More New Testament Apocrypha 3 Near Completion
I have spent much of the past month hunkered down, determined to finish up work on the third volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. At time of writing, I’m waiting for two more pieces, and final edits of the remaining chapters are coming back from the other contributors. Things are looking good for sending the complete manuscript off to the publisher (Eerdmans) in September.
The second volume of MNTA was published in the summer of 2020. Like other projects appearing in the middle of a pandemic, the book didn’t get as much exposure as normal. The Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature provides an opportunity for the main demographic of the book (biblical scholars) to pick up a discounted copy; but it’s hard to buy a book at a virtual conference. And a review panel scheduled for the meeting of the Canadian Society for Patristic Studies had to be delayed until 2022. Nevertheless, Benito Cereno and Chris Sims at the podcast Apocrypals devoted three episodes to discussing texts in the volume, Shirley Paulson interviewed me for the Early Christian Writings podcast, James McGrath for his Religion Prof podcast, Rick Brannan tweeted mini-summaries of each text (as he did for MNTA 1), and Ancient Jew Review turned a planned session for SBL into four articles from MNTA contributors. I’m grateful to everyone who helped promote the book, especially in a time when we all have far more pressing concerns.
It may seem surprising that volume 3 is …