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Fifty new manuscripts of Greek New Testament catenae have been identified by the CATENA Project.

The European Research Council-funded CATENA project running at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, has released a new checklist of Greek New Testament manuscripts that contain commentary on the biblical text. This includes fifty new entries, thirty-five of which are not currently listed in the Kurzgefasste Liste of Greek New Testament manuscripts. 

The list has been compiled by Dr Georgi Parpulov, a postdoctoral fellow on the CATENA project with responsibility for producing a catalogue of New Testament catena manuscripts. It builds on the preliminary checklist made by Professor David Parker as part of the ERC COMPAUL project, published in 2016 in the volume Commentaries, Catena and Biblical Tradition, which identified one hundred unregistered New Testament manuscripts.

The new checklist contains 646 items, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, covering the Gospels, Acts and Epistles. It has been released on the University of Birmingham’s epapers portal, at http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/3086. It is expected that the list will be updated during the course of the project, with further updates linked to the first release. 

Professor Hugh Houghton, Principal Investigator of the CATENA Project said:

“This is a wonderful advance for research in this field. Part of the impetus for the CATENA project was the realisation that the coverage of catena manuscripts in the Kurzgefasste Liste is far from complete. Even though we are not yet three months into this five-year project, for Georgi to have identified a further thirty-five previously unregistered manuscripts is already an important contribution. The project will also examine the treatment of the New Testament text in catenae in order to review their suitability for inclusion in the Liste.”

Librarians and researchers are invited to download the spreadsheet and communicate any updates or additions to Dr Parpulov