The twelfth biennial Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament will be held online on Thursdays from 21 January to 25 March 2021 at 1600 GMT, when papers will be delivered live online using the Zoom platform, following the successful paradigm of the Text-Critical Thursdays seminar held earlier this year. 

The overall theme for the Colloquium is "Fragments". Sessions will consist of two 30 minute papers, followed by a period of discussion, sometimes in breakout rooms; on 11th February, there will be a session of 'fragment papers' (also known as lightning talks), when presenters will give 10-minute summaries of work in progress. 

As the seminar will be hosted on the University of Birmingham’s Zoom platform, there will be no fees for participation. Details of how to join each week's session and the abstracts for the papers will be disseminated on the NTTC mailing list set up for Text-Critical Thursdays. Anyone wishing to participate in the colloquium who is not already on this list is invited to subscribe using the interface at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/NTTC or to contact Professor Houghton  The majority of the presentations will also be made available afterwards on the the IGNTP YouTube channel.

The planned schedule is as follows (updated 6.1.2021):

M. Burks and Y. Lee (New Orleans) - The Text of Papyrus 11 at 1 Cor. 5:1
E. Hixson (Plano TX) - Possible Markers of Inauthenticity in a Greek New Testament Papyrus: Genuinely Bad or a Very Good Fake?

D. Jongkind (Cambridge) - How to Make Sense of Substitutions: A Discussion of Some of the Relevant Impulses
P. Manafis (Birmingham) - Vaticanus Palatinus graecus 273: a fragmentary witness to the oldest surviving New Testament catena.

G. Parpulov (Birmingham) - Orphaned Leaves: Eight Pages from the History of Byzantine New Testament Illustration
K. Clarke (Langley, BC) - Fragmented History: Charles Lang Freer and the Ongoing Puzzlements Surrounding the Discovery of His Washington Manuscripts

P. R. Rodgers (USA) - The Origin of the Alexandrian Text
J. Dowden (Cardiff) - Geerlings Revisited: The Relationship between Minuscules 826 and 543
G. Farthing (UK) - Forming a more detailed stemma of Mark in Family 13 by using ‘Probability Structure Analysis’
M. Whidden (Orlando FL) - Family 1 in Luke: An Update on Current and Future Research
V. Andronache (Leuven) - Piecing Together Fragments of Tradition: Following the Alterations of John 14:25–26 in the Early Greek Authors

T. O'Loughlin (Nottingham) - Why Gather the Fragments?
G. Jenkins (Australia) - The Search for Mariam in the Nominative: Reflections on New Testament persons and the spelling of their names

D. Flood (Edinburgh) - New Readings in 1506: a fresh analysis of old microfilm scans of an imperfectly preserved manuscript
D. McCrory (Birmingham) - The Arabic Text of Romans 1:1-9a, 24b-29 in Sinai Greek New Finds Majuscule 2

C. Bates (Birmingham) - A Fragmentary Confirmation of an Earlier Date for the Greek Minuscule Bookhand and its Unexpected Correlation with New Testament Textual Criticism
H. Garza and C. Niccum (Abilene TX) A Fragment of His Imagination: GA 1831

P. Montoro (Birmingham) and R. Turnbull (Melbourne) - Should We Feast on the Fragments? An Examination of the Relative Textual Stability of Lemmata and Their Subsequent Repetitions in the Course of Exposition
M. Frey Rébeillé-Borgella (Lyon) - Philippus Presbyter’s commentary on Job: a source for New Testament citations

S. Rickerby (Australia) - The Peculiar Latin Vocabulary of Mark: A fragmentary argument
P. Lorenz (Münster) The Texts of Codices Bobbiensis (VL 1 / k) and Palatinus (VL 2 / e) in Mark 12:37-40; 13:2-3, 24-27, 33-36

E. Scieri (Birmingham) The Exegetical “Fragments” on Acts
A. Patton (Birmingham) The Fragmentation of a Fifteenth-Century Byzantine Lectionary


 We look forward to a fascinating series of text-critical presentations and discussions, despite the fragmented nature of the colloquium and our inability to meet in person on this occasion.

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 Amy Donaldson presenting online to the Birmingham Colloquium in 2011