Non-CrossWire Text-Development Projects

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Introduction

The CrossWire Bible Society's purpose is to develop Bible software. Part of what makes great software is the availability of great content: Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, atlases, and other books. CrossWire depends on the availability of great content produced by others--we generally do not produce our own original content.

Other projects around the Web have been started to produce electronic editions of texts that we would love to see incorporated into SWORD. The following are a list of links to such projects. Involvement in these projects does not usually require a great deal of technical expertise, so we strongly encourage people who want to help SWORD improve but who don't feel prepared to contribute by writing code to contribute their time and work to these projects.

Some of these projects have a limited scope (perhaps just one book) while others serve as repositories for massive collections of texts. All links are just suggestions. If you find additional projects or particular works being produced by those projects, please add them to the list.

Individual Works

  • The Codex Sinaiticus Project http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/
    This is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript. See also [1] for details of the intended complete electronic edition, using and developing software pioneered by Peter Robinson of the University of Birmingham.
  • The English Hexapla 1841 http://bible.zoxt.net/hex/hex.htm – Greek New Testament according to Scholtz with 6 ancient English translations: Wiclif 1380, Tyndale 1534, Cranmer 1539, Geneva 1557, Rheims 1582, Authorised 1611
  • Mount Sinai Arabic Codex 151 – as described in [2] Need to find out the current status of this project.

Collections

  • Nordic (Scandinavian) literature (including some Bibles, etc)
  • Several historic Bibles and other important books have been digitized by the web-master, Yves Petrakian.
  • Some significant historic Bibles and translations are hosted on this French site. (Domain expired; use wayback.)
  • The Project is dedicated to republishing the extensive literary efforts of the Reverend Matthew Poole (1624-79). The cornerstone of the project is the translation of Poole's massive Synopsis Criticorum (Synopsis of Interpreters), making it available in English for the first time. This is an ongoing translation project. The translation work is being undertaken by Pastor Steven Dilday. He holds a Ph.D. Degree in Puritan History and Literature from Whitefield Theological Seminary. This work was drawn to my attention by reading Victor Perry's review in The Banner of Truth magazine (issue 547, April 2009). So far the first 5 volumes have been translated. These are available in print through Lulu.com, or to purchase as downloads at much lower cost. There are some samples available as free downloads.
  • The National Yiddish Book Center is a non-profit organization working to rescue Yiddish books and share their content with the world. More than 10,000 of our titles are now available free-of-charge through the Open Content Alliance.
This site has three collections of English Bibles:
  • Public Domain Bibles - hosted by the site
  • More Public Domain Bibles - hosted elsewhere
  • Copyright Bibles - hosted elsewhere
Some of those in the first collection are translations that I have not seen hosted elsewhere. Among the more unusual digitized texts are the following:
  • Anglo-Saxon Gospels - Manuscript 140, Corpus Christi College - circa 1000 by Aelfric
  • Anglo-Saxon Gospels - Hatton Manuscript 38, Bodleian Library - circa 1200 by unknown author
  • Wycliffe Bible - 1395 by John Wycliffe (66 books)
  • Calvin Bible - 1855 by Calvin Translation Society (Joshua, Psalms, Isaiah to Malachi, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews to 1 John, Jude)
  • Revised Version, also called English Revised Version, 1885 Charles Ellicott editor
  • The New Testament: Revised and Translated 1904 by Adolphus Worrell
  • The New Testament: Translated from the Original Greek 1858 by Leicester Sawyer
  • The New Testament: Translated from the Sinaitic Manuscript 1918 by Henry Anderson
None of the hosted translations include any deuterocanonical books, even though (for example) the 1885 Revised Version included the Apocrypha.
This site is an electronic library of historic Orthodox Christian resources in the indigenous languages of Alaska. Included in this site are printed texts in the Aleut, Alutiiq, Tlingit, and Yup'ik languages. Among these are some translations of the Holy Gospels.
As part of the Corpus Scriptorum Cataloniae series, the Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum will include a critical edition of all known Catalan translations of the Bible or texts directly related to it, published or unpublished, from the thirteenth century until the year 1900. On the website of the Associació Bíblica de Catalunya
This is a private website maintained by Ulrich Stiehl in Germany. The other Sanskrit documents include Bible in Sanskrit (Gospel of Matthew in Sanskrit Translation)[3].
The Massachusetts Bible Society Collection contains over 4,000 items, which include: Bibles, parts of Bibles, and tracts. Many of the Bibles in the collection are being documented for the first time in the ongoing cataloging project. The Bibles are important, not only as sacred texts, but as a record of the people who produced them, received them, and those who were transformed by the message. See the Rare Bibles Exhibition at the Boston University School of Theology Library.
View a statistical list of the language groups cataloged thus far in the project.
Project Gezelius is a Nordic project which has reached its aim to put out the 4200 pages of extensive biblical works from the 1700s into a web database.
Cuneiform Circle is a community of scholars engaged in the study of the Old Babylonian Akkadian. Their main goal is to create an Old Babylonian Text Corpus, an Old Babylonian Dictionary, and a List of Old Babylonian Cuneiform Signs.
The object of the project is to gather together textual evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages and to produce a corpus in digital and print form. See this University of Cambridge news item [4].

Catalogues

  • Bible Research – The site is for Bible students who are looking for detailed information on the history of the canon, texts, and versions of Scripture.

Museums

  • The Ramseyer-Northern Bible Society Collection was the hobby and intense interest of the Rev. Henry E. Ramseyer, who was from 1918 until his death in 1945 the Secretary of the Northern Bible Society. He was born in Ontario in 1873, moved in his youth to Michigan, and studied theology at Blufton College in Ohio. He became a minister in 1896 and, coming somewhat by chance to Duluth Minnesota in 1898, he decided that his life's work would be to minister to the lumber and mining camps then developing in northern Minnesota. In Duluth itself he also found a lack of ministry to the poor and homeless, and founded a branch of the Bethel Society, raising funds for the construction of a building which still stands. In 1918, he expanded the work of missions to the workers in northern Minnesota by founding the Northern Bible Society, with the objective of providing the Scriptures to all, at little or no cost, in the languages of their origins. In 1932, the Society erected the Bible House, and in it they had their headquarters, a Book and Bible Shop, and space for the public display of Rev. Ramseyer's private collection.

Online Resources

Software

  • Greenstone Digital Library Software – Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read the Greenstone Factsheet for more information.

Libraries

The following powerful inter-library search engines are useful as aids for general research.: