YCAS 2015: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Panel
This is the final post previewing the upcoming 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium to be held September 25-26 at York University in Toronto. How only a week away! Remember, if you register for the symposium, you will receive drafts of the papers in advance (and many of them are available now), thus enabling you to participate more fully in the discussions that follow. For registration information, visit the YCAS 2015 web site (HERE).
When Brent Landau and I began planning for the 2015 Symposium, we considered immediately a panel on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife as a way to capitalize on the widespread interest in the text. One of the goals of the Symposium, after all, is to draw non-scholars into the discussion of the literature. The session is intended not as an assessment of the evidence for or against forgery but as an examination of the reception of the text. Caroline Schroeder examines the gender divide apparent in the online discussions of the gospel, with male scholars often employing misogynistic language in their spirited dismissals of the text and female scholars for the most part proceeding more cautiously, waiting for the results of scientific testing and expressing their concerns about the tenor of the responses of their male counterparts. James McGrath and Mark Goodacre, themselves popular biblio-bloggers, provide further analyses of the reception of the text on blogs, and consider that the speed and collaboration that blogging offers may sacrifice the precision and accuracy that is …