Over at deinde.org, Danny Zacharias wonders whether Codex Vaticanus will ever be digitized. I really don’t know, but his question reminded me of a very exciting development undertaken by Accordance Bible Software. Now, I know we are not talking about a digitized version of the manuscript itself, but Accordance does include morphologically-tagged editions of parts of the main Greek codices, namely, Vaticanus (the whole NT except for 1-2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Revelation), Sinaiticus (NT), Bezae (Matthew, John, Luke, Mark and Acts) and Washingtonensis (Matthew, John, Luke and Mark). All these Uncials, displayed with the proper uncial font, retain most of the features of the actual manuscripts, and can be compared and searched in almost any imaginable way. Notice in the screenshot below that a search for the lexical form πνευμα finds all the occurrences of the term, including those displayed as nomina sacra.

Again, I know this is not what Danny had in mind, but it gave me an excellent excuse to mention what I consider to be a great tool that, in many ways, is much more powerful and flexible than the kind of digitization projects I have already mentioned before. In actual fact, the availability of these electronic editions enable us to go one step further than simply using the current critical texts available in many Bible software packages.

I expect to see more exciting developments in this area in the near future.