Thursday, December 09, 2004

Testament of Abraham on-line

Which reminds me that I went to the only on-line English translation of the Testament of Abraham available, at New Advent, and it is completely unusable -- riddled with errors, not even ordered properly, clearly not even proof-read before it was uploaded to the web. A real shame. One difficulty here is that it is not straightforward to see who to correspond with about this. It is frusrating because the possibilities for on-line open resources are so strong. Stick an on-line edition up there and each user can help you polish your edition until it is perfect.

In line with this, I have typed up the Greek text of the Apocalypse of Peter, the other text we covered in our post-graduate Greek class this year, with a view to opening it up for others to use and improve. I'll upload that text next week.

But back to the Testament of Abraham again, I have been impressed with the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha and have used the Testament of Abraham Recension A for our classes. The only problem with that project at this stage is that it does not provide printable texts. If you try to print up from the web pages that are there at the moment, you will struggle to get anything decent looking. What I did was to copy and paste the whole lot into a fresh document and re-format and print. (If anyone at the OCP wants a copy of that document, I'd be happy to send it over). So I would recommend that a facility is added to convert to PDF or similar on the fly so that an individual who needs a printed version can use one. To see the kind of thing I mean, have a look at this, which has a PDF button at the top:

The Passion and Resurrection Narratives from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

And see my brief blog post on.

Update (19.25): Ian Scott and Ken Penner email from the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha and confirm (a) that an overhaul of the user interface is planned soon, once the Testament of Job edition is complete and (b) that a more printer-friendly option should be integrated; they have the texts in .doc format for internal use so it will be straightforward to make those more widely available.

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