According to Mark IV

Harvard's great Mark IV computer does not spend all its time figuring out problems in physics and aerodynamics. Sometimes its electronic brain cells think about the Bible in Greek.

The Rev. John William Ellison, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Winchester, Mass.. has been working for several years at the monstrous task of comparing varying manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. All of the 4,600 known versions are copies (or copies of copies of copies) and few are exactly alike. The copyists added words and omitted words. They changed spellings to fit their times and even changed meanings to conform with current notions. They made all sorts of mistakes. Mr. Ellison's project has been to try to find out what variations went in "families." indicating that groups of manuscripts were copies from the same original or from one another.

Plodding through 311 versions of the Gospel According to St. Luke, he found 2,000 variations in only two chapters. In 15 verses he found 400 variations. The whole book probably contains more than 100,000 differences. It was obviously impossible, in one human lifetime, to make any sense by the usual methods out of all this confusion.

So Mr. Ellison went to Harvard's Computation Laboratory to find whether the Mark IV could straighten out St. Luke. The mathematicians who serve the great computer decided that the Biblical problem was "realistic" and told Mr. Ellison how; to translate parts of the Gospel into mathematical language that the Mark IV would understand.

This task in itself was laborious. Each variation in the manuscripts had to have a description in numerical code. For four related versions of Luke 2:12* the code came out:

2 12 01 2 20 2 12 03 2 12 2 12 07 2 16 2 12 09 2 16

The first two columns identify chapter and verse. The other code numbers describe the variations and tell where they occur. When such code numbers were properly packaged and fed into the Mark IV, it replied with figures telling which of the 311 versions of the Gospel are identical or similar.

Mr. Ellison's task is far from finished, but already he can say that 16 medieval manuscripts from widely separated libraries belong to the same "family." They were copied from the same lost manuscript or from each other. Sometime next year, with the help of Mark IV, he hopes to have all versions of St. Luke's Gospel arranged in families.

* King James Version: "And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.