dead sea scrolls

Donald W. Parry, author of the Institute’s Illuminating the Dead Sea Scrolls, will deliver a free lecture this Thursday (March 6) called “The Isaiah Scrolls: Their Significance to Modern Religious Communities.” His lecture is part of the ongoing Leonardo Lecture Series on the Dead Sea Scrolls, held at The Leonardo museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. The series coincides with The Leonardo’s major exhibit on the “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times.”

The Leonardo Lecture Series on the Dead Sea Scrolls continues tomorrow with Sidnie White Crawford’s lecture: “Scribes, Scrolls and Scriptures: What the Dead Sea Scrolls Teach Us About the Old Testament.” Crawford teaches in the department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The free lecture series is being hosted by the Leonardo Museum in conjunction with their ongoing exhibit, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times.” While you’re there you can pick up a copy of Donald Parry’s new book Illuminating the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Leonardo’s gift shop (also available on Amazon).

The big news for 2013 was CPART’s agreement with the Vatican Apostolic Library to continue the Syriac manuscript research and publication project. The next phase of the project will focus on 80 Vatican Syriac manuscripts. These manuscripts will appear online, be freshly catalogued, studied, and made the subject of an academic conference. Of course, we haven’t just been waiting around for these 80 splendid manuscripts to be photographed! This year we published online digital facsimiles of over two-hundred Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, and Garshuni manuscripts from the Brown Collection. And we plan to publish hundreds more manuscripts from this and other collections in the coming years. A steady stream of CPART Student assistants is essential to the production and delivery of such resources. Working with such brilliant people is another highlight of 2013.

Note: Each month, the Maxwell Institute Blog will feature posts from each of our initiatives to keep readers informed about the variety of work we do. Today’s post is from Kristian Heal of the Institute’s Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts. Heal announces the exciting news that the Institute reached an agreement last month to publish all of the DSS’s biblical scrolls in an electronic database. —BHodges