Snapshots of Evolving Traditions – A Sneak Peek!

The edited volume, Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology has just been submitted to the publisher. The volume, which is edited by Hugo Lundhaug and me, will appear in De Gruyter’s TUGAL-series, hopefully in the late autumn 2016. This blog post offers a sneak peek!

According to the introductory chapter (Lundhaug & Lied), the main goal of the volume is,

“to explore the relevance and value of applying a perspective inspired by New Philology to [the study of Christian and Jewish manuscripts and their texts]. It is not a volume on New Philology per se, but rather a collection of studies exploring the implications of taking seriously a range of implications arising from it, suggesting new and exciting arenas of research. From this perspective the book has three main foci: (1) The study of texts in their manuscript contexts. (2) Textual fluidity and its implications. (3) Discussion and evaluation of modern editorial practices. The volume thus aims to show how perspectives inspired by New Philology can provide us with additions, constructive alternatives, and critical correctives to a historical-critical paradigm and its privileged models of interpretation which are still dominant in those academic fields that have made early Jewish and Christian texts their main topic of study.”

The TOC suggests the richness of the contributions in the volume – empirically, theoretically and methodologically:

1. Studying Snapshots: On Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology
Hugo Lundhaug & Liv Ingeborg Lied

2. An Illusion of Textual Stability: Textual Fluidity, New Philology, and the Nag Hammadi Codices
Hugo Lundhaug

3. Reading Variants in James and the Apocalypse of James: A Perspective from New Philology
Lance Jenott

4. The Making of a Secret Book of John: Nag Hammadi Codex III in Light of New Philology
René Falkenberg

5. Two Witnesses, One Valentinian Gospel? The Gospel of Truth in Nag Hammadi Codices I and XII
Katrine Brix

6. Monastic Paideia and Textual Fluidity in the Classroom
Lillian I. Larsen

7. Textual Fluidity in Early Monasticism: Sayings, Sermons and Stories
Samuel Rubenson

8. Four Texts from Nag Hammadi amid the Textual and Generic Fluidity of the “Letter” in the Literature of Late Antique Egypt
J. Gregory Given

9. Know Thy Enemy: The Materialization of Orthodoxy in Syriac Manuscripts
Michael Philip Penn

10. “You Have Found What You Seek”: The Form and Function of a Sixth-Century Divinatory Bible in Syriac
Jeff Childers

11. Between “Text Witness” and “Text on the Page”: Trajectories in the History of Editing the Epistle of Baruch
Liv Ingeborg Lied

12. The End of the Psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek Codices, and Syriac Manuscripts
Eva Mroczek

13. Translating the Hekhalot Literature: Insights from New Philology
James R. Davila

More information is available in the De Gruyter New Publications Catalogue, here:

https://issuu.com/degruyter/docs/nev_religious-studies_2015/24

The volume has just been mentioned over at PaleoJudaica, here: http://paleojudaica.blogspot.no/2016_04_10_archive.html#9061691599764561291