Our AHRC/DFG project partner Hugh Houghton from the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) of the University of Birmingham convened scholars from all over the world for an international conference on The Pauline Epistles and the Ancient Versions. The conference was not only the final meeting of the (AHRC/DFG funded) GALaCSy project team, but also the 14th Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. From our team Julien Delhez (now Louvain) and Frank Feder, as members of the GALaCSy Göttingen team, took part with papers on the Coptic transmission of the Pauline Epistles. In the three years of the GALaCSy project, Göttingen and Münster were responsible for the edition of all extant Coptic manuscripts of Galatians and Ephesians, with a special focus on the earliest witnesses. Although we were able to fulfil this task within the (only) three years of funding, mainly thanks to the well-preserved Sahidic manuscripts, such as sa 4, it has quickly become quite obvious that we have only discovered the tip of the iceberg. The Coptic versions of the Pauline Epistles are extant in many, but mostly fragmentary manuscripts that already existed in all known literary dialects of Coptic: Bohairic, Fayyumic, Mesokemic, Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, and Sahidic as early as the 4th century. Along with the psalms and the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles are the best-preserved books of the Coptic Bible. Much remains to be discovered that could shed new light on the textual history of the Greek New Testament.

The GALaCSy Team