Principles

Posting all of the ancient Biblical manuscripts may appear to be a simple, though obviously time-consuming, task.  It is certainly time-consuming but it is not simple.  There are a multitude of factors that must be taken into consideration:

1. It is a waste of resources to post images that have been posted elsewhere.
2. Fanatics will find it easier to disrupt a single website than to disrupt a huge group of websites.
3. We now know that all of the ancient Biblical manuscripts are already posted collectively (taken together) on websites across the internet.
4. We have sent specialized spiders (programmatic website examiners) across the entirety of the internet and identified all of the websites containing ancient Biblical manuscripts.
5. We now know that all of the ancient Bibllical manuscripts are posted collectively on over one hundred thousand internet websites.
6. Posting some images may impact the revenue of a large number of institutions in a negative way.
7. Images have owners and owners have certain legal rights.  These rights may mean that one is not free to publish a given image without permission.  In such cases, we may use shadows in place of images.  The results, for textual criticism and, more important, textual calculus, purposes, is the same.
8. Some image owners require payment for use of their images.  If 10,000 image owners required just $1.00 each for 1 image that would cost us $10,000 and there are over 1,000,000 images to deal with.
9. About 98% of the images are redundant; that is, out of the 1,000,000+ images, about 98% of their surface area is reflected in images of other ancient Biblical manuscripts.
10. A geometric analysis of all of the images, via computer, shows that the 1,000,000+ images could be represented by 100,000+ base images combined with an index of images containing the same texts.

Final note: No human being has ever personally examined all of the ancient Biblical manuscripts and no human being could accomplish this task if they lived to be 200 years old.  We, however, have developed computer programs to examine every single one of these images.

What’s Next?

Next we will provide a broad outline of the overall organization of the Manuscript Portal, which is only a subset of Lionwrit content.  See Organization.

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