The edition of the non-canonical Gospels that I’ve been discussing in previous posts (The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations), which I published with my colleague Zlatko Plese, was meant for academics – professors of New Testament and early Christianity and their graduate students.   Most other people, of course, have no need or desire to see the original Greek, Latin, or Coptic of a text along with a translation.  People generally just want an English translation. But having a facing-page translation is a great thing for scholars and budding scholars.   The only way really to understand a foreign language text in its many nuances is to read it in its own language.  And since these are texts that deserve to be studied carefully, minutely, with full attention to all the fullness of their meaning, they really need to be read in the Greek, Latin, and Coptic languages in which that they have come down to us. For some scholars, the book would be useful because it provides the original language text for all these writings, and [...]

In my last couple of posts I began to describe how my edition of the Apocryphal Gospels came about.   After having done the Apostolic Fathers in two volumes for the Loeb, I had decided never to do another translation project again.  Too hard!  But then, forgetting my decision, I thought it would be useful to have a Greek/Latin – English version of the early Christian non-canonical Gospels.  And at the urging of the editor at Harvard, submitted a proposal also for the Loeb Classical Library.  But the editorial board decided that they did not want to start publishing new editions of Christian texts in the series, since that would detract from its typical focus on Greek and Roman classics.   And so I was now interested in a project without a publisher. I should say – this may not be widely known – that most of the time a scholar writes a book, s/he does not know who will be publishing it, or even if *anyone* will be.  This can be a source of real anxiety, [...]

My previous two posts were meant to be a kind of lead-up to this one; this thread started by my talking about the times I have published both a scholarly work and a trade book for popular audiences on the same topic.   The third and most recent time had to do with an edition of the Apocryphal Gospels.  I’ve now given some of the backstory: I had done a translation project creating a new bi-lingual edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library, and had vowed I would never do something like that again.  But I broke my vow. It all began innocently enough.   I had a scholar from England as a houseguest back in 1999 or so.   David Parker is the premier New Testament textual critic in the U.K. these days, or in the English-speaking world for that matter.  He is a real, hard-core manuscript guy.  At that point of my career – fifteen years ago now – I too was actively involved in that field.  Some of our interests and writings [...]