Why Digitize Manuscripts

An extremely brief rundown from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. I really appreciate the work of this group, though I rarely need to consult a manuscript directly, and then usually only to ooh and aah over some feature mentioned by an expert.

But all the tools I use benefit from making manuscripts more accessible. I recommend looking at a manuscript digitized in the type of resolution they’re talking about to understand the benefits for researchers. I wrote a paper for my class in NT textual criticism in college and had to acquire microfiche images for a number of manuscripts. Not fun to read!

PS: My company has just released a reprint of a work from the 1970s, The Byzantine Text & New Testament Textual Criticism. As I was reading this, I was thinking how much easier it would be to research the kind of information used with current digitized manuscripts.