Saturday 21 June 2014

Jeremiah conference (Ascona) and research stay in Milan

I am off to Ascona in Switzerland to attend the conference Jeremiah's Scriptures: Production, Reception, Interaction, Transformation (22 - 26 June), organized by Hindy Najman and Konrad Schmid.

Together with Matthias Henze I am presenting the paper "Jeremiah and Baruch in 2 Baruch". In this paper we address the complex literary and text historical relationships between 2 Baruch and Jeremiah. In my part of the paper I discuss the relationship between the two in the Syriac History of transmission, asking how this transmission process affected the discourses on Jeremiah and Baruch, the relationship between them and the textual units associated with the figures. The explicit focus of my part of the paper is the so-called Epistle of Baruch (e.g., 2 Bar 78-87) in Syriac manuscript sources. In the Syriac (pre 10th-12th century) context the Epistle, assumed by most scholars to be originally excerpted from 2 Baruch, was appended to the larger Jeremiah corpus in biblical manuscripts and ascribed to Jeremiah in lectionaries. This transmission process also illustrates how collections and orders of biblical books, contents of transmitted texts, and cultural identifications of text units may be transformed as they circulate.

More on the Epistle of Baruch here later. I am working on three articles on there different issues relating to it; one dealing with the relationship between 2 Baruch/the Epistle and Jeremiah (proceedings, above), another on the common use of the various mss containing the Jeremianic corpus-version of the Epistle as a "text witness" to the Epistle as an attached part of 2 Baruch (Snapshots of Evolving Traditions, Eds. Lied and Lundhaug) and one on textual history and codicological details for the forthcoming Textual History of the Bible (Eds., Tov/Lange/Henze).

Once the conference is over I am heading to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to work on the Codex Ambrosianus and a couple of other mss. I will blog on this while there.