SALC Centre for Biblical Studies, Reflections on a Year. Highlights for me (Peter Oakes, Co-Director) have been Karen King of Harvard, bringing everyone to the verge of tears recalling her life with the Gospel of Mary, Geoff Smith of University of Texas, enthusing over getting ancient Coptic text fragments out of envelopes in the Rylands (“It was like being in the nineteenth century!!” [this was meant very positively!]), and three outstanding Biblical Studies PhD completions. Sarah Parkhouse and Siobhán Jolley (back with us this September after two years postdoc at the National Gallery) organised a symposium on reception of the Gospel of Mary, ranging from academic consultants for TV and film to showing of Jo Blake’s innovative play (then live discussion with Jo and others) and to the moving contribution of the doyenne of Gospel of Mary scholars. This day followed another very good year of Ehrhardt Seminars, with speakers from Manchester to Leuven to Houston (albeit with handicaps of dropping from weekly to fortnightly and continuing limitations of audio equipment for hybrid meetings). Prof. Geoff Smith, Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at The University of Texas at Austin brought 5 students from Austin for a week in May, hosted by Jeremy Penner, to work on the Rylands still-unpublished/uncatalogued ‘Coptic Limbo’ papyri. Among the hundreds of fragments that still needed sorting, they worked on magical texts, a palimpsest and documentary works; they also discovered a previously unknown Coptic translation of a Gregory of Nazianzus text as well as an unusual/unique(?) alphabet commentary. This was the beginning of a collaborative project that will include a publication of the Coptic Limbo collection in digital format. The first of three extremely successful PhD examinations was Sherry Ashworth, ‘A Novel Approach to Reading Esther: An intertextual study of the Book of Esther with three nineteenth century novels.’ This was followed by Anna Budhi-Thornton, ‘Jesus the Model Man? A Comparison of Ancient Masculinities and the Jesus of the Johannine Passion Narrative’ and David Bell, ‘Children’s Lives and Deaths in 1 Thessalonians: The Significance of the Presence of Children for Interpreting Context and Text’. Between them, they were a great advert for the range and quality of Biblical Studies PhD work happening here. As in past years, a great learning experience for our postgrad students was participation in the 2024 Northern Universities Biblical and Patristic Postgraduate Day Conference, held this year at Durham (we alternate as hosts). It was especially good to have PhD alumna and now Assistant Professor of New Testament at University of Groningen, Kim Fowler, as the plenary speaker for the conference. Finally, we want to thank Lev Eakins warmly for three years of dedicated work as Administrator for the Centre for Biblical Studies. Lev stands down at the end of August, to be succeeded by Lynne Potts, who, after completing MA here is moving on to doctoral work on Septuagint.
