It is often strange for professors and other researchers to look back on the calendar year and ahead at the one about to begin. Our rhythm follows the academic year, and so we would more naturally celebrance new year\u2019s day in August, and make resolutions then. It is nonetheless worth joining in with this calendrical event and reminding ourselves of things accomplished and experienced. Definitely the biggest life event of the past year was that my father passed away<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Mandaean Book of John<\/em><\/a>, funded for 4 years by the NEH<\/a> and a total of about 9 years in the making<\/a>, finally appeared. The new font, formatting the text in versified form, and many other aspects of it took longer than we expected. Related to that,\u00a0I\u2019m happy to say that I made the first concrete step towards starting a book project related to the historical John the Baptist, bringing the Mandaean sources into the picture, through a paper I presented at a conference in Romania last summer.<\/p>\n Eighth International East-West Symposium of New Testament Scholars<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n