Online Critical Pseudepigrapha

[jdarlack]

Hello folks, I just stumbled upon a site that shows a heap of promise!

The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha project is directed by Ken Penner, David Miller and Ian Scott. Thus far, they have posted the Greek text in Unicode for The Testament of Job along with a fully prepared critical apparatus; also available are Testament of Abraham and 1 Enoch-with Aramaic variants. There's an invitation for others to get involved. If you've got an interest in Second Temple Judaism, you may want to take a look.

Of course, the usefulness of the site for studying the Jewish backgrounds of the New Testament is easy to see!

The project has placed the base text files into public domain, so that means they could be incorporated into BW. Perhaps if enough BW users could help out with the apparatus, we could convince them to let us incorporate the text into BW! ...we could at least hope...

Project Description

For some time it has been evident that scholars of early Judaism and early Christianity need better access to the texts of the Pseudepigrapha in their original (or extant) languages and with a critical apparatus. In many cases critical editions are prohibitively expensive or out of print, and scholars without access to a large library have been hard pressed to find them.

The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is intended to address this problem by publishing on-line, free-access critical texts of the Pseudepigrapha which are up-to-date and academically rigorous. This aim is to be realized by

1) co-ordinating the efforts of scholars who take on the editing of individual texts;
2) providing a forum for peer review of texts as they are developed;
3) developing the technology necessary for the publication of these texts in electronic form; and
4) providing a permanent web-site for the long-term publication of these texts and as a forum for ongoing text-critical work on the pseudepigrapha.