Titles of the New Testament
Titles of the New Testament: A New Approach to Manuscripts and the History of Interpretation (TiNT)
The Titles of the New Testament: A New Approach to Manuscripts and the History of Interpretation (TiNT) project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 847428).
Although the titles of the letters and narratives that make up the New Testament are well known, the types of titles found in the manuscripts, their wording, and their aesthetics differ from manuscript to manuscript and place to place. The book of Revelation, for example, has over forty different titles in its Greek manuscripts. This variability provides fresh ground to inform a number of critical issues relevant to biblical studies, theology, reception history, and other disciplines.
The project begins to examine the New Testament's titles and paratexts by digitally editing every form of every title in every non-lectionary Greek manuscript that preserves part of the New Testament, using this data to contribute to new research related to six primary research questions: (1) the diachronic development of paratextual traditions (especially titles in all their forms); (2) the provenance of New Testament works in historical imagination; (3) the relationship between bibliography and canon; (4) the design, codicology, and artistic features of manuscripts; (5) scribal identities and the sociology of textual transmission; and (6) traditions of textual segmentation.
The data produced by the project will also raise new research questions and be publicly available. The objectives of the project are to rethink the critical value of manuscripts beyond the purely textual concerns of traditional textual criticism and to explore titular traditions as expressive modes of communication and as aspects of reception history. We will also interested to carry on an active dialogue with scholars who work with the New Testament in other versions and in early print material, along with colleagues who work with other manuscript cultures of various kinds. For more on the project and its work, see https://kephalaia.com/.