I've just returned (11/21/06) from attending the 2006 Society of Biblical Literature conference held this year in Washington, DC. My description of the conference will be both personal and professional. My second to the oldest daughter lives in Reston, VA, so we drove there and stayed with her over the weekend.

We got a chance to see her in action teaching first grade at the Lorien Wood School .She does very well and we are extremely proud of what she has accomplished. She recently applied for a position as a part-time tutor and out of the hundreds of applicants she was chosen. It doesn't surprise me in the least -- Heidi has the intelligence, skills, and personal qualities that a teacher needs to be effective. It's obvious that the children love and respect her.

As always, my greatest challenge in attending conferences is the travel. I managed rather well this time. I was able to drive from my daughter's house in Reston to the Metro station in Vienna, VA. Saturday morning Heidi drove there and I followed her with Suann writing down every turn. The return trip was more challeninging since I had to do it at night trying to read the directions and see street signs. It wasn't easy, but Imade it. It's extremely helpful to have a cell phone along if one gets lost.

It takes about 45 minutes on the Metro to get to the Washington Convention Center. I changed from one line to the next once. I think on every trip there were others who were also going to the AAR/SBL conference. On Sunday I followed a group when I shouldn't have. We got on the train going the wrong direction and had to get on the next train back. We actually didn't lose any time, because when we arrived back at the prvious station others who had been riding with us before were standing there waiting.

At my destination I only had to go up an escalator from the Metro station, take a few steps, and then enter the Convention Center. It was extremely convenient, but it also meant that I hardly saw any of the city.

The early afternoon session I attended on Saturday was the Pauline Epistles group which had the topic Paul and Violence. Robert Jewett compared the attitude of Paul in the first letter we have (1 Thessalonians) with the last one (Romans, as the last of the undisputed letters of Paul). He understands 1 Thess 2:16 The wrath of God has come upon them at last" to be a vindictive statement of Paul relating to a massacre of Jews that took place contemporaneoius with Paul's writing. Jewett considers Paul to have developed in his thinking and by the time of the writing of Romans Paul is interpreting God's work through Christ to be a redemption involving Jews and Gentiles alike. Jewett takes the phrase "All Israel will be saved" to mean all Jews -- not a spiritual Israel or "all Israel" in any restrive sense. It was interesting to hear him state his view that the formation of Rabbinic Judaism was the measn by which God has preserved Israel following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Paul, he said, had no way to know what God would be doing within the next century to preserve Israel and be faithful to the covenant.

Another paper in that session on Paul and Violence was given by Joseph Marchal. He seems to be a Lilly Visiting Scholar at Austin College having earned a doctorate at the GTU. His approach was clearly based on a hermeneutic of suspicion and described himself as a feminist scholar, among other things. I don't know why I didn't pick up on this from his talk, but this topic is from his book published by SBL this year Hierarchy, unity, and imitation: a feminist rhetorical analysis of power dynamics in Paul's letter to the Philippians. I get the idea that he depends on someone else's research on military language. Paul comes out of Marchal's analysis looking like imperialistic, power-mongering, control freak. The problem with this approach is that it puts Paul in the wrong context to begin with. Just because Philippi was a Roman colony populated with retired soldiers and that Paul is in prison with some connections with the praetorium guard doesn't mean that Paul writes with language from military connotations. If someone could show that Paul had a military background and used language peculiar to the military, then you could have an argument. I wasn't persuaded at all by this paper. All of the language that was interpreted as being military was language that is common within philophronetic literature and traditional in Jewish writing. This work seemed to me to be an attempt to see how you could make a sensational interpretation that says the opposite of traditional approaches.

In the late afternoon time-slot I attended a joint session of the Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti Consultation and the Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity Section. This was a book review panel focusing on the commentary by Johan Thom on Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus. It was a privilege to hear the eminent scholar on hellenistic philosophy, Anthony Long. I was also eager to hear Troels Engberg-Pedersen. The latter scholar has done much work on how to understand Paul in the context of hellenistic Judaism with its adaptation of hellenistic philosophy's theory and practice. I can't say I understood everything they said. I was happy to hear that Troels is working on a book with a title like Paul as Philosopher.

Sunday morning I attended the Hebrews Consultation. This session was on the topic "The Structure of the Book of Hebrews." It was painful for me to hear other scholars struggling with the structure of Hebrews. I think I've solved that issue but I've failed to give my theory a wide hearing. George Guthrie and Cynthia Westfall described their work with discourse analysis. Westfall seems to think that her rigorous application of linguistic analysis achieves some sort of objective and scientific conclusions. It certainly is one way to analyze a document and can give some helpful ideas about the language of a document. I can imagine someone having a document written in some obscure language without knowledge of the cultural context and being able to describe linguistically how the document is structured. But I can also imagine that one could then discover the identiity of the author and find out that the author disagrees completely with the results of the analysis. What's different about studying something like Hebrews is that we have a great deal of information about how people were to write speeches and letters in Greek and a wealth of material with which to compare Hebrews. I prefer that sort of approach. I think the evidence is incontrovertible that the author of Hebrews is employing synkrisis (comparison) throughout the document focusing on specific topics for comparison and then concluding each section with exhortation. Whatever else is going on in Hebrews is subordinate to the synkrisis. The point is a simple one: maintain your allegiance to God through Christ because that's the only way now to achieve the goal of maturity in faith. By comparison what God has now done through Christ is even better than what was done in the first covenant. God's people failed in their allegiance with the first covenant and suffered the consequences. It makes sense that a great consequence will befall God's people if they fail with this greater work God has now done through a Son.

The last paper in this session was presented by Gabriella Gellardini. The first ten minutes was a rehearsal of the development of literary criticism. I'm not sure there was actually a point to the review, but it was an impressive description. The next 10 minutes rehearsed the history of Hebrews scholarship. Since Gabriella comes from this European context of multiple languages, she is able to do what very few American scholars can do--give a survey of the work done in German and French as well as British and American English scholarship. I was exhausted with the breadth of her brief recitation of several centuries of academic scholarship relating to the study of language and of Hebrews specifically. Her proposal for the structure of Hebrews was less impressive. She believes that all of us are dependent on the work of Albert Vanhoye and that his theory of concentric structure still stands. I used Vanhoye only to show that what he had identified is actually not only sections which functioned as comparison but were also rhetorically and linguistically sections of synkrisis as described and practiced in Greek literature. Gellardini's chart of a concentric or chiastic structure of Hebrews is one of those that I described in my dissertation (I think that's where I said it) as more creative than the original author. Gellardini's dissertation had more to do with seeing Hebrews in the context of Jewish rabbinic literature.

In the early afternoon I attended the joint session on Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds Group / New Testament Textual Criticism Section. It was another book review panel, this one on the recently published book The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins by Larry Hurtado. I purchased the book from the Eerdman's exhibition before the session. I wish I had waited until afterwards, because I might not have spent the money. The whole proceedings were overshadowed by Bart Ehrman's evisceration of Hurtado's work. Ehrman's criticisms began with the whole of New Testament scholarship because most scholars rely on a text reconstructed from hundreds of ancient manuscripts. We do need to be reminded about the mechanics of creating a critical text, but the work of papyrology, codcology, and textual criticism is not an end in itself. It serves the larger goal of constructing an understanding of the history and culture of the world at that time and what that tells us about how we live in our own time. For the most part Hurtado held his own under the attacks, though he did get a little ticked off it seemed.

For some reason I decided to attend a session on Josephus in the late afternoon. The session was poorly attended and I wasn't the only one who had trouble staying awake. I enjoyed hearing Richard Horsley again, appreciated hearing John Barclay and Tessa Rajak.

I needed to wait around on Sunday to attend the Brown University reception, so I attended a book review session sponsored by Westminster John Knox Press on the new book by Wayne Meeks, Christ is the Question. I especially enjoyed hearing Luke Timothy Johnson and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom are scholars I greatly respect. Of course I also appreciated hearing Wayne Meeks, whom I had never heard before in person.

It was an interesting conference and I'm glad I had the opportunity to go. I have mixed feelings about not being a presenter myself. I aspire to be the sort of scholar who is presenting research at SBL, but one not only presents research at a conference like this but also has to be able to accept criticism and even sometimes outright attacks. One needs to develop the skill to be a good presenter (which many scholars fail miserably at, I must say), but also a good and able defender of one's ideas.