Editing More New Testament Apocrypha, Part 1: Choosing the Texts
Yesterday I sent off the last chapter of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures vol. 2 (=MNTA 2) to its authors for revisions. The project is not over by a longshot, but it is the end of a major stage in the process of getting this volume, now over three years in the making, to publication. Of the 36 texts included in the volume, 29 are complete, four are in the authors’ hands waiting for final revisions, and the last three are contributions by the editors (Brent Landau and I)—these always get delayed until the very end. This seems to me a good time to pause and look back at how the project came together.
The planning for this volume began when we submitted the manuscript of vol. 1 to the publisher back in January 2015 (yes, that long ago). The introduction included a provisional list of texts to be included in vol. 2. As you can see below, that list was provisional indeed.
Why so many changes? Well, some are not that dramatic at all and are merely changes in titles. But some texts are absent from the final contents because these projects were just too big and our contributors simply realized at some point that they could not finish it in time for our deadline. This was certainly the case for the Infancy of the Savior and the Vision of Theophilus (both of which I promised to contribute), and the other major work was the Pseudo-Clementines, which if included, would have taken up considerable space in the volume. A few other texts were sidelined by contributors who had agreed to work on multiple texts but other commitments led to them reducing their contributions to MNTA. A few of our contributors dropped out of the project because they decided to leave academia entirely and some exited more quietly by simply no longer replying to our emails (a practice that I really struggle to understand). All of this movement meant having to reassign some of the texts or to solicit translations of texts that we never planned to include.
In stepped Cambry Pardee to take over the Act of Peter in Ashdod, Chance Bonar quickly put together a translation of the very challenging 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (later joined by me and Slavomír Céplö as the task grew more and more complicated), Lloyd Abercrombie and Hugo Lundhaug agreed to cover the Mysteries of John, and the Epistle of Pelagia went from Slavomír Céplö to Adam McCollum and then back to Slavomír. Some new texts were added through conversations at SBL or other academic gatherings—such as the Adoration of the Magi by Adam McCollum, the Acts of Andrew and Philemon by Ivan Miroshnikov and the Investiture of Gabriel by Lance Jennot; others came from decisions to try and broaden coverage of some subgenres of texts—e.g., the Dialogue of the Revealer and John (by Philip Tite), though widely available elsewhere, was added to the Johannine apocalyptica when it became clear that we should include all of the dialogues with John. Also coming through for us were Janet Spittler, who took on full duties on the Acts of John in the City of Rome and partnered with her student Jonathan Holste for the Acts of Thomas and His Wonderworking Skin, and Christine Luckritz-Marquis, who came through with some speedy work on the Life of Mary Magdalene.
A few of our most diligent contributors submitted their work before the initial deadline—set for December 2016 (!)—but others needed more time, particularly the new recruits. A new deadline was set for August 2017, then April 2018, then September 2018, and now . . . January 2019? It is frustrating to see such delays—as much for editors as readers, but also for those contributors who completed their work so long ago and have to wait for others to finish before they see their texts in print. But sometimes the complexities of the work make delays unavoidable—for example, some contributors ran into problems obtaining copies of manuscripts from the Ethnikê Bibliothêkê tês Hellados in Athens when the library shut down for a year for renovations. Sometimes classroom and administrative work derail research projects once the school year resumes, so a project not completed by September 1 must wait until December or even April the following year.
Despite all of the changes, MNTA 2 looks equally as strong a collection as MNTA 1. We have around 20 texts that appear here in English for the first time, some of these for the first time in any modern language; most of the remainder appear in substantially updated forms, drawing on a wide assortment of manuscripts. In some cases this would not have been possible without the assistance of other authors in the volume—such as Slavomír Céplö, Brandon Hawk, and Ivan Miroshnikov—who drew on their particular expertise to enhance the already formidable work of their colleagues. When it comes time to write the foreword, we will have many people to thank.