New Testament and Digital Humanities

Alliance biblique française, online: https://lire.la-bible.net (Jun 7, 2020). – Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, online: https://www.die-bibel.de/ (Jun 7, 2020). – Digital Editio Critica Maior, online: https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/ecm (Jun 7, 2020). – Early Christianity: The Letters of Paul, online: https://www.edx.org/course/ear ly-christianity-letters-paul-harvardx-hds1544-1x (Jun 7, 2020). – New Revised Standard Version, online: https://www.zondervan.com/p/nrsv-2/ (Jun 7, 2020). – New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, online: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/ (Jun 7, 2020). – SBL Bible Odyssey, online: https://www.bibleodyssey.org/ (Jun 7, 2020). – YouVersion, https://www.youversion.com (Jun 7, 2020).

Literature, Bible Odyssey (section 3), a Harvard teaching MOOC Early Christian Letters of Paul (section 4), and what I propose to name the »Digital Editio Critica Maior« (DECM) with the NT Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR) (section 5). The writing of this article has been supported by the SNSF PRIMA project MARK16; some passages come from a previously published de Gruyter article in CC BY-SA 4.0 license (https:// doi.org/10.1515/opth-2019-0035 [Jun 7, 2020]) or are translated from a French book (Clivaz, Écritures) with the kind permission of the publishers.

Perspectives on the state of the art: Bible and New Testament in digital culture
It is well known that the first computing tool built for the humanities was the Index Thomisticus, created by Jesuit Roberto Busa. Soon thereafter, the Reverend John W. Ellison produced the first computing tool for biblical studies, an index of the English translation of the Revised Standard Version (Jones, 100f.). This traditional Anfangspunkt in the history of DH has often promoted Roberto Busa to the position of »father of the discipline«, a prominent role demonstrated by his enthusiasm for DH, going so far as to compare him to the »finger of God« (Busa). In the early 1990s, the field of biblical studies relied on and advanced alongside the DH to a greater extent than any other discipline in the humanities (Garcés/Heilmann, 30). But critical reflection on the relationship between the DH and theology has been slow to emerge: Jeffrey Siker's »Liquid Scripture«, the first monograph devoted to the Bible in digital culture, was published in 2017, only sixty years after the biblical index built by Ellison. Siker's work was followed in quick succession by C. Clivaz's »Écritures digitales« and P. Phillips' »The Bible, Social Media and Digital Culture« (2019 both). This substantial six decade gap reflects the transformation of the biblical text influenced by the beginning of digital culture, as well as the multimodal expression of the Bible and theological discourse in digital culture. To reflect on this expanding field, a special »Open Theology« issue was published in 2019 on Digital Humanities, demonstrating the relevance of digital theology (Clivaz/Allen). Generic tools (not available in OA) such as »Bibleworks«, »Accordance«, and »Logos«, are now widely used, alongside OA biblical applications like »YouVersion«

Online translations of the Bible and the software application YouVersion
At first glance, it would seem obvious to find the major translations of the Bible in OA with notes. However, upon further inspection, this is not the case for German, English, and French translations.
German reference Bible translations are available online in OA on a reference website, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, specifically the »Lutherbibel 2017«, »der zum Gebrauch empfohlene Bibeltext der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (EKD)«, and the »Zürcher Bibel«, »eine gediegene Übersetzung von hohem Niveau«, as their websites indicate. It must be noted that one can only get the translated text in OA, and not the footnotes and comments of these editions; they remain only partly in OA. Similarly, in regards to the reference edition of the Greek New Testament edited by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, the Nestle-Aland 28th edition, the Greek text is available in OA, but not the apparatus criticus. This website does not provide multimodal material.
When it comes to French translations, La Traduction Oecuménique de la Bible (TOB) is not available in OA on the publisher website, Le Cerf. It was accessible several years ago, and there are archives of websites detailing requests to withdraw the TOB online, for example on the Dominicans website trader.org. However, the 2010 TOB version was co-edited with the Société biblique française, now L'Alliance biblique française, that provides a TOB version in OA on its website, without notes, with five other French translations. There is also a link providing a few videos, but it is not possible to listen to the biblical text. Last but not least, in a 2017 report, L'Alliance biblique française revealed that one-fifth of Bibles are now downloaded online through the software application YouVersion, instead of purchased as paper books. In other words, a reader must go through an interpretive framework to find the NRSV in OA, since it is unavailable on the publisher's website. In this context, the YouVersion app and Bible.com are becoming the common places to access NRSV and other translations. The Bible is available in 900 languages on You- Such observations should provoke critical thought for the church, considering the fact that YouVersion is providing more than one-fifth of the Bibles purchased every year worldwide. At the same time, it is an interesting tool to be used in church for teaching teens and adults, with a critical perception of the material surrounding the texts themselves. All participants in theological education, from the minister to the professor of theology, should be concerned by the fact that we do not currently have an accurate translation of the Bible with notes and comments available in OA in German, French, or English. An urgent discussion with publishers is needed on this topic.

The web portal »Bible Odyssey«
Bible Odyssey is a multimedia biblical encyclopedia, under the umbrealla of the Society of Biblical Literature. SBL produces this OA and born digital tool, attesting to the quality of the content, with articles written by established scholars. It aims to »address not only the literacy gap but also the gap between the academy and the ›street‹« in regards to the Bible. It is divided in three sections: people, places, and passages, and it also offers Bibles and tools with audio and video galleries. Resources are conclusively multimodal, implying texts and images, or texts and audios, or all the three together. The multimodality is one of the big transformations of the Bible in digital culture.
Over the past several years, Biblical exegesis has become increasingly influenced by orality, notably with the emergence of »performance criticism« (B. Oestreich/G. Holland) and »visual exegesis« (V. Robbins/W. Melion). However, the main multimodal impact on Scriptures is due to the widespread use of biblical applications or websites like Bible Odyssey. The creation of multimodal digital expressions of the Scriptures brings about several new theological challenges, from exegesis to practical theology, ethics, and systematic theology. It blurs the boundaries between the diverse literary genres, a general phenomenon in digitized Humanities, noted by R. Chartier (Chartier, 12-14).

One can find examples of these blurred lines in Bible Odyssey by consulting the list of places.
No context is given for real geographical places like Alexandria, Antioch, and Bethlehem listed alongside Hell, without quotations marks, or »Kingdom of God« and »Kingdom of Heaven« with quotations marks. It is not evident whether laypeople targeted by the tool will get accurate information from this complex depiction of theological geography. This example demonstrates that the best use of this tool would be in a church context, training teens and adults. Theology students will also surely find useful information, if they consider the resources as basic information, accompanied with images and/or audio material.

Teaching New Testament online: »Early Christian letters of Paul«
There is currently a global challenge of education through MOOC in religious fields, and the online edX/HarvardX course, Early Christianity: The Letters of Paul, launched in 2014, serves as exemplary illustration for this section. All its material has been archived on the edX website and is available in OA, after subscribing with an email and password. The course has been presented and analyzed in detail in an article to which one can refer for further information. In a comprehensive evaluation of this MOOC on the Pauline letters, one can estimate that the large numbers of certification through this platform is likely not the most important point. The course was offered just once in six years, allowing 1,548 people to acquire a basic certificate. But its impact has been quite impressive, reaching thousands of people, not just those attaining certification. This material, and the videos in particular, should be translated into other languages and integrated into NT introduction courses for discussion and debate, as an effective introduction to the field. To look at the NT first as a sea of manuscripts leads one to reconsider the »textuality« of the NT. Digital editions for various Humanities texts or works have a »decanonizing effect,« as argued by S. Mombert (Mombert). But as long as readers ask to read the New Testament, its identity as a coherent and complete text will probably endure, even in a very new format, like the movie published at the end of 2019 by KoineGreek.com that uses the Greek Gospel according to Mark as script.