John-punctuation-browser
Textual source comparison
This repository contains a collection of Jupyter notebooks used to generate an overview of possible alternative punctuations in the Greek text of the Gospel of John, based on the Nestle 1904, seventh edition (1913 reprint). These alternative punctuations were identified by analyzing punctuation marks in parallel Greek source texts. Because these sources may also contain textual variations beyond punctuation, a tunable matching algorithm was applied to align the texts accurately. For implementation details, see the notebook sourcecomparing.ipynb.
Greek input texts
The following textual versions were used as input, with links provided to the corresponding preprocessing notebooks. These notebooks transform each source into a standardized format suitable for subsequent analysis.
- N1904 - Eberhard Nestle’s 1904 Greek New Testment
- KJTR - King James Textus Receptus
- SR - Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament
- SBL - Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testment
- TCGNT - Text-Critical Greek New Testament
- TISCH - Tischendorf’s 8th edition
Each of these notebooks generate a set of files like detailed below:
- XX-John.txt : a normalized (lower case, diacritics removed) Greek base text of the Gospel as one string.
- XX-John-tagged.txt : the same text, with verse tags, with each verse on a single line.
- XX-John.json : JSON data with each entry containing a verse tag and the normalized of that verse.
The N1904 preparation notebook generates also a JSON file that maps verses to node numbers (words), providing a reference for subsequent analysis.
The analysis notebooks
After executing all the above notebooks this section performs the analisys and creates the final HTML data for the punctuation browser. The main analysis is done in the following jupyter notebook:
- sourcecomparing.ipynb: This notebook performs three key tasks. Firstly, it combines the JSON data from individual text versions generated in the previous section. Secondly, it identifies differences between the N1904 base text and the other source texts. Finally, it generates a downloadable table that displays, for each verse and source text, the insertion of punctuation marks from other texts into the N1904 text. In cases of textual differences, the variations are displayed below the verse in gray.
Results
The resulting table is downloadable and the file is called John_versions.html. Please note that the filesize is more than 4.6 Mb, so downloading may take a while.
Partial screenshot is shown below. Click on the image to open the file:
Explanation:
- The table consists of five columns: the leftmost displays the N1904 base text in black. The remaining four columns also show the N1904 base text in black, but with punctuation inserted based on the respective column version (e.g., KJTR of SBL).
- Punctuation marks present in the column version but absent in N1904 are highlighted with a green background in the black text.
- Punctuation marks found in N1904 but missing from the column version are indicated by a red placeholder space in the black text.
- If the base text of the column version differs from N1904 other than for punctuation, it appears in gray beneath the N1904 line.
- Words in the column version that differ only slightly from their N1904 counterparts are highlighted in yellow within the gray text.
- Words present in N1904 but missing in the column version are shown in red, struck through in the gray text.
- Words present in the column version but absent in N1904 are shown in blue within the gray text.
Impact of significant base text differences
A brief discussion on the impact of base text differences between N1904 and Tischendorf’s text can be found here.