Well, phooey.

(The Chronicler notes with interest the discussion surrounding N.T. Wrong and the ethics of anonymous blogging that's been preoccupying the biblio-blogosphere. The Chronicler sees nothing wrong with sharing reflections, bits of research, etc. with the great wide open that is the internet without being forced to disclose that one is, say, a gay Asian-American middle-aged vegetarian male with a Ph.D. in New Testament from a mid-range conservative U.S. institution. As the thoughtful posts keep rolling in, though, the Chronicler may feel compelled to weigh in at greater length at some point regardless.)

Here's what I've been doing while I've been avoiding le blog:

• I'm happy to say that while I've been spending comparatively little time with Ambrose and "his" Jews, the encounters we've had have been most rewarding. It looks like this year's NAPS conference will feature a paper on the topic by yours truly, in the hopes of getting a fuller draft into publication one of these years ... once I've rid the accursed thing of split infinitives, and an overabundance of "by the same token"s. Thanks to Stephen for alerting me to the latter problem -- if only he knew that the version he read had already had a good number of them excised from its pages ;)
  
  
• On the languages front, I'm gaining ground on the twin evils otherwise known as Coptic and Syriac. The former in particular is a source of both joyful discovery and rampant cursing -- the one when a read through the Gospels of Mark and John reveals idiosyncratic Christological variants ("in you my will dwells") or simply insights into the language's features (e.g., the predilection for making use of the little one-letter verb translated as both "do" and "make" -- rather than "shining," the Coptic scribe thus uses "making light," etc.) The cursing, on the other hand, comes into play when attempting to speed-read pages upon pages of Quecke only to be, once again, stumped by the difference between sigma-omega-tau-mu and sigma-omega-tau-pi. Vocabulary, my old enemy, we meet again!
  
  
• Paper and project-wise, I'm currently working a bit out side of my comfort zone -- both earlier and later, really. One project about which I'll have more to say as I've got a lot more to think on it concerns one or two minor treatise(s) by Tertullian. The other deals with Severus of Antioch, Syriac Christian liturgy and, well, death. I'm a fourth-century kinda kid, so the second century is unsettling me a touch, while the sixth is leaving me really out of my depth. For both projects, however, the online resources over at the Tertullian project have been quite helpful -- did you realize that the ToC for the Patrologia Orientalis can be found online there? No? Go see for yourself!

Not much of this is inherently interesting, but a few of these items have the potential to become interesting in their own right at some point. For now, putting them out there is a bit of a path back into blogging, as well as a set-up for the obligatory plug for the new, improved N.T. Gateway. :D