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The Bible in Coptic

The Coptic Bible consists of books of the Old and New Testament in one of the Egyptian dialects, such as Sahidic or Bohairic. It is one of the earliest translations of the Bible. The Old Testament was translated from the Septuagint, possibly even in the Hellenistic period; the New Testament from the Greek, in the second century CE. The earliest extant manuscripts date back to the fourth century CE.

In these manuscripts, a considerable number of apocryphal texts are preserved. The best-known example is the Coptic-Gnostic Nag Hammadi library. Its texts can be found here on Scholarly Editions.

This version of the Bible in Coptic presents the edition by the Coptic Scriptorium.This is an interdisciplinary project to create a digital, open source platform for the research of texts in the Coptic language, particularly the Sahidic dialect.

Besides a searchable, richly-annotated corpus of text, published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, Coptic Scriptorium offers tools to analyze these texts, such as lexica and a part-of-speech tagger.

The text of this Coptic Scriptorium version of the Bible in Coptic is in the public domain. Brill has created CTS compliant TEI XML for it. The resulting publication is in Open Access.

Brill Polyglot Bible is not a scholarly publication. It is a showcase of possibilities.

The aim is to collect the books of the Bible in the major languages of the ancient world and to publish them in CTS compliant TEI XML on Brill Scholarly Editions.

In this way, each Biblical passage has a persistent and unique identifier and can be retrieved. This means, for example, that a reference to a Biblical passage in a monograph or journal article can be turned into a hyperlink, so readers can review the passage and its context.

A further possibility is to connect the passages to Biblical iconography using the Iconclass classification system, so readers can go from, for example, an image of the annunciation in the Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie Online to Luke 1:26-38 in the Brill Polyglot Bible and vice versa.

Brill Polyglot Bible is in Open Access.