What we intend to do

The following text is from the application to the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig and was written by the project leaders, in particular Jens Herzer. A more accessible introduction to our project for the general public can be found here.

Stand: 2023.

Abstract

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The Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum (CJH) comprises the entirety of the surviving literary, non-literary and material evidence of early (pre-rabbinic) Judaism (including the Qumran finds) as it developed under the conditions of the Hellenistic-Roman world between ca. 300 BC and 200 AD. Under the extended name Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti digital (CJHNTdigital), the proposed project includes the complete recording, digital documentation and annotated evaluation of the CJH with regard to its significance for the interpretation of the New Testament from the roots of Judaism influenced by Greco-Roman culture.

This research perspective is based on the fundamental insight, which is by no means self-evident in research, that the writings of the New Testament themselves belong to the Jewish writings of the epoch in question or were written in the narrower context of Jewish-Hellenistic culture and tradition. The CJH is therefore the most important comparative corpus to the New Testament in terms of its origins and impact. While the New Testament is currently still largely understood as a Christian canon in contrast to Jewish literature and culture, from the perspective of the project it appears as a genuine part of the literary history of Hellenistic Judaism, which itself gains a new profile as a result. This is indicated not least by the fact that the majority of Jewish-Hellenistic texts have only been preserved through a history of transmission in the context of the emerging Christian tradition.

The realization of the CJHNTdigital project on the basis of a digital research environment not only makes it possible for the first time to comprehensively process and comment on the texts of the CJH in their relation to the New Testament, but the project can also be extended to other areas of ancient literature and history. The research platform thus has the potential to establish itself as an authoritative working environment in the research field of Theology/Jewish Studies/History of Religion. The necessary interdisciplinary orientation involves the inclusion of other ancient studies disciplines, for which the project will also be of benefit: Jewish Studies, Classical Philology, Papyrology, Numismatics, Epigraphy, Iconography, Archaeology, Ancient History and Computer Science/Digital Humanities.

Detailed Description

Research history of the project and status of the preliminary work

The creation of selective collections from larger volumes of text with the aim of understanding and interpreting one's own past and present has a long history. For example, apart from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the oldest testimonies of Hellenistic Judaism were only preserved because Alexander Polyhistor (ca. 110-40 BC) included them in his collected work Peri Ioudaiōn, which in turn was used extensively by Eusebius of Caesarea, mainly in Book IX of his work Praeparatio Evangelica. In it, Eusebius compiled testimonies about the Jewish people and their religion as part of his historical-philosophical justification of Christian revelation as a critique and confirmation of both biblical-Jewish and philosophical-pagan traditions. It was above all through Eusebius that the beginnings of Jewish-Hellenistic literature were preserved in Christian literature. The same applies to the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which stands at the beginning of Jewish-Hellenistic literature, as well as to the remains of the other, primarily Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible, the fragments of which are largely due to the collection work of the Alexandrian Christian scholar Origen in the first half of the 3rd century.

The writings of the outstanding Jewish-Hellenistic authors Philo of Alexandria and Josephus of Jerusalem were also only handed down in the Christian cosmos, and it took until the 10th (Josippon) and 16th century (Philo) before these texts also made an impact within Judaism again. For other elements of Jewish-Hellenistic literature (especially apocalypticism), this reintegration into Jewish religious and cultural history only took place with a delay and after overcoming considerable internal resistance to these sometimes 'bizarre' worlds of imagination in the course of the 20th century, after the significance and scholarly exploration (combined with numerous new discoveries) had begun, especially in the context of New Testament scholarship in the second half of the 19th century.

These texts often only survived outside Latin- and Greek-language Christian literature, even if the surviving Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian or (ecclesiastical) Slavic translations still often reveal the Greek original. Whenever these texts were included in a scholarly study of the New Testament, the perspective changed on both sides: The specifically Jewish character of the writings of the New Testament was seen more clearly, thereby removing the ground from overly simple, sometimes anti-Jewish mechanisms of exaggeration and demarcation within Christian theology. At the same time, it was recognized that Judaism in the Roman period should not be understood historically solely through the perspective of rabbinic Judaism - which was also preferred within the Jews for a long time - but that it was much more pluralistic and that views such as those found in the New Testament were held independently of this and in some cases even earlier within the broad spectrum of Judaism.

The beginning of the systematic use of Jewish-Hellenistic texts (especially the Septuagint and Josephus) for the interpretation of the New Testament is linked to the so-called ≫Observations literature≪, which began in the 16th century and focused on the relationship between Hellenism and the New Testament. The Leipzig professor Joachim Camerarius (1500-1574) was one of the first important representatives. Based on the hermeneutical program of Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the medieval interpretation of the fourfold sense of Scripture with its overemphasis on allegory was countered by a philological-historical exegesis based on the semantics, syntax and textual pragmatics of the biblical authors. This could only be achieved through comparison with contemporary Hebrew and Greek literature, so that from then on a profound knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew languages and their literatures was part of the ideal - initially only Protestant - of the Bible interpreter. A new type of commentary emerged, the aim of which was to understand the language, style and content of the New Testament texts more appropriately on the basis of philological parallels from the entire Greek tradition (from Homer to the church writers of the 5th century).

Hugo Grotius (1583- 1645) and his Annotationes in libros Evangeliorum (Amsterdam 1641), in which Philo of Alexandria was also consulted in detail for the first time, represent a milestone in the literature of observations. By 1650, Grotius had completed his edition of the entire New Testament in three volumes, which underwent numerous reprints and revisions. The highlight, although not yet the end of this genre of collected literature, is the edition of the New Testament by Johann Jakob Wettstein (1693-1754), which appeared in two volumes in 1751/52 and still gives its name to the so-called ≫New Wettstein≪ today. The ≫old≪ Wettstein aimed to compile as broad a material basis as possible for the interpretation of the New Testament on the basis of over 30,000 philological and factual source documents from the entire Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin literature of antiquity up to the early Middle Ages, including biblical, early Christian, patristic and rabbinical sources, in order to be able to make appropriate decisions in the event of text-critical difficulties. A deeper exploration of the profile and intentions of the extra-New Testament sources, on the other hand, was not intended, and this criticism also applies to the follow-up project of the ≫New Wettstein≪ initiated in 1986, which has clear limitations as an uncommented collection of material.

From the ≫old Wettstein≪ not only a line leads to the ≫new≪, but also to the ≫Corpus Hellenisticum≪. This project, initiated in 1915 by the Leipzig New Testament scholar C. F. Georg Heinrici, aimed to prepare a fundamental revision of Wettstein's edition of the New Testament under the new name. The publication of Billerbeck's monumental collection of passages ≫Commentary on the New Testament from Talmud and Midrash≪ in 1922 made the treatment of rabbinic literature superfluous, so that from then on all attention was focused on Greek (and to a lesser extent Latin) literature. This project was pursued in various branches (Corpus Pagano-Hellenisticum and Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum) throughout the 20th century, but only achieved limited results in individual areas and never realized the desired overall project.

In his research report, Frey rightly emphasizes that only through such ≫parallels and contextualizations≪as made possible by the ≫New Wettstein≪ and similar works is understanding really advanced. That is why the collection and reflected exegetical perception of parallels, background and contrasting texts to New Testament statements is of the greatest interpretative value. Admittedly, this can hardly be achieved today through a single collection focused on a specific textual area, but only through an interdisciplinary collection and consideration of parallels from different religious-historical contexts.¹The CJHNTdigital project offers such a perspective, both in relation to the New Testament and the early Jewish writings in their mutual relationship. In addition, the project is designed in such a way that other text corpora, which are not (initially) given priority in this project, can be connected by supplementing the platform accordingly.

The problem with all previous attempts at realization is the wealth of material, which not only has to be processed academically, but also presented in an appropriate manner. The requirements have changed so fundamentally as a result of the scholarly work of the last 50 years that a one-line parallel collection based on the New Testament no longer meets today's demands and insights. In addition, the material base has expanded considerably in the last 100 years or so. This applies in particular to the Corpus Qumranicum, which could not be included in the original project structure of the CJH due to the history of its discovery. Against this background, in 2000 a group of researchers developed and tested a new concept for processing the CJH in relation to the New Testament. To this end, project workshops have been held at regular intervals (annually) and five international conferences have been held to date, which have been documented in conference proceedings. The CJH has already compiled extensive overviews of passages from some areas of the New Testament (Romans and Galatians; Pastoral Epistles; Epistle of James; Gospels: Mark, Matthew and Luke). As part of a sub-project on the Pastoral Epistles, a concept for a digital working structure was developed in 2013-2015 in cooperation with the Institute for Applied Computer Science at the University of Leipzig, which is the starting point for a professional and internet-based digital research platform and was further developed in cooperation with the Chair of Digital Humanities in Leipzig.

¹ Frey, Der »Neue Wettstein« auf der Zielgeraden, 904.

Detailed description of the research project

Methodological consequences of the research subject and objective

a) The fundamental perspective of the project is based on the insight that the writings of the New Testament belong to the writings of Hellenistic Judaism. Moreover, the testimonies of ancient Judaism in the Hellenistic-Roman period are inextricably linked to the intellectual, social and political developments of the ancient culture(s) and can only be understood as part of these culture(s). Nevertheless, a factual and methodological focus of the research perspective on the early Jewish testimonies suggests itself for several reasons. Firstly, as indicated above, recent research has increasingly emphasized that almost all the authors of the New Testament writings, like their addressees, were either Jews themselves or at least had close factual and historical ties with the diverse Judaism of the Hellenistic-Roman period. This is not only evident from the historical origins of the early Christian movement in the inner-Jewish reform movement of Jesus of Nazareth and his pre- and post-Easter followers, but is also visible in concrete textual elements on every page of the New Testament, in terms of language, tradition, religious history and theology.

On the other hand, the early Jewish testimonies allow us to study in a special way how the writings of Israel were transformed into a new form of biblical-Jewish tradition in Hellenistic-Roman times with the intellectual means and perspectives of Greco-Roman culture. Early Christianity and its literature emerged from this diverse form of Judaism. The proposed project is methodologically oriented towards this religious and literary-historical thesis and its methodological and structural architecture takes into account the mutual transfer of cultural and religious ideas.

b) Methodologically, the research objective makes it necessary to digitally record, process and present the entire corpus of Jewish-Hellenistic writings on a digital research platform. The research perspective of “mutual perception” is to be reflected in the architecture of the database insofar as the use of the project results on the user interface is possible in various directions. As an added value of the digital format (compared to the pure print format), it is thus also possible to create a continuous commentary on an early Jewish writing with the help of corresponding digital tools and links, which then - in a reverse perspective - electronically selects and presents testimonies from New Testament texts.

c) A large part of the literary text inventory of the CJH (in original or traditional languages) is already available in various places in different electronic formats. This also applies to the writings of the New Testament, which can be entered in digital form on the basis of a license agreement with the German Bible Society. However, most of these texts are not openly licensed and digitally edited, meaning that a significant proportion of the CJH texts are only available in a digitally edited form subject to a license. In order to avoid having to carry out a large amount of digitization and modeling work again, a usage agreement is currently being negotiated with a provider. This will significantly increase the efficiency of creating a data repository, accelerate the research platform's ability to work and also save high personnel costs. It should be noted that the digitized texts are based on older, public domain editions and therefore do not represent the latest research. This has to be taken into account when annotating and is primarily captured by the documentation of the research work in the printed fascicles.

d) Text material from the CJH that has not yet been processed, as well as non-literary material (e.g. Jewish papyri; coins; inscription material) must be digitized, modelled and integrated into the research platform as part of the project. From this point of view, the project also has a conservational and encyclopaedic function of digitally securing and summarizing the CJH's entire collection of sources in one working environment. The development and integration of digital interfaces will enable the connection with the data stock of existing critical text editions or subject-specific databases.

The aim is to interlink existing digital sub-collections, which is an urgent desideratum due to the inevitable fragmentation of such research work and the problem of a lack of sustainable updating and continuation of existing platforms. The digital project format also allows the integration of image material, particularly in the case of coins, inscriptions and other evidence of material culture. This provides biblical scholars and scholars from related disciplines (ancient history, classical philology, patristics, religious studies, Jewish studies) as well as anyone interested in in-depth knowledge of the New Testament in the context of ancient Judaism with a working tool that takes into account the constitutive importance of early Judaism for the scholarly interpretation of the New Testament and research into the history of early Christianity.

e) The research platform will be consistently bilingual (German and English).

Text selection criteria

The CJH essentially consists of:
I. the Greek versions of the biblical tradition,
II. the Greek-Jewish authors' literature (some of which has only survived in fragments),
III. the pseudonymous or anonymous early Jewish writings outside the biblical literature,
IV. Evidence for Jewishness in non-Jewish sources,
V. non-literary sources of various provenance (papyri, inscriptions, coins, archaeological findings).

The period of origin of the sources included is the era of Judaism in the Hellenistic-Roman period, for which the above-mentioned period from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD has been established in research. It should be borne in mind that in many cases it is not possible to clearly date individual writings and that the chronological boundaries of the early Jewish period can also be determined in a highly differentiated manner. More important than a precise chronological delimitation of the sources considered is their factual connection with Hellenistic-Roman culture. The language of the sources is undoubtedly an important indicator of this, so that the circumstances of early Judaism in the Mediterranean region suggest a preference for Greek (and to a lesser extent Latin) sources, without fundamentally excluding other original or translated languages.

This gives rise to methodological problems that need to be taken into account when selecting texts: Firstly, by no means all the sources in question are preserved in their original languages. Secondly, in many cases the textual tradition goes back no further than the Byzantine or medieval period. Thirdly, many of the originally early Jewish texts have only survived in a more or less clearly recognizable Christian transformation, and fourthly, there are Jewish-Hellenistic texts that were written in Hebrew or Aramaic and have also been preserved as such.

This has the following consequences for the commentary section of the project:

For the presentation and commentary of source excerpts in the original language and the translation to be produced in the project, texts handed down in Greek and Latin are generally selected;
Texts written or handed down in Hebrew or Aramaic are also taken into account insofar as they reflect specific features of Hellenistic-influenced early Judaism; this applies in particular to the inclusion of the Corpus Qumranicum.
Early Jewish texts that have only survived in the ancient Christian tradition in Oriental, Slavic or other “church languages” are presented in German and English translation alongside the original language version.

Although such a solution also follows pragmatic considerations, it also does justice to the factual problems associated with the textual transmission of the early Jewish sources. This applies in particular to the texts from Qumran, which, due to their largely Hebrew-Aramaic textual form, are usually ignored in research on Hellenistic Judaism. CJHNTdigital does not draw this linguistic dividing line, as the Qumran texts belong to the period of Judaism's engagement with Hellenism due to their date of origin. When selecting texts from the Septuagint, preference is also given to those that show characteristic differences to the original Hebrew or Aramaic text and suggest influences in the Hellenistic-Roman period.

When presenting sources that have been preserved in other languages (Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Slavonic, etc.), the problems of textual transmission must be mentioned in the commentary if they are relevant to the question of the early Jewish “Urtext” and thus to the CJHNTdigital project. Often, a Greek first or at least surviving version can be made probable for these writings (e.g. for parts of the Enoch literature). The decisive criterion for the selection of such texts, which were not originally written in Greek or have not survived in their Greek version, is their significance for the Hellenistic-Roman era of early Judaism.

One problem is the identification of Christian interpolations or layers of revision in early Jewish writings, right up to the controversial debate as to whether there was a pre-Christian Jewish version of certain writings at all (e.g. TestXII, 4Baruch). When selecting excerpts from such writings, careful consideration will have to be given to whether there are reasons to infer a pre-Christian transmission stage of the source from the Hellenistic-Roman period that is relevant and meaningful for the project's approach.

A further text area with particular challenges are Jewish-Hellenistic texts that have only been preserved in fragments in Christian contexts as excerpts and quotations. These include the fragments of so-called Jewish-Hellenistic exegetes and historians (e.g. Aristobulos, Demetrios, Eupolemos, Artapanos), handed down by Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, which require particular hermeneutical and methodological caution in order to make them accessible.

The content-related and methodological issues must be kept under constant review during the development of the commentaries in the project and, if necessary, explicitly discussed in individual cases. For this reason, the interpretive and commentary sections in CJHNTdigital are of particular academic importance. Regular workshops and two specialist conferences serve to discuss such problems of text selection and treatment on the basis of the current state of research and to continue working on them productively with the help of results already achieved. In particular, the format of the conferences and workshops serves to focus on the respective individual profile and the historical intrinsic value of the Jewish-Hellenistic texts dealt with and their relevance for Judaic research.

Criteria of the commentary

A key feature of the project is the indexing and annotation of the selected early Jewish text excerpts in their literary-historical contexts and their relationship to the New Testament. To this end, a methodological algorithm for processing the early Jewish sources was developed, taking into account specialized research and the relevant history of research.

The processing of the entries is divided into the following categories:
(A) Overview of special literature,
(B) Overview of references,
(C) Justification of the text selection from the CJH,
(D) Presentation of the selected text excerpts,
(E) Summarizing evaluation and further information.

After citing selected special literature on the NT passage (A), which discusses its relationship to early Jewish literature, the overview of references (B) includes all early Jewish references to the continuous text of the New Testament writings.

Particular importance is attached to the justification of the text selection (C) for the commentary. The following aspects are decisive here:

Context of the statement in the early Jewish source,
context of the statement in the New Testament Scriptures,
conceptual, thematic or literal similarities (possibly also contradictions),
informative value for characteristic features of the early Jewish tradition,
informative value for the development of the New Testament passage,
significance in the history of research.

In contrast, an assumed or presumed genealogical relationship in the sense of literary or tradition-historical dependencies between a New Testament writing and an early Jewish source plays a lesser role in the selection of the textual evidence presented. Accordingly, within the limits set by the CJH (see above), certain early Jewish sources are not preferred or set aside for dating reasons. The already mentioned problem of Christian interpolations or reworking layers must be discussed in this context and clarified as far as possible.

The core of the project consists of the presentation of the text excerpts selected for commentary (D). This part is subdivided into six sections:

(a) References to the early Jewish text,
(b) Introduction and contextualization of the early Jewish reference; historical and literary explanations; references to early Jewish references that are not presented, e.g. those that do not belong to the corpus in the narrower sense (Rabbinica, pagan texts, etc.),
(c) Text in original language, if necessary in translation language,
(d) text-critical and philological explanations of the text and translation,
(e) German and English translation,
(f) commentary and interpretation.

Particular attention is to be paid here to the assessment and evaluation of the literary and historical contexts of the selected early Jewish texts in their own right, before they are commented on - structurally under heading E (see below) - for the understanding of the New Testament passage. With the help of the presentation in the original language and their own translation, direct access to the early Jewish sources should be suggested and facilitated for the user. Philological explanations of the text and translation also serve this purpose.

A summarizing evaluation and further references (E) conclude each entry; if necessary, several entries from early Jewish sources can be summarized and evaluated here. At this point, the findings from the use of the early Jewish texts for the understanding of the New Testament passage are collected and evaluated with regard to Scripture as a whole or characteristic developments in early Christianity.

Use of information technologies and data backup

Structure and function of the digital working environment

The requirement for the digital platform is to map the described content aspects of the project as well as the structures of the work steps. The starting point for modeling the architecture of the platform is the draft of a digital working environment developed in the project. This is expanded using existing technologies, adapted to the requirements of the project and optimized according to the necessary functions in close coordination with the specialist scientists in the project.

A central component of the platform will be the reading interface. At this level, interactive use of the data is possible in three different ways: interaction with the commentary, with the biblical texts and with the texts of the CJH. In the commentary reading function, users can navigate, search and link the text data on which the commentary is based using search functions. The modeled biblical text allows direct access to underlying metadata and links to texts in the database. Each verse of the New Testament as well as the corresponding commentary and the stored Jewish texts can be accessed via a corresponding navigation. Parallel texts can be called up from passages of the New Testament text or other links can be created according to user-defined criteria. This makes it possible to access all Jewish texts relevant to a New Testament passage - and vice versa, the Jewish texts can be used accordingly and navigated in the same way. The texts of the CJH are linked to the commentary level so that the corresponding biblical parallels and the associated commentaries can be found. These reciprocal links take account of the fundamental perspective of the project, namely that the texts of the New Testament represent a separate canonical corpus of writings within the Christian tradition, but that they were initially created as part of the diverse literature of Hellenistic Judaism.

The search interface uses structured search functions to access all texts (in the respective text languages) in the database, based on the full text, the lemmas or the metadata. It is possible to combine full-text and metadata searches so that hybrid search algorithms can also be generated. The search results are linked to the reading interface so that it is possible to switch between using the search and reading functions.

The input interface is only accessible to project members. Via this interface, all entries are transformed into the correct format according to the work steps, the links specified in the comments are set, etc. Other project members can also use this interface to make changes and corrections at any time. In the spirit of open and citizen science, the platform is intended to provide an extended level of interaction to enable users to participate in the improvement of the text and data material and its processing.

Data formats

All text data of the project are published in TEI-XML format in accordance with the CapiTainS Guidelines (https://github.com/Capitains). The CapiTainS Guidelines allow texts to be clearly referenced down to the word level in order to precisely link certain commentaries or biblical and early Jewish passages. CapiTainS defines a specific set of required metadata that is optimized for web presentation. This metadata is based on the Dublin Core standards and makes it possible to model metadata based on standards or guidelines that meet the project requirements. CapiTainS also defines a text API that can be used to retrieve specific parts of any text. Both the TEI-XML standards and the CapiTainS guidelines are created under open source licenses, so that the project can freely use and modify any part of them to meet its own requirements.

The texts of the CJH are recorded in a data repository. Different formats will be used. A usage agreement with “Logos” means that the majority of the CJH texts will be digitally available for immediate use in tagged or marked form at the start of the project. Other texts are currently only accessible in image format (PDF scans) and are to be successively prepared digitally according to personnel capacities.

Technologies

The project uses open source technologies to create data and program code. The programming is carried out using open technologies for both the server (e.g. Python, Java, PHP, Node.js) and the client side (e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery). In order to efficiently map the relationships between the texts used, these must be stored in a dynamic graph database (e.g. Neo4J, MongoDB, OrientDB, ArangoDB) based on unique identifiers. By using the CapiTainS API, the different levels can be linked together. An essential technological element is the implementation of interfaces that enable networking and linking with other online projects (e.g. Papyrus Portal, Cologne Inscription Project, etc.) on the basis of the corresponding cooperations.

(Digital) sustainability and archiving

The project publishes all data under Creative Commons licenses. This allows other users and projects to use, extend and modify the data as long as they acknowledge the data source (i.e. the CJHNTdigital project). The program code is also released under an open license that corresponds to the code being created, e.g. GNU General Public License, MIT license, Apache license, etc. These licenses allow the free use and further development of the program codes developed in the project.

The project's digital working environment will be hosted in and integrated into the technical infrastructure of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which will primarily ensure the operation of the platform in terms of long-term availability even after the end of the project. In order to make the research data and results available in the long term in accordance with the FAIR Data principles, they are stored in certified repositories (e.g. in accordance with the Core Trust Seal) and also archived for the long term via these repositories. The concrete regulations on formats and responsibilities will be developed and specified in a research data management plan at the beginning of the project and iteratively adapted to current circumstances, technologies and standards over the course of the project. The aim is to integrate the research data into the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), which is currently being set up at the time of application. This is organized in so-called consortia, which serve methodological or subject-specific focal points. The Text+ consortium, in which the SAW is a consortium partner and acts as a data and competence center, is responsible for text and language-based research data. These are ideal conditions for ensuring the sustainable safeguarding of the data, including central networking and provision for the purpose of searchability via central search algorithms, as well as the implementation and provision of the necessary interfaces when setting up the platform, in close coordination with the NFDI consortium Text+. All online publications comply with the current recommendations on electronic publishing issued by the Union of German Academies and the German Research Foundation.

For the duration of the project, all data will be stored and made available on servers and all program code on the GitLab implementation of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities and on Github. GitLab and Github are useful as version management and project management systems to enable and document the collaboration of different project members on the data and program code. From the current perspective, maximum efficiency of the backup concept beyond the duration of the project can only be realized in a hybrid form. As described above, the concept of long-term data backup therefore also includes the print publication of the specific research results from the commentary section of the project.