Editing More New Testament Apocrypha, Part 1: Choosing the Texts
Yesterday I sent off the last chapter of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures vol. 2 (=MNTA 2) to its authors for revisions. The project is not over by a longshot, but it is the end of a major stage in the process of getting this volume, now over three years in the making, to publication. Of the 36 texts included in the volume, 29 are complete, four are in the authors’ hands waiting for final revisions, and the last three are contributions by the editors (Brent Landau and I)—these always get delayed until the very end. This seems to me a good time to pause and look back at how the project came together.
The planning for this volume began when we submitted the manuscript of vol. 1 to the publisher back in January 2015 (yes, that long ago). The introduction included a provisional list of texts to be included in vol. 2. As you can see below, that list was provisional indeed.
Why so many changes? Well, some are not that dramatic at all and are merely changes in titles. But some texts are absent from the final contents because these projects were just too big and our contributors simply realized at some point that they could not finish it in time for our deadline. This was certainly the case for the Infancy of the Savior and the Vision of Theophilus (both of which I promised to contribute), and the other major work was the Pseudo-Clementines, …