Manuscript fragments
New research has uncovered a forgotten chapter in the history of the Bible, offering a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture. The study by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King's College London, in collaboration with Cambridge University researchers, suggests that, contrary to long-accepted views, Jews continued to use a Greek version of the Bible in synagogues for centuries longer than previously thought. In some places, the practice continued almost until living memory. The key to the new discovery lay in manuscripts, some of them mere fragments, discovered in an old synagogue in Egypt and brought to Cambridge at the end of the 19th century. The so-called Cairo Genizah manuscripts have been housed ever since in Cambridge University Library. Now, a fully searchable online corpus has gathered these manuscripts together, making the texts and analysis of them available to other scholars for the first time. ' This ambitious piece of collaborative digital scholarship required challenging technical difficulties to be solved ,' explains Paul Spence, who led the CCH team.
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