Editorial decisions

The endings in this text are produced by rule and never vary. Everything on this page is the part that isn’t: the places where a person, or the scholarly edition underneath, made a choice. It is here so you can check it rather than take it on trust.

The edition’s own text-critical marks

The Greek edition this text is built from prints the standard critical marks: brackets round a passage it judges a later addition, brackets round words of doubtful authenticity, and apparatus marks against wording that other manuscripts contest. They are reproduced here, in the reading text, exactly where the edition puts them.

8,718 words carry one of the edition's marks. They are reproduced as the edition sets them.

Three passages carry the double brackets: the shorter ending of Mark (16:8), the longer ending (16:9–20), and the account of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). The edition does not print that last passage at all; it is included here from MACULA’s text, and bracketed so that it is not mistaken for the edition’s own. Single brackets fall at Luke 22:19–20, Luke 24:40, Luke 24:51, Luke 24:52, Ephesians 1:1 and Colossians 1:20.

Where this text departs from the analysis

This text is spelled from the MACULA Greek analysis of every word. In 551 places it reads a word differently, and every one is listed here with the reason. Each correction is triggered by the Greek spelling itself, so it applies wherever that spelling occurs.

490 words MACULA files under the reflexive ἑαυτοῦ (himself) while tagging them personal and glossing them “him”, “her”, “them”. The breathing decides it: αὐτ- with a smooth breathing is the plain pronoun αὐτός, and is read as one. The reflexive, written with a rough breathing, is left as MACULA has it.

2 verbs that are not participles carry a case and gender in MACULA's tag (Matthew 11:17, Luke 19:48). The spelling never used them; they are dropped.

The rest, word by word:

Hand-set stems

A Biblang word is a stem plus its endings. The endings are pure rule. The stem is normally derived from the Greek dictionary form by rule too, but some have had their stem set by hand instead.

The reasons those exist are given below, with how many words each accounts for. They are not written after the fact: each is worked out by removing the override and seeing what actually goes wrong — whether the word merges with another, becomes awkward to say, or loses a root Greek itself swaps. None of them changes what a word means; they change how it is spelled.

• system — a closed-class word whose stem is structural, not derived (the article, the copula, the pronouns) 17
• degree — a comparative or superlative spelled on its positive's stem, so the comparison stays visible 6
• name — a proper name normalised to one spelling 28
• suppletion — Greek itself swaps roots between forms, so one root is kept everywhere 180
• collision — the rule-derived stem would merge this word with another 93
• euphony — the rule-derived stem is awkward to say 62
• family — one root kept across the word's compounds and Greek's own stem alternations 91
• rule-gap — the ending rule strips a letter that belongs to the stem 154

631 stems in all are set by hand, out of 5,468 dictionary words — about one in 9. Which words they are is not listed: the reasons above are the account, and the spellings themselves are in the text for anyone reading it.

Glosses changed from their source

The one English word shown beside a Greek word in the reader comes from a public-domain lexicon, unaltered. Where it has been changed, the change is listed here in full.

No gloss has been changed from its source.

What this page does not cover

Two things on this page’s subject are not decisions anyone here made, and are worth naming anyway. The Greek text is a scholarly reconstruction, and where editions differ this one follows its own; and where a Greek form could be parsed more than one way, the morphological analysis behind this text picks one. Both are the work of the editions named on the copyright page, not of this project — but a reader relying on a single word should know they are there. The Greek is always one tap away in the reader.