Saturday, November 22, 2008

SBL, Saturday evening...

Day 1 is over, whew. Pretty nice day for me. One paper down. My ADHD does make it really hard to sit through 2 1/2 hour sessions--which if you're giving a paper or are on a steering committee is requisite.

Yearly dinner with Jimmy Dunn, wife Meta, and former Dunn students at the "Legal Seafood" restaurant. Scot McKnight made a cameo and then was off to publishers unknown. You'll be glad to know that Simon Gathercole and Dunn still talk to each other :-) The number one biblioblogger James McGrath was there.

Saw former student Alicia Myers who's finishing her PhD at Baylor. Was graced with lunch with the infamous Nijay Gupta, currently of Durham. Had coffee with McGrath at Starbucks. Lots of Hebrews scholars coming up through the ranks and entering the professorial market very soon. My advice to those contemplating a PhD in Bible, theology, etc. Don't!

Playing the game in Boston...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is SBL much different without AAR?

Anonymous said...

Being a Scot you should have asked at the end of the meal "Jimmy are you Dunn?"

Jared Calaway said...

I also have noticed an explosion of Hebrews scholarship. But where else are you going to go if you want to say something remotely new about the NT? It is both reaffirming and discouraging, isn't it? Pretty soon the HEbrews group will be as big as the Johannine section!

Angie Van De Merwe said...

I will interact with Jared's comment on this blog in case either Jared or Ken may want to respond.
When you speack of the study of Hebrews being expanded, are you saying that the intperpretive understanding of Hebrews? As Hebrews was written late, was it an attempt to "train others" in "spiritual formation" (according to Jewish tradition)? If so, I understand why you would say that Hebrews will be expanded in the future.

Ken Schenck said...

Angie, what I meant was that AAR has a lot of individuals like Hare Krishna and such who come.

Jared, one interesting phenomenon about Hebrews is that, I suspect, half of the most interesting papers read on Hebrews this year weren't actually read in the Hebrews Group (my own, of course, included :-)

I'm not sure if we should try to funnel more papers to the Hebrews Group because the cross fertilization element is perhaps a good deal of what makes these "rogue" papers interesting.