SBL PAPER: Recently got the good news that my paper proposal for the November 2009 Society of Biblical Literature meeting in New Orleans has been accepted by the Pseudepigrapha Section. Here's the abstract:

PRACTICAL CHALLENGES IN PUBLISHING THE MORE OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA PROJECT

Specialists in the study of ancient parabiblical literature have been engaged for some time in a debate on what such literature should be called and how it should be studied. There is little agreement on terminology apart from the conclusion that the term "pseudepigrapha" is entirely unhelpful and should not be used. More broadly, it is widely agreed that these texts should be liberated from subjugation to the biblical canon and treated as worthy of study in their own right. With the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project (MOTP) sending results to press in 2009, these issues take on a practical urgency, since the editors must make many decisions about how to arrange the texts, how to present them, and how to refer to them.

Moreover, these decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. The Charlesworth volumes brought the term and concept "pseudepigrapha" into popular consciousness and solidified their use in scholarly discourse. These volumes also laid out implicit templates for how to organize and present the texts (e.g., arranging the texts by genre and showing a distinct tendency to find texts to be early and Jewish rather than later and Christian). The editors of the MOTP have to take this background into account in order to provide a publication that is intelligible both to specialists in cognate fields and to the general public, while advancing their understanding of the current state of the question and maintaining the integrity of the work for specialists in parabiblical literature.

This paper discusses the practical problems encountered by the MOTP editors as they organized the project and prepared the texts for publication. These included the principles for selecting which texts to publish, how to arrange the texts in the actual publication, how to present them, and what title to give the whole work.

I will also be on a book review panel in the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group.