Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism

Thanks to Matthew Brook O'Donnell for alerting me to updates in the following journal:

Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism

I've added this to my Journals page. It used to be there some years ago, but got removed when the journal hit problems. Its first issue was in 2000 but then nothing appeared for some time, and the journal vanished from the web altogether, its URL poached by someone else. It returned in December 2003, now hosted at McMaster (see blog entry on). Now Volume 2 has been announced with a 2001-5 date. There are currently three articles on-line:

Zeba Crook, The Divine Benefactions of Paul the Client
Hans Förster, 7Q5 = Mark 6.52-53: A Challenge for Textual Criticism?
Malcolm Choat and Alanna Nobbs, Monotheistic Formulae of Belief in Greek Letters on Papyrus from the Second to the Fourth Century

Matt O'Donnell writes:

We are actively seeking new articles, to complete Volume 2 (which we hope to do by the summer and then to see it out in print by the end of the year), and to go into Volume 3.

The scope of the Journal is broad, covering the texts, language and cultures of the Graeco-Roman world of early Christianity and Judaism.

From editorial statement (http://divinity.mcmaster.ca/jgrchj/current):

"...the scope of this journal remains broad, with articles welcome on many areas of relevance to the journal’s aims. Nevertheless, the approach of the journal is also specific—to publish only the highest quality articles that examine the ways in which the Greco-Roman world was the world of the New Testament and early Judaism. The emphasis in the journal is thus on a range of possible approaches and bodies of material, including historical, linguistic, papyrological, epigraphical and synthetic studies of the kind that are often lacking in other journals. In fact, we encourage contributors to attempt to draw various areas of related knowledge together in their submissions."

The journal plans to keep material on-line for a year or so and then to push into print with Sheffield Phoenix Press, at the same time removing that volume from the web. So it's an interesting experiment in mixing on-line and print publication, though I think a little odd. Just as people are picking up the on-line versions of the articles and citing them, and creating some presence on the internet for their authors, they go to print only, and it's a pretty expensive print journal at £80 / $140 (institutional) or £40 / $70 (individual), and it is going to take some time for libaries to start picking up that first volume.