I'M BACK. The conference was excellent and I want to thank Mark Goodacre, the University of Birmingham, and Mark's postgraduate assistants Catherine Smith, Helen Ingram, Kuyseok Han, and Richard Goode, who not only made everything run incredibly smoothly, but also made it look effortless. Having held a couple of conferences myself at St. Andrews, I know just how much hard work goes on behind the scenes to make one successful. Mark and team, your efforts are much appreciated.

I'm in a hurry this morning and I'm not going to try to blog the conference in any detail. But I do want to mention two things. First is the Mingana Collection, a collection of hundreds of Syriac and thousands of Arabic manuscripts (with a few in Ethiopic, Coptic, Greek, Persian, cuneiform, etc.) at the University of Birmingham. Some of us were given a tour of it and there's a great deal of fascinating material in it. We were shown codices of the Acts of Thomas in Garshuni (Arabic written in Syriac script) and Syriac, among many other things. Alphonse Mingana was an Iraqi Chaldean Christian who gathered the collection in the 1920s. See the web page for lots more information.

Second is Friday evening's presentation by an international team of scholars on "Digital Editing: A New Generation of Greek New Testaments." This team is currently producing an incredibly ambitious new edition of the Greek Gospel of John, eventually to be expanded to include the whole Greek New Testament. Spin-off projects include an edition of the Old Latin Gospel of John and an edition of the Byzantine text of the New Testament for Orthodox scholars and lay people. You can read about their work at the Institut f�r neutestamentliche Textforschung INTF website. The site is mostly in German, but a number of very interesting pages are in English. These people are the Special Forces of New Testament textual criticism and anyone interested in the subject should keep a close eye on their work. It promises to change the face of the field in years to come.

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre is blogging the conference at length. Start at the link and just keep scrolling up.