translation Archives ⋆ X-Reality: University of Michigan XR

AnnArbor.com – St. Paul’s Ancient Letters Available for Perusal

From AnnArbor.com:

You can now hold one of University of Michigan’s most valuable possessions in your hands.

Well, sort of.

Thirty of the rarest, earliest leaves of the Epistles of St. Paul, dating from 180 to 220 AD, have been digitized and turned into an interactive app usable on iPhones and iPads.

“What’s especially important is the direct experience with the ancient world,” Arthur Verhoogt, acting archivist of the library’s papyrology collection, said of the app, called PictureIt: EP.

“History is nice to read about but it’s much more important to be able to touch history.”

The collection of letters, known to scholars as Papyrus 46, is believed to be the oldest known surviving copy of the Letters of St. Paul. Out of the 104 page collection, 30 leaves reside here in Ann Arbor, 56 leaves reside at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and 18 are lost. A leaf is made up of two pages of a book.

The new app, prepared by the Digital Media Commons 3-D Lab at U-M, allows users to flip through the letters as they would a book.

Read the Full Article

PictureIt: Epistles of Paul Released on iTunes

Get the App!

Welcome to the world of second century C.E. Egypt. This app will allow you to leaf through pages of the world’s oldest existing manuscript of the letters of St. Paul (P.Mich.inv.6238, also known in NT scholarship as P46). Thirty leaves of this manuscript, written in about 200 C.E., were found in Egypt and purchased by the University of Michigan Papyrology Collection in 1931 and 1933 (another 56 leaves, not included in this app, are housed in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; 18 leaves are missing completely).

The app will give you the feel of what it was like reading an ancient Greek book on papyrus, where the text is written without word division, punctuation, headings, or chapter and verse numbers. To aid the reader without knowledge of ancient Greek the translation mode will give a literal translation of the Greek text preserved on these pages (with addition of chapter and verse numbers), with explanatory notes showing where this text is different from the Standard text.