Leading New Testament scholar retires

MÜNSTER, Germany — High-ranking dignitaries and academics gathered to pay tribute to New Testament scholar Prof Barbara Aland at a retirement ceremony held in her honour at Münster Castle in July.

Speakers included Prof Roman Herzog, the former President of the Federal Republic and chairman of the board of trustees of the Hermann Kunst charitable foundation, Günter Schulze Blasum, Mayor of Münster, Prof Jürgen Schmidt, Vice Chancellor of the University of Münster, and Prof Michael Beintker, Dean of the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Münster.

The German Bible Society was represented by Dr Jan-A Bühner, the General Secretary.

A former President of the UBS, Bishop Prof Eduard Lohse, gave the official lecture, The Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Romans and the Beginnings of Roman Christianity. Prof Aland expressed her appreciation and thanks to those present.

Later Jan de Waard, UBS Interregional Coordinator of Work on Ancient Languages and Texts, gave thanks to Prof Aland personally on behalf of UBS for the contribution she has made to New Testament textual research, stressing the important role she played in the meetings of the UBS Greek New Testament Committee.

For the last 20 years Prof Aland has been based at the University of Münster and since 1983 she has been director of its Institute for New Testament Textual Research. She is continuing in the post while the search for a successor takes place.

Harold Scanlin, UBS Consultant on Scholarly Editions, writes: Prof Barbara Aland has continued a long and fruitful relationship with the Bible Societies, an affiliation begun by her late husband Prof Kurt Aland. When UBS was interested in providing an up-to-date, scholarly Greek New Testament text as the basis for its translation projects, they turned to Kurt Aland and the work of the Münster Institute. Since 1995 Barbara’s irenic leadership has continued to foster the spirit of the goals of the Bible Societies and to enhance the academic study of the text of the New Testament. Virtually all the New Testament translations of recent decades are founded upon the work of the Alands and their colleagues who also served as editors of the UBS Greek New Testament and the Nestle-Aland text.