1. the manuscript material

In the case of the Old Testament writings, Jerome’s new translation from the Hebrew makes it easy to distinguish between Old Latin versions, i.e. those translated from the Greek Septuagint text, and the Vulgate. In contrast, the transition from the Old Latin versions to the Vulgate in the New Testament is rather fluid, a process that took place over a long period of time and was not yet complete even in the 13th century. In the course of the revision begun by Jerome, a new version of the text obviously emerged, which sought to achieve the closest possible proximity to the then current Greek biblical text; however, as it reproduces a largely similar Greek source text, it does not represent a radical new creation, but is itself based on older translations. The official recognition of the Vulgate did not take place until 1546, and the first ecclesiastically recognized edition in 1592. When reconstructing the Latin tradition, it is therefore necessary to take into account not only the few manuscripts that have a clearly Old Latin character, but also those that, although they have a Vulgate character over long stretches, are nevertheless repeatedly interspersed with Old Latin, i.e. in this case with intersperses that deviate from the medieval Vulgate text. All of these manuscripts, between 80 and 90 in total depending on the text passage due to the gaps in some of them, were made available to the Mainz project in 2009 in the form of photographs by the Vetus Latina Institute. They have since been collated and the transcriptions transferred to Excel tables, which allow a quick overview of the different versions. This has been made available online to experts (see “Manuscript collations online” below). The electronic databases of the Institute for New Testament Text Research in Münster are available for comparison with the Greek manuscripts.

2 The quotations from the Church Fathers

Since only a few Old Latin manuscripts are available for the reconstruction of the textual history of the Old Latin Actus Apostolorum, in contrast to the Greek tradition of the New Testament Studies, the quotations from the church writers are of particular importance. Therefore, all quotations from the Acts of the Apostles in the Latin Church Fathers must be interpreted philologically and evaluated for the reconstruction of their original. In 24 years of painstaking work, the Munich priest Josef Denk had compiled a card index of around 400,000 Old Latin quotations from the Holy Scriptures by 1927. This material was completed at the Beuron Archabbey, and a total of around 20,000 quotations from the Church Fathers on the Acts of the Apostles alone were collected. The complete documentary material was made available by the head of the Vetus Latina Institute. The wording of these quotations must be checked according to the latest critical editions and their context analyzed with regard to possible deliberate textual changes. It is already clear that the diversity of the text versions to be reconstructed goes beyond the manuscript versions. Where they are identical, they offer the possibility of a more precise dating and localization of the text versions attested by the mostly later manuscripts.

The citations provided by the Vetus Latina Institute on CD-ROM (image files) were first converted into usable databases (WORD files) and, as far as possible, supplemented with important information (dating and localization). As the collection of evidence took place in the first decades of the 20th century, the wording of each individual case had to be checked against the latest critical edition of the respective text, and the location had to be re-entered by page and line. In order to enable the citation to be checked in the context of the respective writing, copies of the sources and their context were made in the relevant editions, unless the edition was available in the library of the Department of Classical Philology. This was usually the case with later authors: here, the libraries of the theological seminars were usually used.

In a further step, the quotations were arranged chronologically and compared with each other in terms of their wording. This already showed that an early text form, whose main witnesses were at home in Africa, can be distinguished from the later text forms. However, it also showed that the so-called vulgate text is not a late manifestation, but that the individual readings are often already attested by early witnesses.

In a third step, the individual quotations were assigned to each other according to their wording and recorded in clear tables. The decisive question here was whether the text versions apparently documented by quotations could actually be regarded as manuscript texts existing in late antiquity or the Middle Ages and thus as representatives of certain text types. To this end, each individual quotation had to be examined in its context, as this was the only way to clarify whether omissions, additions and deviations in word choice or word order were caused by syntactic context adaptation, for example, or were even due to deliberate changes on the part of the quoter in the interest of a particular evidentiary goal. It is therefore not only the grammatical structures in which the quotations occur that must be taken into account, but also the intention or argumentation of the respective author in the context of the text passage in question. For example, in the case of verses 1 and 2 of the first chapter alone, around 200 quotations from the Church Fathers were interpreted in their context and evaluated for the reconstruction, dating and localization of the various text types.

For chapters 1-6, handwritten collations from the Beuron Institute could initially be used, but these caused considerable problems in the evaluation, as the full text of the individual witnesses was not presented in a clear and complete manner. The transfer of the entire documentation to databases in 2009 made it possible to immediately recognize in the test collations carried out between July and December 2009 that not only the 5 text types reconstructed so far mainly from the Church Fathers’ quotations, but also considerably more (depending on the material found, up to 11) text types can be distinguished. Further editorial work was made considerably easier by the fact that the individual text types no longer had to be painstakingly reconstructed from the quotations from the Church Fathers, but that the manuscripts now contain clear leading witnesses for the majority of the text types, to which the quotations from the Church Fathers can be assigned with a few exceptions (above all Augustine). This in turn required a full collation of all existing manuscripts.

This sub-project was launched in July 2010. The German Research Foundation (DFG) provided the necessary funding. Since then, the manuscripts of the Acts of the Apostles have been collated, recorded in Excel tables and made available to scholars online in PDF format (see “Manuscript collations online PDF”). This enables the user to determine the reading of each individual manuscript for each verse of the Acts of the Apostles. The manuscripts considered to be leading witnesses for certain text types have been highlighted in color, so that the group affiliation of the main witnesses can also be conveniently traced.

On the basis of these collations and taking into account the quotations from the Church Fathers, the schemata of the text types were created, which will provide an overview of the various word sounds of the Latin tradition in the edition. These schemes formed the basis for the incorporation of the Latin tradition into the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of the Greek Acts of the Apostles, published by the Institute for New Testament Text Research (INTF) in Münster.

For the online publication of the first fascicle (chapter 1), some changes were made to the presentation of the text types. In view of the complexity of the transmission history and the large number of text types in the Acts of the Apostles, the previously used system with quotation marks etc. seemed too confusing for the presentation of the findings. The simplest solution (requiring no additional space) was to print the complete text in every single line (see “The Edition of Acts: Chapter 1”).

The critical edition of the Old Latin Acts of the Apostles will provide an indispensable foundation for theological, historical and philological research. Thanks to the possibility of dating and localizing the various text types on the basis of the authors who quote them, far-reaching insights can be expected not only into the development of the biblical text, but also into the relationships between the authors and the institutions they led.

As the translations generally allow extensive conclusions to be drawn about the text of the underlying Greek original, the reconstruction of the Latin text types also allows partial insights into the age and distribution of the respective Greek original. The comparison of the Greek and Latin versions (as well as the Syriac, Coptic and Armenian versions edited in Münster) can provide insights into translation technique and developments in meaning.

Due to the enormous wealth of material and the broad textual tradition, the systematic processing of the Church Fathers’ citations from the (Greek and Latin) New Testament Studies enables well-founded investigations into the citation practice of the late antique authors. This opens up interesting possibilities for comparison with regard to how other authors dealt with other authoritative texts.

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