Saturday, October 09, 2004

THE ONLINE CRITICAL PSEUDEPIGRAPHA PROJECT is a new initiative to provide original-language critical texts for the various books of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. It is sponsored by King's University College at the University of Western Ontario. (My thanks to Jim West for alerting me to this site.) The Project Description reads:
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.

This is a very exciting and much-needed project. I look forward to hearing more about it.

Incidentally, have a look at the "Copyrights and Permissions" link on the main page. It does a good job of laying out the copyright considerations and a sensible "scholarly courtesy" policy. Perhaps the SBL could have a look at it and rethink its Seminar Papers policy.

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