaliana include things such as lists of chapters and quotations, prologues for works or sub-collections, and accounts of Paul's life, death, and activities, among others. The Euthalian apparatus gets its name from the mention of an elusive 'Euthalius' in the colophons at end of some of the manuscripts, including the earliest available example, Codex H, from the 6th century CE. The Euthalian tradition is an important and overlooked resource for our understanding of several related areas:

New Testament Canon: These manuscripts shed light on the complex process of the formation of the New Testament, highlighting the strategies involved in the transmission of particular collections of texts, and the ways they were understood.

Early Christian Reading Practices: The paratexts that make up the Euthaliana enrich our picture of how early Christians interpreted, studied, and taught certain New Testament texts and how their framing of these texts was drawn from other ancient literature.

Ancient Intellectual and Scribal Culture: Despite uncertainty about the identify of Euthalius, it is generally agreed that the apparatus can be traced back to a grammarian from late antiquity, likely associated with Caesarea in Palestine, an important intellectual hub where figures such as Pamphilus, Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome were active.

The overall aim of this project is to compile and analyse manuscripts with the Euthalian apparatus, paying particular attention to Codex H as the earliest example of the tradition. Very little scholarly work has been carried out on the Euthaliana generally and Codex H in particular, which was taken apart from the 10th to the 13th century in the monastic community of the Great Lavra monastery on Mount Athos, where the individual leaves were used to bind other codices. Over time, these leaves found their way into museums across Europe and they are now damaged and difficult to read.

The project's goals are:

(1) To produce new digital images of the leaves of Codex H using multi-spectral technology, in order to maximise the readability of faded or damaged text.

(2) To use these images to produce a new critical edition of Codex H in both digital and print format, featuring a transcription of the Greek text and an English translation of its text and Euthalian paratexts.

(3) To create a catalogue of every Greek New Testament manuscript which displays one or more features of Euthalian apparatus, paving the way for future work on this tradition's textual and historical relevance to the study of the New Testament, early Christianity, literary and scribal culture, and the manuscripts as material objects.

(4) To investigate the history and development of the Euthalian apparatus, especially as it relates to questions surrounding the New Testament and its formation as a collection, pedagogical habits in late antiquity, and the ways that traditions about the authorship and origins of particular texts were understood and communicated.

(5) To further establish what the Euthaliana can reveal about late-antique scholarship in Caesarea and the wider eastern Mediterranean, including how the Euthaliana fit into the broader landscape of New Testament interpretation and the development of other paratextual material in Caesarea, like the Eusebian apparatus to the Gospels.

(6) To encourage more direct and creative work with the individual manuscripts that preserve New Testament texts, which is made increasingly possible through the digital humanities.