The Editio Critica Maior of the Greek New Testament: twenty years of digital collaboration

Since 1997, the Novum Testamentum Graecum – Editio Critica Maior (ECM) has been a collaborative, born-digital project to produce the most comprehensive edition to date of the Greek New Testament. Involving full-text transcriptions of hundreds of manuscripts, tens of thousands of quotations in early Christian writers and evidence from at least seven translated traditions, the edition has as its goal to report the textual history of the first millennium of the transmission of the New Testament and to provide a new ‘Initial Text’ reconstructed on scientific principles. This article relates the history of the collaboration on this edition between the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) and the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP). Comprising multiple centres of activity, dozens of trained transcribers, numerous associated or spin-off projects and extensive third-party funding, this is an edition at scale. The article describes the workflow, development of data standards and software, and the publication of both print and electronic editions.