I read about this before, but this fascinates me: “The origins of a holy book.”
Corpus Coranicum is a project from scholars at Germany’s Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences to analyze various versions of Islam’s holy book, the Koran.
But, drawing on some of the earliest Korans in existence – codices found in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, and Morocco – the Corpus Coranicum will allow users to study for themselves images of thousands of pages of early Korans, texts that differ in small but potentially telling ways from the modern standard version. The project will also link passages in the text to analogous ones in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible, and offer an exhaustive critical commentary on the Koran’s language, structure, themes, and roots. The project’s creators are calling it the world’s first “critical edition” of the Koran, a resource that gathers historical evidence and scholarly literature into one searchable, cross-referenced whole.
Origins of world religions fascinate me. It’ll be interesting to see what they find …
The Boston Globe headline really says it all: “
