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With the theme of The Pauline Epistles and the Ancient Versions, the Fourteenth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament also served as the closing conference for the AHRC-DFG funded GALaCSy project, a collaboration between Birmingham, Göttingen and Münster since 2022.

More than 100 people registered for the conference, which was held as a hybrid event building on the success of the Thirteenth Colloquium in 2023. Over half the participants came to Birmingham in person from seven countries, including Australia and the USA.

A total of 26 papers were presented on aspects of the earliest translations of the Pauline Epistles. In addition to Latin and Coptic, the languages treated included Gothic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Arabic and Caucasian Albanian.

Most of these presentations have now been released on a , enabling those who were not present to catch up with the academic content.

In addition, there were social activities each evening. The Colloquium Dinner, held in the Lodge Room in the Edgbaston Park Hotel, included a talk about the famous author and critic David Lodge from another renowned Birmingham academic, Professor David Edgar. On the Friday afternoon, participants visited Gloucester Cathedral for tours of the building and the cathedral library, where there was a display of some of the older manuscripts in their collection.

Overall, the Colloquium was a highly successful event, bringing together doctoral and early career scholars with more established 'veterans'. As ever, participants enjoyed the opportunities to learn more about each other's research and academic interests in both a formal and an informal setting.

The is established as one of the key conferences in this specialist field. We look forward to hosting the fifteenth colloquium in 2027, marking 30 years since the series began.