Glossary and Abbreviations

• Common terms first
• Project classifications
• Texts, witnesses, and editions
• Textual criticism
• Historical and literary methods
• Interpretation and argument
• Canon and related literature
• Language and translation
• Citation abbreviations

Common terms first

• Historical criticism: examining texts in their historical settings, production, and use.
• Textual variant: a difference among surviving textual witnesses.
• Contradiction: claims that cannot both be true in the same relevant sense, time, and respect.
• Assessment: the project’s judgment of the strength of an alleged problem.
• Scholarly position: how widely an interpretation is held among relevant specialists.
• MT / LXX / DSS: Masoretic Text / Septuagint / Dead Sea Scrolls.

Project classifications

• Anachronism: Something assigned to a period in which it is historically implausible in a way requiring explanation.
• Assessment: Bad Bible's judgment about the strength of an alleged problem after evidence and resolutions are evaluated.
• Category: A recurring topic used to group investigations.
• Direct Contradiction: Claims that cannot both be true in the same relevant sense, time, and respect.
• Difference of Emphasis: Distinctive presentation without substantive incompatibility.
• Failed Prediction: A sufficiently definite prediction that does not occur as stated under its relevant conditions or timeframe.
• Historical Tension: A claim that conflicts with or sits uneasily beside available historical evidence.
• Inconsistency: A substantive difficulty combining accounts that may fall short of strict logical contradiction.
• Later Reinterpretation: A later text's reuse of an earlier text in a materially new context or sense.
• Narrative Inconsistency: A conflict or unresolved tension in plot, chronology, characterization, or narrated detail.
• Primary Domain: Highest-level research area: Canon, Theological, Ethical, NT Reuse, Prophecy, World-Model, Historical, or Textual.
• Scholarly Position: How widely an interpretation is held in relevant scholarship; it does not directly measure truth.
• Theological Disagreement: A material difference among texts concerning a theological subject.
• Type: The most precise description of what the completed analysis finds.
• Unresolved: Current evidence does not justify a definite conclusion.

Texts, witnesses, and editions

• HB: Hebrew Bible.
• OT: Old Testament; retained when discussing Christian canons or interpretation.
• NT: New Testament.
• MT: Masoretic Text, the medieval Hebrew textual tradition represented by codices and later editions—not an identical copy of the earliest recoverable Hebrew text.
• LXX: Septuagint, a conventional label for ancient Greek translations of Jewish scriptures. It is not one uniform translation produced at one time.
• DSS: Dead Sea Scrolls, including biblical manuscripts, sectarian works, and other Jewish literature.
• SP: Samaritan Pentateuch, the Samaritan textual tradition of the Torah.
• Vg: Vulgate, the Latin biblical tradition associated especially with Jerome and its later transmission.
• Peshitta: A major Syriac biblical tradition.
• Tg. / Targum: An Aramaic translation or interpretive rendering of a biblical text.
• NA28: Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland, 28th edition.
• UBS5: The Greek New Testament, United Bible Societies, 5th edition.
• BHQ: Biblia Hebraica Quinta, an ongoing critical edition of the Hebrew Bible.
• BHS: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
• THGNT: The Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge.
• NRSVue: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
• JPS: Jewish Publication Society; a specific translation or edition should be named in citations.

Textual criticism

• Autograph: The original written form of a work. No biblical autograph is known to survive, and some works developed through multiple compositional stages.
• Critical apparatus: Notes in a critical edition reporting selected variants, manuscript support, and editorial information.
• Critical edition: A scholarly edited text presented with evidence about variants and editorial decisions.
• Conjectural emendation: A proposed correction not directly preserved by a surviving witness.
• Interpolation: Material argued to have entered a text after an earlier form. Awkwardness alone does not prove it.
• Lectio difficilior: “The more difficult reading,” a consideration used to explain how one reading may have produced another—not a mechanical rule.
• Manuscript witness: A manuscript or physical artifact preserving some form of a text.
• Scribal harmonization: A copying change that makes wording more similar to a parallel or familiar passage.
• Textual variant: A difference among witnesses, ancient versions, or textual forms. Most variants do not materially affect interpretation.
• Urtext: A hypothesized earliest recoverable textual form; its applicability varies by work.
• Version: An ancient translation tradition, such as Old Latin, Syriac, Coptic, or Greek.
• Vorlage: The source text used by a translator or copyist, often reconstructed from an ancient translation.

Historical and literary methods

• Diachronic analysis: Study of development through time.
• Synchronic analysis: Study of a text in a particular form, especially its final or received form.
• Form criticism: Study of recurring literary forms and their possible social settings.
• Historical criticism: Investigation of texts in relation to historical production, sources, audiences, and contexts.
• Historical-critical method: An umbrella term for historically oriented methods, not one procedure.
• Literary / narrative criticism: Analysis of plot, characterization, point of view, structure, and rhetoric.
• Redaction criticism: Study of how an editor or author shaped inherited material.
• Reception history: Study of how texts have been interpreted, used, and contested over time.
• Social-scientific criticism: Use of anthropological, sociological, economic, or related models to investigate ancient societies.
• Source criticism: Investigation of sources that may underlie a text.
• Tradition history: Study of how traditions developed before and during their incorporation into written texts.

Interpretation and argument

• Apologetics: Reasoned defense of a religious belief or tradition.
• Canon: A recognized collection of authoritative texts; communities maintain different canons.
• Eisegesis: Reading an assumption into a text rather than deriving it through responsible interpretation.
• Exegesis: Critical interpretation using language, literary context, historical setting, and evidence.
• Ex eventu prophecy: Prophecy composed or substantially shaped after the event it appears to predict.
• Genre: A conventional kind of discourse—law, lament, wisdom, apocalypse, letter, narrative—that shapes interpretation.
• Harmonization: An attempt to reconcile divergent accounts. It must be evaluated for plausibility, not merely possibility.
• Hermeneutics: Theory and practice of interpretation.
• Inerrancy: The theological position that scripture is without error; definitions vary by tradition.
• Intertextuality: Relationships created when one text echoes, quotes, alludes to, or transforms another.
• Midrash: A broad category of Jewish interpretation, not a vague label for any creative scriptural reuse.
• Pseudepigraphy: Attribution of a work to someone other than its actual author, often an authoritative past figure.
• Proof-texting: Using an isolated passage without adequate attention to context, genre, or evidence.
• Special pleading: Applying an exception or standard selectively without sufficient justification.
• Typology: Reading an earlier person, event, or institution as a pattern corresponding to a later one.

Canon and related literature

• Apocrypha: A context-dependent label for writings outside a particular canon; whose canon must be specified.
• Deuterocanonical: Writings canonical in Catholic and some Orthodox traditions but not in the Jewish Tanakh or most Protestant Old Testaments.
• Pseudepigrapha: A modern collective label for diverse ancient writings; its boundaries vary.
• Tanakh: Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim.
• Torah: Narrowly, the Pentateuch; more broadly, Jewish teaching or instruction.

Language and translation

• Gloss: A short word-equivalence, not necessarily an adequate translation in every context.
• Lemma: Dictionary form under which inflected forms are listed.
• Lexeme: An abstract vocabulary unit represented by its grammatical forms.
• Lexical semantics: Study of word meaning and semantic relationships in context.
• Semantic range: Senses a word can have across contexts; not every sense applies in one occurrence.
• Septuagintal Greek: Greek usage characteristic of ancient Jewish Greek translations and related literature.
• Textual semantics: Meaning produced by wording and constructions in a particular discourse, not by dictionary entries in isolation.

Citation abbreviations

• ca.: Circa; approximately.
• cf.: Compare.
• ch. / chs.: Chapter / chapters.
• col. / cols.: Column / columns.
• ed. / eds.: Editor, edition, or editors, according to context.
• e.g.: For example.
• esp.: Especially.
• et al.: And others.
• f. / ff.: Following page, verse, or folio / multiple following units. A precise range is preferable.
• frag. / frags.: Fragment / fragments.
• i.e.: That is.
• lit.: Literally; a gloss is not automatically the best contextual translation.
• MS / MSS: Manuscript / manuscripts.
• n.d.: No date.
• p. / pp.: Page / pages.
• par.: Parallel passage.
• trans.: Translator or translated by.
• v. / vv.: Verse / verses.
• vol. / vols.: Volume / volumes.

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