Come study with us! Ph.D. applications for this funding round are due 1 October 2025.

Congratulations to @joeymccollum.bsky.social for his timely submission of his most excellent dissertation on the text of Ephesians. It has been an absolute joy working with Joey over the past three and a half years and the floor feels a little emptier now that he's back home.

It’s proofs time! How about another piece on Papias, this time looking looking at his presbyters?

My associate supervisor Rob Turnbull has written an exciting and accessible report on the research he's been doing! He recently published his PhD dissertation (brill.com/display/titl...), and he's currently applying phylogenetic methods to texts beyond the New Testament.

In biology, phylogenetics reconstructs evolutionary relationships by analysing how traits are inherited and change over time. The same technique is revealing the history of the New Testament 📜New research from MDAP's Robert Turnbull! pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/sci...

I had the pleasure of reading a draft of this paper a while ago. Excited to see that it's now published! Go check it out!

My article on the Papias testimonium about Mark is now out, open access, in HTR! In this piece, I interrogate the multilayered tradition about its composition and explore why authorship was imposed on it against its writer’s intent to remain anonymous. DOI: doi.org/10.1017/S001...

I am delighted to announce the IRCI has 2 job openings in early Christianity (specialisation open, research-focus, early career). Closing date 15 Aug. Contact me with any questions. We hope you'll consider joining our excellent group of scholars! candidate.aurion.cloud/acu/producti...

Now that I'm blogging again, I decided to mention my new book: ntweblog.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-...

I have to say I was fairly impressed with Seesengood's little guide to Philemon. He does a good job of introducing students to different and fraught ways of reading a text when we know so little about its context.

I've read this book now. She calls her view "Dutch Radical Thought 3.0" and, yes, that's what it is. The main thing new and of interest apart from her overall thesis is her comparison of Paul's letters with Seneca's Moral Epistles as "protreptic rhetoric masquerading as genuine letters" (140).

So disappointed.

Today's question: If I'm going to cite a dissertation from The Ohio State University, do I have to include the 'The'?

Friday night news drop: it got announced at tonight's NAPS business meeting---I will be taking over as the next editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies On the hunt for your best work on any aspect of early Christianity (100-700CE)! www.press.jhu.edu/journals/jou...

Thanks to everyone at the session for your stimulating questions.

Here’s an image illustrating my #NAPS2025 talk.

I've had fun updating my professional website over the past few weeks. (The end of the semester is always a nice opportunity to get back into old hobbies like web design.) And I have a few new things out there. Here it is! www.hugomendez.com

Who’s coming to NAPS? I’m excited to present my work on Salvian, the only person in antiquity who wrote about his use of an allonym. Here’s the abstract of “Salvian’s ‘Forgery’ Reconsidered”:

I’m reading a piece that discusses Foucault’s “What is an Author?” and I’m constantly asking myself, “Did we read the same essay?”

one of my first articles was on foucault's author function... almost 3 decades ago (!!!) works.hcommons.org/records/3d3k...

Coming to a Harvard Theological Review near you. (And it's open access!)

Good news: teiphy v0.1.21b has been released! (I had to fix some GitHub workflows that didn't work on release v0.1.21a.) It adds support for weighted variation units based on different variation categories, for use in @sccarlson.bsky.social's stemma software. Check it out: github.com/jjmccollum/t...

Come study with us! Fully-funded Ph.D. scholarship opportunity to work on the Late Antique translation of texts. www.acu.edu.au/research-and...

Looks like a really fun series

I'll be talking about paratexts at the Chester Beatty museum on 19 November 2025 in their Manuscripts and the Mind Lecture Series.

Registration is still open for our Makarios conference on Love of Neighbor and Human Flourishing (deadline 15 May) which will take place at ACU’s Rome campus in partnership with Baylor, Harvard, and Boston College! >

Really proud of this article that I wrote with @garrickvallen.bsky.social on the manuscript we've been spending a lot of time with these past couple of years. It's in the latest JBL, and I'd be happy to send anyone a copy who's interested.

As a textual and manuscript scholar, it's been hard to get my head around the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Now I can.

Perseus Digital Library is an incredible resource for accessing original Ancient Greek texts alongside parsing tools and lexical aids. Perfect for exploring classical literature in depth. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ #AncientGreek #Classics

Come study with us. ACU has just been rated #22 in the world in Theology, Divinity, and Religious Studies in the QS World University Rankings for 2025. #1 in Australia.

And it's out! Congratulations to the editors and participants. It was my first paper after my career break.

What's taking so long? How hard is it to take the backups you have and host the images? I don't care if the interface is fancy or not.

I'm be at NAPS in Chicago, talking about pseudonymity. See you there.

The "author fuction" has been incredibly generative beyond what I suspect the discourse initiator ever contemplated. But Foucault's status doesn't come from being first: I am now reading a fifth-century monk who's made the same points but didn't manage to initiate a discourse.

Coming to an HTR near you

Rufinus of Aquileia was a productive translator from Greek into Latin in late antiquity. Here is a nice bifolium from a MS of his Latin version of Eusebius' Historia ecclesiastica recycled as book cover. (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, 9/1473) nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0...

Looking forward to this issue!

Playing around with Copilot. It can: 1. Bring up the Vulgate text by chapter-verse citation. 2. Parse simple Latin. 3. Learn a new grammatical subcategory I defined and apply to a text. 4. Read a PDF in a modern language and summarize it. 5. Identify errors and correct a proposed translation. >

Prompting to AI to produce foreseeable disruptions to academia, I asked for a list of potential growth and shrinkage areas. Growth: increased enrolment; cost savings; new revenue streams; and enhanced research funding. Shrinkage: jobs cut, more competition, infrastructure costs, tuition pressure.

Further to this topic, I asked Copilot for 3-5 ways AIs will significantly disrupt academia in the humanities. This thread is what it answered (respondes lightly edited for length). >

If AI will reduce the demand for graduate students, what will happen to graduate education in the academy? Will it contract to just the Ivies and flagship state universities? Thinking in a humantities context...

This is helpful! Never thought journals implementing AI to make judgements. Some areas where I think it will have positive impacts: • improved search and discovery of digital collections • faster editing/indexing • transcribing documents

How will AI transform academia? I had a long chat with a colleague about it yesterday. Some ideas: 1. AI agents can do the work of TAs (grading, providing individualized instruction), allowing professors to teach many more students with less human support. 2. AI agents can do the work of RAs, >

Very excited to present at the BECs global seminar this year! Thank you for the invitation @sccarlson.bsky.social !

The 2025 Seminar 1 schedule for the BECS Global Seminar Series is now available with contributions from Sarah Corrigan, Stephen Carlson, Bronwen Neil, Sabrina Inowlocki, and David Woods.

Harsh critic!

Passing along this little piece of good news.

UPDATE: upgrading from 7 billion parameters to 14 billion made it smart enough to parse the verb! (Not sure what the random Chinese is doing though...)

For anyone who doesn't know Latin, that's like the AI claiming that "it was" is in present tense and in second person. Or how English speakers would say it, "you are"