What More Do You Need? The Next Wave in Christian Apocrypha Texts and Translations
The following paper was presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.
This paper has two goals: to narcissistically acknowledge and celebrate the publication this past summer of the third volume of the More New Testament Apocrypha series, edited by me with contributions from numerous SBL and NASSCAL (North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature) members, and to consider, where we as members of the field might go next in our editing and translation efforts. The question is raised, in part, because Eerdmans, the publisher of the MNTA series, has said that it will publish additional volumes, and I am continually asked whether there will be More MNTA, to which I respond, “Why do you hate me so?” Because the volumes are a LOT of work and as my wife will attest, editing makes me very grumpy. I also have projects of my own to write; a scholar cannot live on editing alone. And I have to wonder how much additional volumes of MNTA are really needed, given the other options that have become available over the past few years for scholars to publish both texts and translations.
So this paper asks “What More Do You Need?” and by “you” I really mean “we,” the Christian apocrypha scholars of SBL and NASSCAL and anyone who studies and reads this material. As scholars who, I hope, want to collaborate, where do we go from here? What projects do we want to collaborate on? How …
