"Sahidica - A New Edition of the New Testament in Sahidic Coptic"
Copyright (c)2000-2006 by J Warren Wells. All rights reserved.

For more information visit www.sahidica.org.

This edition is available free of charge for use in free electronic editions of the New Testament as long as the full title and copyright information are included and credited. For written permission to use all or any part of this document in print editions, contact the editor at www.sahidica.org.

This edition is primarily meant for use by teachers and students of Sahidic Coptic, and to a lesser degree by Coptologists involved in scholarly research, textual criticism, or New Testament translation.

PURPOSE
Please note: This text is a work in progress. As such, there is an ongoing effort to standardize the spelling of words in the text. Be aware that version updates periodically appear.

The primary purpose is to produce a standardized edition of the Sahidic NT similar to standard Greek editions.

An additional purpose of this text is to allow side-by-side comparison with the Greek New Testament. To facilitate this effort, a new version of the Greek text has been developed, which is meant to better represent the Greek text upon which the Sahidic was based. This text is entitled "The New Testament According to the Egyptian Greek Text" [NTAEG]

This text does not include representation of either accents or supralinear strokes, since these are used inconsistently in the original texts. There is also a higher degree of standardization in spelling and punctuation; like today's standard Greek master texts, but unlike both the original Sahidic texts, and the PHI and Coptic Society texts. Moreover, as in standard Greek texts, instances of the Nomina Sacra have been expanded to their full forms. This is again a departure from earlier versions of the Sahidic, including the PHI and Coptic Society texts, which are Both inconsistent in their usage.

Special thanks to David Brakke of Indiana University Bloomington, Brigitte Comparini of the Packard Humanities Institute, and Michael Heiser, Academic Editor, at Logos Research Systems; for their assistance in making this edition possible.

BASIS
Sahidica was initially based (by permission) on the Coptic New Testament, which is an electronic publication, which was edited by David Brakke. (PHI-CD 5.3 dated 7/2/91. Los Altos. Packard Humanities Institute. 1991).

During later development, Sahidica was electronically collated against the Coptic CD I by the St. Shenouda The Archmandrite Coptic Society. Los Angeles, CA dated April, 1998.

These two editions were reduced to a raw electronic form, which allowed both to be compared electronically letter by letter with Sahidica in order to accurately detect and report every single variation and input error in any of the texts. Though errors are inevitable, the collators of three seperate editions are highly unlikely to make the same errors. Therefore, this method helps to insure the integrity of the Sahidica edition.

Throughout the project, Sahidica was also collated against printed editions of the following coptic manuscripts, which manuscripts date from the third century and later.