Hugh Houghton: Patristic evidence in the new edition of the Vetus Latina Iohannes

Since 2002, work has been proceeding on a new edition of the Old Latin versions of John. Transcriptions of the manuscripts are already online at www.iohannes.com/vetuslatina/ and data has been entered from the cards held by the Vetus Latina-Institut in Beuron to an online database comprising more than 60,000 quotations. The task now is to combine this evidence to produce a printed edition in the Herder Vetus Latina series. It is hoped that the first volume (comprising John 1–5) will have been published by the time of the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies.

This paper will introduce the new edition, explaining how the material has been deployed on each page (more than half of which is devoted to presenting the patristic evidence). The contribution of particular authors to the text of John will be discussed, illustrated by their appearance in the edition. Individual readings of special interest will also be highlighted, and there will be a consideration of the broader methodological issues involved in identifying and presenting patristic evidence. The final part of the paper, tying in with the more general theme of the workshop, will focus on how the data gathered for this edition can be made available for re-use by subsequent projects, along with the development of standards and procedures for creating large electronic corpora of biblical material.