Nils Dahl was an omnivorous scholar, tackling questions related to the composition, redaction, theology, transmission, and history of the New Testament. One area that captured his attention (and the attention of his students and colleagues) was the Euthalian apparatus, a series of complicated and ubiquitous lists, cross-reference systems, biographical texts, and text division traditions. Dahl saw the critical value of these traditions for understanding the early transmission of the Pauline corpus, hypothesising that the material once comprised an official ancient edition connected to the library of Caesarea. This lecture takes a step back by first examining the flexibility of the Euthalian material in the manuscripts that preserve it, arguing that it is more valuable to understand these features in the context of transmission and reading as opposed to viewing the tradition as evidence for an ancient edition. There is much more to be said about the Euthalian tradition and Dahl's work will continue to be a guide in that discussion.
About Garrick Allen
Dr. Garrick Allen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. He completed his PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2015. After this, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on ECM-Apk project at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal/Bethel, where he contributed to the production of a new Greek critical edition of the book of Revelation. From 2016 to 2020 he was Associate Professor in New Testament Studies at Dublin City University. Since 2020, Dr. Allen has held his current position as Senior Lecturer in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is currently leading the ERC StG-project Titles of the New Testament: A New Approach to Manuscripts and the History of Interpretation (TiNT), and the Principal Investigator of the Paratextual Understanding project, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. He is the author of Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation: New Philology, Paratexts, Reception (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Book of Revelation and Early Jewish Textual Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2017), along with multiple articles, edited books, and translations. He is also the recipient of the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise (2019) and the Paul J. Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship (2018).
About the Dahl Lecture
The Faculty of Theology presents every other year an international lecture in honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl. He was a professor at the University of Oslo and at Yale University, USA, and Norway’s most international New Testament scholar in the 20th century. His publications ranged widely thematically and in time, from 1936 until 2000, and his ideas are still discussed. Dahl played a role in initiating the new Historical Jesus research in the 1950s. Dahl was born 25th of June 1911 and died July 2nd in 2001.