My Regensburg Year, Part 1: August 2024
“You should come work with us here in Regensburg.” These words from Tobias Nicklas in 2020 made my heart leap. I was in Regensburg for a conference held by Tobias’s Beyond Canon Project and fell in love with the town. Several of my friends and colleagues had already spent time at the project; it seemed the “place to be.” So I immediately began to think of how to make it happen.
My sabbatical in 2024/2025 would be a perfect opportunity. I had never spent time out of Canada on sabbatical before. I had family obligations (two daughters) and three cats to care for. But in 2020 I could see a time soon when the kids would be adults and the cats (sadly) would be meeting their maker. As the time approached, I solidified arrangements with Tobias, my wife and I helped the girls get established, and grieved our feline family members one after the other. Everything was falling into place.
We arranged to live at one of the university properties: the Gasthaus at Hinter der Grieb 8, a thirteenth-century building in the heart of the medieval city. Most apartments in the building are a single room but we managed to get a large one-bedroom unit that would enable us to host guests (we invited all of our family and friends). Staying in the same building are two English-speaking scholars we met in Oslo in June (Sam Cook and Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin), and not far away are two others I had some previous contact with: Scott Robertson (who is working on Titus traditions in Crete) and Alexey Somov (who is completing a translation of Greek and Church Slavic traditions about the Martyrdom of Daniel and the Three Youths for NASSCAL’s Early Christian Apocrypha series). Sam, Roxanne, and I all arrived early in August when the University was closed for vacations, so we didn’t expect to see Tobias and other German residents of the project. But it was comforting to be with a group of outsiders experiencing much the same introduction to Regensburg (and Germany) as we were.
The plan for my time here is to finish my Introduction to Christian Apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Series. This project has already been five years in the making, slowed down by the back-to-back editing of MNTA 2 and 3, and the brain funk of the pandemic. I also discovered about a year ago that I was writing a book four times the size agreed upon by the publisher. We managed to come to a compromise with a volume of around 600 pages, but this would still be the tip of the iceberg—much of the manuscript details and bibliography for each text will be mounted on the e-Clavis. That has meant creating a lot of entries as I write the book, so much that e-Clavis now looks more like my own project than the collaborative work it was intended to be.
Once the Anchor Yale volume is completed I will turn my attention to finally finishing a volume on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas for Early Christian Apocrypha, thus completing our trilogy of infancy gospels begun with Brandon Hawk’s Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Lily Vuong’s Protevangelium of James. My previous work on the Infancy Thomas has focused on single traditions—Greek and Syriac. The new translation will allow me the opportunity to synthesize my work into a reconstructed close-to-the-original text with commentary.
And of course there will be other things to do. Immediately I have to finish a paper for a volume edited by Benjamin de Vos and finish editing Alexey’s Martyrdom of Daniel translation. Then there will be presentations for the Beyond Canon brunches, and hopefully some invited papers around Europe. And travelling! Lots of travelling. So far we have made our way to Nuremberg, Passau, Munich, Innsbruck, Hallstatt, Salzburg, and a side-trip to Edinburgh. We can’t keep this pace going if I hope to get any work done, but future trips in the months ahead will include Vienna, Warsaw, Athens, Prague, Seville and wherever else my wife plans to take us (she is the travel co-ordinator). It’s going to be quite a year.