This is a very good question.

We’d hoped to publish the Second Timothy volume in Rick Brannan’s Lexical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, but Rick’s progress on that has been slow due to lots of life changes with a new son. It means Rick doesn’t have much extended time to spend researching and writing that volume, and its production has lagged.

So Rick has been looking for a project he could make progress on with random spots of time, usually not more than 90 minutes or so. He thinks he’s found something to fit that bill.

In researching and writing a new introduction and translation to the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John for volume two of Burke and Landau’s New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, Rick prepared an edition of Tischendorf’s Greek version of the document. The vocabulary is mostly also found in the New Testament. It is not short (28 chapters, around 3,000 words) but not long. He also followed the now standard versification (not in Tischendorf) and added morphological, lexical, and gloss information.

While this is very preliminary and may change, we thought folks would like to know that Rick is planning on creating a reader’s edition of the Greek text he prepared. It will probably be a slim volume (smaller than the normal 6×9), between 50–70 pages with all NT words occuring 20 times or less (maybe 30 times or less?) as well as all non-NT words, footnoted with grammatical information, lexical information, and glosses. When complete, it will be published in print at a reasonable price ($7.95? $9.95?) by the Appian Way Press.

If this proves useful, we will evaluate producing readers of other material (likely apocryphal/noncanonical gospels) in similar format.

Would such volumes be interesting to you? Please let us know, and please spread the word. Thanks!