Light Shed on Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts
This post was originally published on 28 July at 9:55 am. But I'll keep it at the top of the page for a while and will keep adding updates below. There are also plenty of new posts under this one, so do scroll down and check.
[UPDATE (6:00 pm): Welcome to visitors who find their way here through one of the articles coming out about the project. You may be interested also in this post about a book I've just completed on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (the page proofs are sitting on my desk right now) and in the St. Andrews Old Testament Pseudepigrapha website, which contains lots of material from a course I have been teaching on the subject. And if you look at the bottom of the links panel to the right, there is a link to some relevant papers and book reviews available online. Also, you may want to look at this post on lost books, some of which will figure in the comprehensive list of Old Testament pseudepigrapha which we're compiling for the project.]
This is the good news I promised you a few days ago. The grant has allowed us to hire a full-time research fellow to administer the project. The research fellow is Dr. Alexander Panayotov, who has appeared on PaleoJudaica from time to time (for example, here and here). The photo in the latter link seems to have rotted, but here's one of him and me at his graduation in June of 2004.
He is to join us here in January, when the project will really begin to move full-speed ahead. But we've already been spending a fair amount of time on it and we continue to add texts to our list (see the first link above, which has just been updated) and to invite new contributors.UPDATE: The Herald has called to arrange a photo shoot of me with some manuscripts later today.
UPDATE (5:40 pm): Just had the photo shoot with the Herald, using the wonderful photolithographic facsimile volume of Codex Ambrosianus as our manuscript prop. The article should be out tomorrow. I was interviewed by the Jewish News earlier today and the press office has had inquiries from the Daily Mail and the Times of London. And there's already an article in the Scotsman and a brief notice in icScotland.
Watch this space.
UPDATE (29 July). There was a brief blurb last night in the Edinburgh Evening News and there's a piece this morning in the Telegraph. The Herald article will probably be out over the weekend.
By the way, I should also take this opportunity to welcome another pseudepigrapha researcher coming to St. Andrews. Grant Macaskill has been awarded a three-year British Academy Fellowship. Grant is in the final stages of the Ph.D. here and when he starts the Fellowship he will be producing a critical edition of 2 Enoch, an extremely important pseudepigraphon preserved only in Old Church Slavonic. St. Andrews is rapidly becoming a major international center for Old Testament Pseudepigrapha studies.
UPDATE: The Times has an article too: "Translators turning to magic texts for a spell." Everybody seems to like my little quote about divine-human miscegenation, pagan prophetesses, and incantations. The story is also in the Courier, the local Fife newspaper, but it doesn't seem to have made it to its online edition.
(12:28 pm): Just got off the phone with Radio Scotland. They're interviewing me at 4:50 this afternoon (GMT).
UPDATE (evening): You can hear the Radio Scotland Newsdrive interview by following the link and clicking on "LISTEN AGAIN." They seem to keep only the most recent show archived, so this one should be available until Monday afternoon GMT. The access facility is very primitive, but my segment, which is only a few minutes long, starts somewhere between 50 and 55 minutes into the program. The jump-forward (in 15- or 5-minute intervals only) works on some systems but not all. Good luck.
UPDATE (1 August): Another article. Info here.
UPDATE (11 August): An article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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