Today we celebrate Dr. Megan Burnett's award of a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster. Megan has been a PhD fellow with the MOTB Greek Paul Project since its inception in the spring of 2015, working as a reconciler of student transcriptions and hosting the tutorial webinars at the start of each semester. In parallel, last year she completed her PhD with Bill Warren at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary; her dissertation title was "Codex Washingtonianus: Testing the Validity of Sander's Block Mixture Thesis". She has done outstanding work for the project and will certainly be missed, but we are happy that the INTF will also benefit from her talents.
The fellowship involves redesigning the apparatuses of the Nestle-Aland 29th edition and the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament 6th edition:
The INTF Research Assistant will prepare NA29 and UBSGNT6 at INTF supervised by the director, Holger Strutwolf. This will be a continuation of the work of two previous fellows Greg Paulson (2014-2017) and Dora Panella (2017-2020).
The research assistant will take part in the meetings of the editorial committee for NA and UBSGNT which has been appointed by the UBS Global Board in 2011. The assistant will re-design the apparatuses according to the decisions of the committee.
For both concise editions, the task consists in implementing the findings of the ECM relating to the reconstruction of the initial text and the choice of textual witnesses, and making them available beyond the relatively limited circle of the ECM’s recipients. Furthermore, the advantageous features of the two concise editions are to be further developed. For UBSGNT6 a completely new design is currently being developed in close collaboration with Florian Voss of the German Bible Society and a consortium of Global Translation Advisors of UBS. The goal is to streamline the edition more forcefully for the use of translators, academic teachers and students. The main task of the research assistant will be to execute this major revision.
Having just spent a year-long sabbatical working at the INTF in 2018-19, I know Megan will enjoy working with her colleagues at the institute and getting to know the city of Münster. The start date for the fellowship (1 April) will certainly be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is far better to have that resolved before beginning the postdoc than during. Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Megan!