Acts of Pilate Workshop

Program Overview

Theoretical sessions will take place on October 4 and 5, 2010. They will consist of short, 15-20 min. presentations, followed by brief discussions. Ample time will be left at the end of each day for an open discussion assessing the implications of the new discoveries, ideas, and suggestions for the research on the Acts of Pilate and for the editorial project.

The presentations will:

a) update the participants on the state of manuscript / textual research on individual linguistic versions of the Acts of Pilate, review and update current assumptions about their relationships and manuscripts, report on the challenges relating to accessibility of manuscripts and/or their reproductions;
b) raise issues relating to the interpretation of textual evidence, consider inter-textual perspectives suggested by cognate texts, discuss the cultural determinants of the original Greek text and of its translations; and
c) address theoretical issues relating to large and fluid manuscript traditions, tackle the problems posed by textual reconstruction, explore the rhetorical consistency of the text, discuss transliterations of words in foreign languages and/or scripts.

Practical sessions will begin with a demonstration of collaborative analysis / comparison of a selected passage in all linguistic versions on October 4-5, but most of the editing work will be done in closed sessions on October 6-8.

This innovative approach requires that all editors of the different versions of the Acts of Pilate be present. The editors proceed through the text lemma by lemma. Each textual variant is discussed from all attested linguistic perspectives, with individual editors drawing their conclusions from all extant manuscripts of their respective linguistic versions.

This constant exchange of perspectives and nuanced understandings of linguistic constructs and their cultural significance generates otherwise inaccessible insights, establishes connections among manuscripts in different languages, and enables individual editors to make their textual choices in relation to the entire multi-lingual tradition of the Acts of Pilate.

The Acta Pilati Research Team has already tried this approach at its workshops in Paris (2006), Les Places (2007), and Dole (2008).

Administrative sessions will take place in the evenings and will focus on issues relating to planning the two volumes for the Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum, one with texts and the other with commentaries. They will also explore the possibility of accelerating the process of collaborative analysis / comparison so that the project may be concluded by 2014.