My PhD dissertation is concerned with the text of a New Testament epistle entitled "To the Hebrews." It documents the transcription, collation and analysis of collation results for about 30 manuscripts (MSS), dated between ~200 and ~1000 AD. Multivariate analysis produced "maps" showing MS affiliations inherent in the collation results, from the perspectives of both substantive and orthographic variants.

The results are surprising: maps of orthographic and substantive variants are similar even though they are based on differing sets of data. This suggests a common underlying cause of affiliation, which I attribute to the geographic origins of the MSS. If this is correct then multivariate analysis of orthographic and substantive variants can be used to indicate provenance in MS traditions with many surviving copies.

The dissertation was submitted in 1999. It consists of three volumes containing more than 1200 pages in total, as well as four 1.4MB disks of data. Copies are deposited in libraries at Murdoch University and the Baptist Theological College in Perth, Western Australia.

One day I hope to prepare a decent web version of the dissertation. In the mean time (which may be a long time), you will have to make do with the following:

• PDFs
• RTFs (Many images need to be downloaded.)

These are imperfect; there are problems of varying severity with formatting, graphics, Greek rendering, and page numbering. I apologize for these shortcomings.

Programs and data files associated with the dissertation are available here.

Tim Finney, 2005