In July, online, if this happens to be your thing

Just noticed this announced, a paper I will be giving within the Oxford Interfaith Forum series, in the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts seminar.

It’s a very nice series of seminars, and I’m quite thrilled to give a paper in this context. Do check the other papers here.

Finding a Home: The West Syriac Context of the Clementine Epistles on Chastity

The two epistles De virginitate attributed to Clement of Rome seem to have been composed in Greek but only survived as a whole in Syriac. The publication of the Syriac text, known until recently from only one witness of the fifteenth century, led then to the double identification of a handful of excepts in Greek, quoted without attribution in one late-antique exegetical work, and of the fragment of one Coptic witness. The Syriac, however, remains the most interesting. Since the last edition (Beelen, 1856), a series of new witnesses have emerged that further document what was initially thought to be a fluke due to a scribal confusion: the fact that the two epistles are included as an integral part in several Syriac New Testament collections. This lecture aims to reconstruct the West Syrian context that led to this inclusion, which alone should probably be credited with the survival of the two epistles.