Six members of the Göttingen University and Göttingen Academy participated in the recently concluded 11th International Congress of Coptic Studies (Claremont, CA, July 25-30): Heike Behlmer, Frank Feder, So Miyagawa, Troy Griffitts, and myself.

Thus, Frank Feder organized together with Siegfried Richter (University of Münster) the panel “Prospects and Studies for the Reconstruction and Edition of the Coptic Bible,” and spoke about “Reconstructing and Editing the Coptic Bible: The Münster-Göttingen Collaboration for a Complete Reconstruction and Edition of the Coptic Sahidic Bible.” In the same panel, Heike Behlmer presented a paper entitled “Paul de Lagarde, Agapios Bsciai and the Edition of the Coptic Bible.” Frank also organized with Christian Askeland (Indiana Wesleyan University) the “Coptic Digital Tools for Beginners Workshop.”

Troy Griffitts and So Miyagawa participated in the panel “Coptic Digital Humanities,” chaired by Carrie Schroeder (the University of the Pacific). So read a paper which he prepared together with Marco Büchler, from the Göttingen Center for Digital Humanities, who unfortunately could not attend the congress. Their talk was titled “Computational Analysis of Text Reuse in Shenoute and Besa.” Another member of our team, Uwe-Karsten Plisch, gave a talk on the Mesokemic codex Glazier and its relevance for the Coptic translation of the Septuagint.

Finally, I delivered the paper “Recovering a Hitherto Lost Patristic Text: Greek and Coptic Vestiges of Melito of Sardis’ De Baptismo” in the panel “Early Christian Literature Preserved in Coptic,” organized and chaired by Timothy Sailors (Tübingen University).

The abstracts of all the papers presented at the congress, including those mentioned above, can be read HERE.