Nag Hammadi Coptic Library
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The ‘Concordances’ Series

Concordances
The Volumes of the BCNH Series

The ‘Concordances’ Series

The texts of the Nag Hammadi library have come down to us in a state that requires more than just simply editing and translation. The lacunous state of most of them, as well as the numerous problems posed by their language, requires ongoing philological efforts in order to improve the reading of the texts and their interpretation, whatever the state of the edition of a particular text may be. Also, the analysis of these texts is of considerable interest for Coptic philology in general, i.e., for the study of grammar and vocabulary, translation techniques, the standardization of the written language, and the production of manuscripts in the early period. Given the primitive state of this type of study, these texts are destined to be the subject of meticulous philological work for a long time.

The “Concordances” series of the BCNH is designed to meet this demand. As was amply shown by the Concordance du Nouveau Testament sahidique (published during the fifties, it was, prior to the BCNH, the only concordance of an important corpus of Coptic literature ever published), a concordance is, along with a dictionary, the most valuable resource for the philologist. It provides easy access to the total number of occurrences of each linguistic form and, thanks to the recording of the context, to its particular use as well. The availability of such a useful tool for all of the Nag Hammadi texts will certainly initiate a new stage of their exploration.

The volumes of the BCNH “Concordance” series are produced with the help of a Coptic version of the “Lemmatiseur” software (implemented in the “Clipper” D-Base query language) developed by the Centre de traitement de l’information (CTI) of Université Laval, in collaboration with several members of the BCNH team.

Already Published

In Preparation

  • Concordance des textes de Nag Hammadi. Le Codex II, Louvain, Peeters (coll. «Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi [section «Concordances»]» [en préparation].
  • Concordance des textes de Nag Hammadi. Les Codices IV et V, Louvain, Peeters (coll. «Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi [section «Concordances»]» [en préparation].