Funded PhD Positions in Germany

Do you want to be paid to write your PhD at a prominent German theological school?  The Graduiertenkolleg in Wuppertal has advertised six funded positions for this fall (six starting in Sept, one in Oct). The positions pay approximately €27,000 per year ($30,000 USD) for three years, but the benefits exceed the stipend.  Participants benefits from interdisciplinary seminars and faculty dialogues funded by the larger initiative, which resides at the Protestant University Wuppertal and the University of Wuppertal. Faculty from the seminary have been active in Septuagint research (Siegfried Kruezer) and currently are leading the Editio Critica Maior project on Revelation (Martin Karrer). The Confessing Church movement associated with the seminary is best known by Americans for its broad opposition to the Nazi regime in WWII, especially in the preparation and publication of the Barmen Declaration.

Broadly speaking, the Graduiertenkolleg fosters scientific research on the creation of digital editions of texts, both ancient and modern, engaging faculty and students from across the humanities.  “The project’s goal is ultimately the establishment of a ‘grammar of editing.’” 

PhD positions advertisement (German)

https://www.editionen.uni-wuppertal.de/

Dokument-Text-Edition Graduiertenkolleg hompage (English)

https://www.editionen.uni-wuppertal.de/en.html

Wuppertal University offers excellent classes to support German language learning for students and spouses, who often need to quickly develop a proficiency in the language.  By train, one can travel from Wuppertal into the Düsseldorf city center in twenty minutes.

Application deadline: 25 June 2019

How long will it take to completely revise the Nestle edition?

We all know that the revisions to the Catholic Epistles were printed in the NA28 and that the revisions for Acts, John, and Revelation are underway as I write. But how long will it take to have a completely revised edition of Nestle? Writing in 2000, here is what Klaus Wachtel said:

A simple calculation shows how important this aspect [of collaboration] is. The first instalment of the Editio Critica Maior comprising the Letter of James was published in 1997. We sent the second instalment (the Letters of Peter, sixteen of 670 pages in the Nestle-Aland pocket edition, without the ten pages of James) to the publisher in 1999. This means that 654 Nestle-Aland pages remain to be edited and that would take another 82 years for the edition to be completed, if we keep working on our own, provided that funding will be available to about the same extent overt whole time. One does not have to be a prophet to see that it is unlikely that we will reach our goal under these condition. This means that it is an urgent task to establish an effective infrastructure for cooperation with editors and other collaborators from outside the Münster institute.*

So we need more places like Münster, Birmingham (UK), and Wuppertal. Perhaps it’s time that a US institute joined the labor force.

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*From Klaus Wachtel, “Editing the Greek New Testament on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 15, no. 1 (2000): 43–50 (48 n. 2).

The Apocalypse Project (Wuppertal)

I am pleased to announce the latest major inquiry into the text of the Greek New Testament. At the beginning of this month, a team based at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal-Bethel has started work on an Editio Critica Major of the book of Revelation in partnership with the INTF-directed Editio Critica Maior series. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Fund) has funded the initiative. Martin Karrer is the primary investigator. Ulrich Schmid is playing a leading role in deploying the latest relevant technological innovations. The project will progress in three phases with a completed edition hopefully after approximately ten years.
At least two from our blogroll will be active in the project. For the next two and a half years, I will be editing the Sahidic text of the Apocalypse. In a year, Martin Heide will begin creating an edition of the Syriac. I am fortunate to be able to conduct my research in Münster, which is a world center for Coptology as well as New Testament textual criticism. My colleagues at the INTF have repeatedly surpassed my expectations with their kindness and Gastfreundschaft! ...not to mention patience for my rudimentary German.
In coming months, I will say a bit more about the project. I am excited that Alin Suciu has discover a new fragment of the Sahidic Apocalypse which he has also identified as deriving from the same codex as other already-known leaves.