More Vanity Googling . . .

Volume 5 Shown

Brill

I did some vanity Googling again and discovered my name . . . or sort of my name . . . acknowledged in Volume 2 in the series of which Volume 5 is depicted above: "Jeffrey H. Hodges":

Thanks also to Jeffrey H. Hodges at the University of Tübingen, for providing an additional collation of the text of the synopsis against the facsimile edition and the photographs of BG 8502, and for his many suggestions for improvements in the translation.

This was written by Michael Waldstein, with whom I worked for several months on the Gnostic text The Apocryphon of John, deciphering facsimiles of the Coptic original, a task exceedingly obscure! Michael had asked my assistance because I had not only mastered Coptic, I had constructed my own synopsis of the four copies of The Apocryphon of John, employing a scissors-and-paste method, the "collation" that he refers to, if I recall.

Despite getting my name wrong -- an error shared with so many other illustrious individuals -- Michael was quite helpful and supportive in our time at Tübingen, once leaning over in a seminar to whisper, "It's an interesting point," when I drew a link between a Gnostic text and a New Testament passage that our German colleagues tended to dismiss. Michael was Austrian. I don't know that his nationality made a difference, but I appreciated his support . . . though I no longer recall the point that I was making.

Maybe that poor recall accounts for the radically different direction that my career has taken . . . not quite good enough for religious studies.