It has been a while since I’ve shared any new recording or ProveText videos, and some may think I’ve fallen off the earth. I wanted to write a brief post sharing what I’ve been up to for those who may be interested in my Greek work. I have been working on printing a Complete Greek Bible!

The last 18 months have been busy in my life, I’ve let off the gas pedal in Greek in some ways, and accelerated in some other areas, but my Greek life hasn’t been dead by any means. Some of you may know I had my hip replaced a couple years ago, and after about a year, I decided to get back in shape, and started putting a lot more time into exercise, mostly in the form of 5am workout classes. Consequently I have had to go to bed earlier than I used to (9:30 like a proper old person, er, recipient of an artificial hip). Additionally, about a year ago (a little more), my wife and I picked back up developing our Spanish abilities, and a little later I started learning Japanese with my kids.

So where does all that leave Greek. Greek has mostly been in what I have called “Maintenance Mode”. I typically listen to about 25 minutes of Greek in my car on the way to work and do a handful of ANKI reviews each day. I’ll occasionally do some reading on the weekends or if I’m feeling spunky.

Despite the lower volume of Greek for me lately, I have embarked on a project that I think may be of interest to others out there, which is to produce a full Koine Greek print Bible that is a single volume, minimalist design that can be taken to church or wherever. This has been a fun challenge, and has allowed me to merge my profession skills (as a software engineer) to with my passion for Greek and the Bible. I may share a post in the future with the details of how I have been executing this project, but for now I just wanted to share a general status update and some pictures.

Project Details

The main goals of this project are:

• A single volume Bible, small enough to take to church
• Septuagint OT and Modern Eclectic Text for the NT
• Minimalist design
  • Single column
  • No apparatus
  • Lightweight chapter (margin) and verse numbering (faded)
• Pretty Styles (to me at least)
• 9pt or greater font (for ease of reading)

Some of the nice to have features (which may not make it into the final version):

• Color headings and dropcaps
• Leather, soft imitation leather, or hardback binding

I started considering this project when I began to search for a complete Greek Bible and came up (nearly) empty. Most Septuagint editions are quite large by themselves. I only found 2 complete Greek Bibles that have been printed. One was out of print, very expensive, and seemed quite large and uncomfortable to read. The other was cheap but I really disliked its styling and layout, and I wanted a different NT text. Finding the pickings slim, I considered whether this was a project I could accomplish on my own, and decided to give it a shot.

For the text sources I used Brenton’s Septuagint and the OpenGNT. The choices here were fairly pragmatic. Both are in public domain, but OpenGNT gets close enough to NA to make it feel similar. Brenton was chosen, because I found a base print project that was using the Latex print files offered by ebible.org.

First Print

Last week I printed a first Proof. I’ve never worked with printers or publishers before, so I have so far had to make concessions on my vision due to the practicality of working with a Print on Demand service. In this first proof, I do use color, but due to page weight with the printer I used, I had to have less than 1000 pages. Consequently I had to drop the font size to 8pt. Once I got it, I wrapped it in a nice leather cover, and I’m pretty fairly pleased with how it turned out

Here are some screenshots and photos:

Preparation for Second Print

I am currently prepping to a second printing. There are a number of things I will try out with this print. First I really want to increase font size, but in order to do that, I may have to go Black and White. That will allow me to go up to around 1200 pages. I have found 2 printers that can print 1200 pages, one of which offers 40lb paper and the other 50lb. I’m going to try the 40lb which is only offered in B&W, but I will also likely try the 50lb, which is offered in Color and Hardcover, and see how they both turn out, how much they weigh. Since printing in B&W is cheaper, I’m going to try that one first.

Next, and much more significant, I have come to realize that the transcription from the scan of Brenton is not perfect. There are a large number of misreads, that product errors. For instance Κύπιον instead of Κύριον. So I have wrestled with whether I pick a new base text for the Septuagint or try to fix the errors. It hasn’t been a clear decision and I’ve gone back and forth a bit, but where I am right now is that Brenton still has a few things that I like about it:

• I have the latex files already, which make paragraphing clear and it would be a decent amount of work to convert the available Swete or Rahlf sources I am aware of until Latex.
• Brenton has accents on Proper nouns. This is something that has always bothered me about Rahlf, as accents help me to know how to pronounce some of the strangest words in the Bible (names).
• Brenton preserves a lot of alternate spellings, whereas it seems to me that Swete and Rahlf have standardize to more modern spellings. This may or may not be an advantage, but I kind of like it. I could go either way

So I have been working on the task of identifying and resolving all of the transcription errors in Brenton. I’ve been working on some scripts that heuristically try to identify the words in Brenton that are most likely to be transcription errors by comparing them to Swete and Rahlf. It applies some other reasoning to try to discern between what is a likely “Brenton” spelling, and what is a true error. I am taking the resulting list (so far around 2000 words or so), and am manually comparing it to a PDF scan of Brenton to determine what the true spelling is. Once I’ve completed that, I’ll write a script to update all the errors, and hopefully I should be ready for a second print.

Future Prints

Once I complete the next print, I think I am going to consider what it will take to distribute and sell it. I would also love to connect with some publishers who could potentially print it in a higher quality binding or with thinner paper. That could unlock the full vision of what I’m looking for. If you happen to have connections to printers or publishers who print Bibles, please reach out and let me know.

Also, if this sounds like something you would find value in, please let me know. Feedback will help me to gauge interest and decide whether it is worth printing and distributing more broadly.