Now that I’m in the deep throes of research for my next book, I thought it would be a good time to devote a thread to it.  It’s what I’ve been thinking about day and night — and reading voraciously on – since this past August!  To explain it all, I need to provide a bit of personal background.

The point of this post:  I have decided to change publishers.   The book that just came out last month, Jesus Before the Gospels, is my seventh book with HarperOne, which is an Imprint of HarperCollins, one of the five largest publishing houses in the world.  It has been an absolutely terrific run with Harper’s, an absolute career-changer.  But I’ve decided now – after working with them for twelve years – to move on to something else.  My next two books will be with Simon and Schuster, another one of the “big five,” which is located in New York (HarperOne is in San Francisco).

Why I changed is a long story.   First maybe I should say something about my association with Harper.

As I think I may have mentioned on the blog before, my original idea when I got into writing books was to write only heavy-hitting scholarship on New Testament textual criticism, books for scholars and only for scholars.  My most serious interests were in the field of textual studies; my most pronounced expertise was on the citations of the New Testament in the writings of the early Greek church fathers and on how these citations could help us both reconstruct the original text of the New Testament (since we don’t have the originals) and to write the history of its transmission, as it was changed by scribes over the centuries in different ways in different times and in different places.

It was a rather, uh, specialized field of interest.  And my idea was…

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