J.-L. Simonet joins blog

I am delighted to announce that J.-L. Simonet has joined the blog. He is currently working on textual criticism of the Acts of the Apostles—collating Greek and Syriac minuscules and lectionaries, and Armenian mss and lectionaries. He has recently discovered a new witness of the Vetus Latina of Acts (he may or may not wish to share details) and has collated a number of Vulgate mss too. He is also studying the oldest Ethiopic ms of Acts. Beyond that he's gathering data from translations made from Latin in the Middle Ages in Dutch, German, English, Swedish, Provencal, Castillian, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian. In addition to the languages indicated in this research he also has Arabic, Coptic, Georgian, and Old Church Slavonic (it's hard to do without OCS nowadays :-).

He is currently preparing a doctorate in Louvain-la-Neuve on the citations of Acts in Gregory Nazianzenus, Greek texts, Latin and Oriental translations, while also preparing the edition of Gregory Nazianzenus Oratio 41 (on Pentecost) in the Armenian translation. This edition should appear in CCSG.

He has a long record of pastoral involvement and is currently President of the French-speaking Evangelical Federation of Belgium (as he has been for many years). A friend of mine who has been a missionary in Belgium says that he played a very significant role in getting state recognition for evangelical churches within Belgium.

Soyez le bienvenu, Monsieur Simonet!

This further enhances representation of European countries on the blog: Euro-bloggers currently come from, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, UK. However, bloggers only come from N. America, Europe and Australia, though one currently resides in Israel (which is allowed into the Eurovision Song Contest because the judges had not consulted an atlas to see which continent it was in). Qualified bloggers from other parts of the world are most welcome.