UNE > News and Events > Browse by article > UNE professor invited to symposium in South Africa

Next Italian honours, festival to celebrate UNE Languages August 11, 2004  

Previous Five-star record of excellence for UNE August 9, 2004 

UNE professor invited to symposium in South Africa

August 10, 2004

Majella Franzmann.jpg
A professor from the University of New England is to be the only Australian representative at a symposium in South Africa titled “The New Testament Interpreted”.

Professor Majella Franzmann, who has studied in Germany as a Humboldt Fellow, is attending the symposium at the invitation of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The Foundation, based in Germany, is supporting the symposium at the University of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town.

During the symposium she will present a paper that highlights the way in which Jesus and the New Testament were revered by adherents of Manichaeism, a religion founded in Persia in the 3rd century AD.

Professor Franzmann, Convener of Studies in Religion at UNE, is an international authority on the portrayal of Jesus in the “heresies” that rivalled the mainstream Christian Church throughout the first five or six centuries of its existence. Research she conducted while holding her Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Tubingen in 1992-93 resulted in her first book, Jesus in the Nag Hammadi Writings (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1996). The von Humboldt Foundation has continued its support of her research, including a further two-month fellowship in Bonn in 1995. Her latest book is Jesus in the Manichaean Writings (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 2003).

Her symposium paper will discuss a letter, written in the Coptic language within a 4th-century Manichaean community in Egypt, which quotes with obvious reverence a well-known passage from St Matthew’s Gospel (chapter 6, verses 19-20). “It really goes to show how the Manichaeans (a community considered by the Christians to be absolutely heretical) revered the Christian scriptures,” Professor Franzmann said. “Scriptures were a kind of ‘commodity’ that a number of groups could use in common at the same time as they were vilifying each other.”

She argues that, as the letter was written from one Manichaean to another, the writer was not quoting Christian scripture with a view to enticing a Christian into the Manichaean community.

The symposium, on August 12-14, will include sessions on New Testament research in South Africa, and the interpretation of the New Testament in the African context. While in South Africa, Professor Franzmann will present a guest lecture at the University of South Africa in Pretoria.

Media contact: Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE, Armidale (02) 6773 3049.
A photograph of Professor Majella Franzmann is available at:
http://smithserver.une.edu.au/photography/media/FRANZ.jpg

Posted by Jim Scanlan at August 10, 2004 03:57 PM