How texts can be lost, found, mistranslated, abandoned and put aside — thus changing the course of history — is a topic professor Annette Yoshiko Reed will tackle at the upcoming 2018 Taubman Lectures at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley.

The program is titled “Forgetting: The Jewish Past between Rupture and Renewal,” and the three lectures are slated to take place in a four-night period starting Monday, March 12.

Reed, who has a Ph.D. from Princeton, is a professor at NYU whose areas of focus are Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity and Jewish-Christian relations in the third through seventh centuries. One of Reed’s areas of study is how much of the ancient past is now considered a part of Christian history instead of Jewish history.

That will be the topic of her second lecture, titled “How the Jewishness of Christianity was Forgotten.” The first is titled “What Was Last with the Dead Sea Scrolls” and the final is “Forgetting and Remembering Second Temple Judaism.”

The lectures will take place at 7 p.m. Monday, March 12, 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, and 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 15 at the Magnes, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley. The lectures are free, but an RSVP is required.

The annual Taubman Lectures series is funded by the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Chair in Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley. Co-sponsors are the Magnes, the Center for Jewish Studies at the GTU, Lehrhaus Judaica, the Jewish studies program at UC Davis and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford.