A Digital Humanities Approach to Textual Emendations with a Special Focus on Ἰουδαίαν in Acts 2:9

The original documents of almost all ancient writings have been lost, and the writings of the New Testament form no exception. Therefore, before any interpretation of a New Testament text, a researcher first must face the challenge of establishing its original wording by critically evaluating the differences in the existing manuscripts. The discipline of textual criticism provides criteria for systematic evaluation of such texts. Besides identified differences, there are texts where the different manuscripts do correspond, but where the content of the text puzzles the researcher. In these cases, some researchers assume a corruption of the text, which could have been caused by a variety of intentional and unintentional errors, and therefore emend the text by conjecture.
Any conjecture starts with an observation on the text, in which a critic is guided by some preunderstanding that leads to the detection of an oddity. After the detection of the textual problem, the critic needs to suggest an alternative that (1) fits the grammatical function of the disputed reading, (2) makes sense in the internal logic of the text, and (3) solves the assumed difficulties. Therefore, the credibility of a conjecture is restricted by grammar, semantics, and its historical, cultural, and geographical suitedness. Finally, the critic must also explain how the attested reading or readings could have originated from the proposed conjecture. Usually, a very early corruption during the transcription process is assumed, which could have been caused by palaeographic or phonetic confusion of letters.
This research proposes a method to estimate the probability of palaeographic confusion to explain the origination of conjectural emendations. Therefore, it introduces the confusion distance, a quantitative metric that indicates the relative proximity in orthography of alternative readings. This metric is based on the Levenshtein edit distance but is here expanded to account for the probability of confusion of a particular combination of (adjacent) letters and functionality has been added to evaluate three additional operations to mimic more sophisticated character confusion.
The resulting distances between the conjectured emendations and the manuscript readings are subsequently translated to a two-dimensional non-geographical space utilizing Multi-Dimensional Scaling and analyzed spatially to evaluate the probability of the originality of variant readings or textual emendations.
The remainder of the presentation will apply this method to the case of Ἰουδαίαν in Acts 2:9. Therefore, it will first present the issues which have challenged exegetes over time. Next, it will provide a short diachronic overview of the suggestions to overcome these challenges and finally it will approach the issue by testing whether reverse engineering might provide a suitable alternative to Ἰουδαίαν.
After presenting the case study its outcomes will be evaluated to assess the method’s viability to aid New Testament interpretation.

van Altena, Vincent, Jan Krans, Henk Bakker, Balász Dukai, and Jantien Stoter. “Spatial Analysis of New Testament Textual Emendations Utilizing Confusion Distances.” OT 5.1 (2019): 44–65.
van Altena, Vincent, Jan Krans, Henk Bakker, and Jantien Stoter. “Ἰουδαίαν in Acts 2:9: A Diachronic Overview of Its Conjectured Emendations.” OT 6.1 (2020): 306–318.
van Altena, Vincent, Jan Krans, Henk Bakker, and Jantien Stoter. “Ἰουδαίαν in Acts 2:9: Reverse Engineering Textual Emendations.” OT 6.1 (2020): 378–391.