{"id":2911,"date":"2020-10-06T08:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-10-06T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/sitc\/?p=2911"},"modified":"2020-10-06T08:42:19","modified_gmt":"2020-10-06T13:42:19","slug":"sitc-professors-take-part-in-biblical-research-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/sitc\/sitc-professors-take-part-in-biblical-research-project\/","title":{"rendered":"SITC Professors Take Part in Biblical Research Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. James Prather<\/p><\/div>\n

Dr. James Prather, associate professor of computer science, is combining his love of biblical text and computer science as he continues his work on the THEOT (Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament) project, exploring ancient Ethiopic biblical manuscripts and producing print and digital editions of Old Testament books in Ge\u2019ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. Joining Prather in the work is Dr. Brent Reeves, associate professor of management science and computer science at ACU. Together they are working on visualizing the relationships of these manuscripts and their manuscript families. These visualizations will help biblical scholars get a quick overview of how textual history developed. The THEOT project<\/a> is at the beginning stages of a three-year period, funded by a prestigious $300,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH). ACU received the second-largest grant in the state of Texas for the project, putting the university on the map for biblical research. Along with the visualizations, the project will involve several publications of critical texts of Ethiopic Old Testament books. Prather began his involvement in the project through his master\u2019s work in the ACU Graduate School of Theology where he completed a Master of Divinity and Masters of Arts in the Old Testament. It was during his thesis work that Prather began working under Dr. Curt Niccum, professor of Bible, who is leading the NEH project. Since then they have been brainstorming a way to apply Prather’s computing background to the massive amounts of data that have been collected.<\/p>\n

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Dr. Brent Reeves<\/p><\/div>\n

Dr. Prather stated that there are hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in Ethiopia that have not been studied or cataloged and that the work of this project will ultimately benefit Christians everywhere as we continue to refine our understanding of the earliest biblical manuscripts. Because early manuscripts were copied by hand by scribes, this often led to mistakes being introduced into the texts. Biblical scholars like Dr. Niccum track those mistakes in order to identify relationships between manuscripts and develop a better understanding of textual transmission. This helps scholars piece together the earliest witnesses that shed light on difficult-to-translate verses in the Bible. Ethiopic has long been ignored by biblical scholars but has recently picked up steam within the community. Ancient Ethiopic, called Ge’ez, was spoken until around the 10th century A.D. and is one of the languages into which the Bible was translated within the first few centuries after Christ. Unlike other translation languages, such as Latin or Coptic, Ge’ez is Semitic (like Hebrew) and shares influences from Arabic and Syriac, as well as Greek. With such a goldmine of manuscripts, Prather intends to utilize data mining and artificial intelligence algorithms to sort through them to provide a meaningful picture for scholars to consume.<\/p>\n

Dr. Prather hopes that his students will gain an understanding of how computer science can be used in partnership with other fields of study like working on the biblical text. He also noted that his propensity for biblical languages stems from a penchant for computer languages stating, “It is all syntax and vocabulary and if you are a linguist switching from one to another, it does not really matter a whole lot. So if you nail programming languages, you will probably be pretty good at spoken languages too.” Prather feels that the real contribution to this work is that the witness of the Ethiopic text is going to help increase the validity of the Bible by either adding witnesses to what we already know or helping shape clarity to our understanding of the Bible. Along with this important work, the THEOT project is showcasing ACU as being at the forefront of cutting-edge biblical studies research, raising ACU’s profile among other universities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. James Prather, associate professor of computer science, is combining his love of biblical text and computer science as he continues his work on the THEOT (Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament) project, exploring ancient Ethiopic biblical manuscripts and producing print and digital editions of Old Testament books in Ge\u2019ez, the ancient language of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18013,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"

Dr. James Prather, Professor of Computer Science is continuing the work of the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) who are trying to explore different manuscripts and their families. What Dr. James Prather in addition to Dr. Brent Reeves is part of in this project is visualizing the relationships of manuscripts and their manuscript's families, so one can get a quick understanding of how the textual history developed. they work of this project is in the beginning of a two to three-year project. How Dr. Prather began his involvement in the project was through his master\u2019s work in Divine Ministry and Masters in the Old Testament he had studied Ethiopic language under Dr. Nickom. (?) Since then they have been brainstorming a way to apply Dr. Prather's computing background to the mass data that has been collected. ()<\/p>

Prather had let us know that while there are hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in Ethiopia they have not been studied or cataloged and the work of this project would benefit biblical manuscripts and relate to biblical witnesses that would be very beneficial for refining our understanding of such as the New Testament. With THEOT they want to produce the manuscripts to visualize the relationship between the manuscripts and the manuscript's families. With different manuscripts that have been copied over and over, there is a process where THEOT is trying the get a full picture of the textural history of a particular book of the bible in Ethiopic language. This is where Dr. Prather and THEOT begins the use of computing as the mass information is gathered from the copies and their families, they make the visitation in family trees of the manuscripts in finding the most reliable copies to produce biblical text for the community.<\/p>

What Dr. Prather is hoping that his students and other students to gain from this project \"is ways that computing can be put to use projects that really matter, such as working on the biblical text.\" Also that his propensity for biblical leagues stems from is a propensity from computer languages and that, \"it is all syntax and vocabulary and if you are a linguist switching from one to another does not really matter a whole lot so if you nail programming languages you will probably be pretty good at spoken languages\u00a0too.\" The real contribution to all this work is that the witness of the Ethiopic text is going to help increase the validity of our New Testaments by either adding witnesses to what we already know or helping shape clarity to our understanding of the New Testament. This project that Prather and Reeves and other ACU faculty are taking part in is adding to letting more people know that ACU at the forefront of cutting-edge biblical studies research.<\/p>

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