GALaCSy is an Anglo-German project funded by the AHRC and DFG to investigate the earliest translations of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul.
These translations into Gothic, Aethiopic, Latin, Coptic and Syriac were made between the second and fourth centuries CE. Not only do they derive from Greek manuscripts which have not been preserved, thereby providing valuable evidence for the early history of the Greek text, but they also stand at the head of important ecclesiastical communities and traditions.
The project is running between 2022 and 2025 in Birmingham, Göttingen, and Münster, and is initially focussed on the Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians. The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), University of Birmingham, will be examining the Old Latin tradition of Galatians which preceded the Latin Vulgate. Team members at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (ADWG) and the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung, Münster (INTF) will be working on the earliest Coptic translations of the Pauline Epistles, producing complete electronic transcriptions of the surviving manuscripts. Partners in Italy and Texas will contribute information from the Gothic and Aethiopic traditions. This will feed into the Novum Testamentum Graecum Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of these Epistles which is currently in preparation by members of the INTF and the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP). The GALaCSy project is co-ordinating its work with that of the Flanders Research Organisation (FWO) 1COR project on the text and translations of 1 Corinthians led by Prof. Dr. Dr. Christina Kreinecker at KU Leuven.
Information about the team members can be found on the Participants page. The release of manuscript transcriptions and other outputs will be noted on the Publications page. Further details about the progress of the project are available on the News page. In addition to presentations at the SBL Annual Meeting and other scholarly gatherings during the course of the research, the project also plans to hold its own conference on the importance of early translations for the biblical text. This will be held in Birmingham in early 2025.
