Monday, December 08, 2008

Exit Live Search Books - Enter Internet Archive

In a previous post, I mentioned a number of NTTC (and OTTC) books found on Microsoft’s Live Search Books. The service, however, was discontinued in May 2008. The Wikipedia page on MSN states that it "integrated into regular web search", but this standard phrase appears to be incorrect (also the page on LSB itself).

Fortunately, many of LSB’s out-of-copyright books are now found on the Internet Archive, the best known part of which is the Wayback Machine. The books are available in different formats. For important books, I would recommend to download a copy on your own computer. There are just too many examples of websites taken down or crashed servers. The following list contains the examples given in the previous post mentioned above. As many people do not use the DjVU format, I will provide a link to the PDF alongside the reference to the archive page itself. In many cases, other copies are available (marked with +).

* Friedrich Blass, Philology of the Gospels (1898). (pdf) (+).
* Charles Fox Burney, The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel (1922). (pdf) (+)
* Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt ... (1875) vol. 1. (pdf)
* Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt ... (1875) vol. 2. (pdf)
* Frederick Field, Notes on the Translation of the New Testament (1899). (pdf) (+)
* Caspar Rene Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (1907). (pdf)
* James Rendel Harris, Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai (1890). (pdf)
* James Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae (1891). (pdf)
* George Milligan, Here & There Among the Papyri (1922). (pdf)
* [Eberhard Nestle], Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ. Text with Critical Apparatus [Nestle text with TR and RV variants] (1904). (pdf)
* James Hardy Ropes, The Text of Acts (The Beginnings of Christianity I.3) (1926). (pdf)
* Philip Schaff, A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (1883). (pdf) (+)
* Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, Contributions to the Criticism of the Greek New Testament (1859). (pdf) (+)
* Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, Six Lectures on the Text of the New Testament and the Ancient Manuscripts Which Contain It (1875). (pdf)
* Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students. Vol. I (41894). (pdf)
* Alexander Souter, The Text and Canon of the New Testament (1913). (pdf) (+)
* Henry Barclay Swete, The Old Testament in Greek vol. 1 (31901) (pdf); vol. 2 (21896) (pdf); vol. 3 (31905) (pdf). ((+))
* Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament (1854). (pdf) (+)
* Thomas Hunter Weir, A Short History of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament (1899). (pdf) (+)

Happy hunting!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for providing this list.

You do well to recommend downloading personal copies of these. Not only do things disappear but I have seen items that were once available for free now subject to a charge.

In the beginnings of the internet many institutions were excited about granting access to many documents (remember telnet and ftp from a unix prompt?). Now with the web and the ease of charging it is harder to find newer items available. I am glad to see, though, many older books and articles are now accessible.

Bob

Peter M. Head said...

Thanks Jan,
Helpful as always.

Anonymous said...

Hello,

Also, some books and articles related to NTTC (including Eberhard Nestle's Intro in English) are available to download as MS Word files in the "Files" section of the Yahoo! TC-Alternate discussion group. (You may also want to look through the Links there too.)

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

Jan Krans-Plaisier said...

James,
In my view, the files at the TC-Alternate group may be helpful in some circumstances, for instance preliminary searching, but the reformatted books and articles do not qualify as a scholarly resource:
(1) in particular, they depend on OCR and internet translation tools which are bound to be unreliable;
(2) in general, they are cannot be cited as published articles or books.