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Friday morning I heard Robyn Whittaker, an Australian member of my own denomination who is a doctoral candidate from U Chicago and the daughter of a colleague of mine, present Worship that enacts diving justice: reconsidering the role of worship in the Apocalypse of John. An interesting paper, but so far out of my area of expertise that all I can say is she presented it well.
I then moved to the “Whence and Whither? Methodology and the Future of Biblical Studies Unit” which was running on the theme “Context Matters in Reading the Bible in Aorearoa New Zealand”. Judith McKinlay from the University of Otago gave a brilliant presentation on Living with Clashing Texts. The abstract does not do it justice and unfortunately doesn’t give me the references to the Biblical texts used so that I can give a coherent account of the content, but she presented as a conversation with the characters in the text and talked about the Israelite conquering of Canaan and the removal of land and compared it with the European invasion of and settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We then saw some contemporary artwork by an Aotearoa New Zealand (A/NZ) artist that presents the crucifixion using abstract images and words. An interesting change of pace.
After the break, Beverley Moana Hall-Smith, a Maori-Pakeha from the University of Auckland presented the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28 from the perspective of a woman who did not fit well into either of the dominant A/NZ cultures - presenting me with even more to think about from one of my favourite texts. This was followed by Anne Taylor from Monash Uni presenting Election-Year Reflections on the politics of Biblical Texts -she’s a Kiwi and was talking about the A/NZ elections due this year.
Then it was time to attend a lunchtime meeting of the WSRT journal editorial collective (I am helping with the website) and then collect my luggage (including getting my daughter’s camera retrieved from the safe in my erstwhile room) and head for the station and my brother’s place.
On the whole, I found the conference worthwhile and enjoyable, but really missed the formal opportunity afforded by meals provided by the conference organisers to be able to sit down and meet people. I suspect that someone who didn’t know anyone much before they came and wasn’t fairly gregarious could go away not knowing anyone much more. This would be especially true of younger grad students who have a tendency to be overawed by “names”.
One of the real frustrations of the conference was the tendency for program chairs to move papers around when presenters failed to show. People would arrive to hear someone only to find that they’d already presented because someone else hadn’t arrived. This was especially annoying for those who had sat through something they weren’t really interested in rather than leave a session early and then had missed one they really wanted to hear. It would have been good to have had a list in several prominent places each day indicating who hadn’t arrived and what measures had been taken to overcome this. However, I’m not sure how it was ascertained who was there because I was sent my name tag in the mail and didn’t have to actually register, just pick up my (rather nice) satchel.
On the whole though, it was well organised and good fun. I met lots of nice people and learned some interesting things and am very glad that I came.
Update 13/07/08 - I’ve added a couple of commas and changed ANZ to A/NZ to stop Steph and other Kiwis from thinking about a bank.
Two links copied from previous posts:
- The SBL on-line program at which you can find abstracts of any of the papers I’ve mentioned. Put the name of the person in the appropriate box and then click on the link.
- I have put some more photos up on Photobucket but the order is a bit random, and be warned that I do scenery rather than people and did not think to take any photos of Uni of Auckland. Sorry Jim.
Wednesday was a short day for presentations - the afternoon was left free for excursions or doing whatever else you wanted. I gather that this is not a usual SBL thing, but is what I’m used to at chaplains’ conferences.
In the morning, I presented my paper, which seemed to have been well received. Majella (ie my doctoral supervisor) was encouraging about both content and presentation, which was nice. The only other paper I heard was the second paper in my unit (actually the third, but the middle presenter was unable to come because his church had moved him between when he submitted and the conference and he couldn’t get away - again a pity because I would have liked to have heard it). Carol Newsom from Emory presented on Eudaimonic and Hedonic Dimensions of Israelite Wisdom Traditions: An Exploration. She talked about the different understandings of human happiness that are presented in Proverbs and Qohelet and her abstract explains things far better than I could do. The link will take you to the on-line program booklet and you will need to type “Newsom” into the name box then follow the link on the page you are taken to.
In the afternoon, I went on a Maori culture tour which I found somewhat disappointing from the perspective of learning about Maori culture, but the views from the volcano we were taken to were spectacular. When Photobucket decides to cooperate, I’ll put in a link to the photos I took.
I spent most of Thursday in AGMs. In the morning, I attended the Australian Association for the Study of Religion AGM, which began with two annual lectures - the Penny Magee lecture and the Charles Strong lecture. This year’s Penny Magee lecture was presented by Barbara Kameniar from University of Melbourne. She talked about women’s ordination in Thai Buddhism and was fascinating. The same link above will take you to her abstract, too. The Charles Strong lecture was by Marion Maddox from Macquarie University, whose topic was ‘There Isn’t a Racist Bone in My Body’: Race and Religion in the Vocabulary of Fear - same thing with the link. The significance of the title is that John Howard, our former Prime Minister became famous for saying “there isn’t a racist bone in my body” after having been called, on several occasions, for having been the architect of a number of particularly racist policies.
After morning tea, the retiring president of AASR, Kathleen McPhillips from University of Western Sydney, gave the presidential address in which she was less than encouraging about the immediate future for Studies in Religion in Australian universities and we then moved to the usual business of an AGM.
After lunch, I went to hear Scott Charlesworth from University of New England (ie my own university) talking about fluidity in early Christian manuscripts. Scott is in the process of making minor corrections to his thesis/dissertation and expects to graduate at the October ceremonies. He has examined papyri at both University of Edinburgh and University of Michigan as well as various facsimiles. The conclusion he has reached after painstaking examination of large numbers of early MSS is that “although scribes made minor detail changes, the early textual tradition was transmitted accurately en bloc. Therefore, the assumption that high fluidity characterised early transmission is unfounded.” On the basis of his presentation, I’m not sure that I would be quite as confident as he is that some of the changes that he talks about are minor - I guess I’ll have to have a look at the dissertation once it reaches the university library in a few months.
I then slipped into the Women Scholars of Theology and Religion AGM. WSTR is an association with a commitment to facilitating networks among women scholars of religion and theology with a view to supporting, encouraging and promoting their work in the Asia/Pacific region and beyond. It publishes an on-line journal called Sea Changes which has an interesting range of articles by women scholars from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Asia/Pacific region. Because the criteria (apart from being scholarly) is that they be from a feminist perspective and from the region of Australasia and the Pacific, the content is eclectic, but worth looking at.
I missed the new book launches in the interests of being packed in time to check out shortly after 8 am the next day. The books themselves looked interesting, but I needed some time. I did, however, get to the Reception hosted by the Auckland Uni school of theology, where I was able to catch up with several people I’d not had a chance to talk to much during the conference. I opted out of the trip to the Irish pub, feeling that 9.45 pm was too late to begin an evening out.
As Tim Bulkeley indicated, quite a number of presenters didn’t arrive. One of the major disappointments for me was that Jon Ma Asgeirsson was unwell and unable to get here from Iceland to present Constructing Memory of No(-)Thing and the Need for Societal Ethos, both because the paper looked interesting and because I wanted to put a face to his writings. I do hope he recovers quickly. He did, however, let SBL know that he would not be there. Some presenters didn’t bother - they just didn’t arrive.
The other (and therefore the only) paper in that session was Robert McIver from Avondale College, the Adventist theological college in New South Wales, and I was very pleased to have heard it. His topic was Skilled Memory and the Jesus Traditions. I was a bit perplexed when he began because he was presenting research with which I was familiar about the difference between copying and recalling from memory and I then realised that in preparing for my own paper, I had actually read the paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology where he and his colleague, Marie Carroll, had written this research up. It’s well worth reading (McIver, Robert K. and Marie Carroll. “Distinguishing Characteristics of Orally Transmitted Material When Compared to Material Transmitted by Literary Means.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 18, no. 9 (2004): 1251-1269), although apparently he has published something similar in JBL, which may be more accessible to biblical scholars.
He was providing evidence that the kinds of differences in wording between gospel accounts could not be the result of copying errors, but could quite easily be the result of oral transmission. He also suggested that Jesus may well have used some of the techniques employed by rabbis to transmit oral tradition to train his disciples to pass on his teachings. For me, it was one of the best papers at the conference, in the sense of most useful to my research, but also well presented.
Earlier that day, I head a couple of other papers in the same Program Unit (Mind, Society and Tradition). One was by Risto Uro, entitled Ritual and Cooperation: Evolutionary Explanations for Early Christian Rituals, which was somewhat outside my area of expertise, but it was good to be able to put a person to the books that he’s written and edited on Thomas. The second was A Cognitive Perspective on Identity and Behaviour Norms in Ephesians, presented by Rikard Roitto, a PhD student from Sweden. He explained the structure of Ephesians very credibly in terms of beginning by describing the protoypical Christ-believer (the author of the book), to which the Ephesians should aspire, and then advice about what they needed to do in order to get there. I liked the concepts he presented and also enjoyed the notion that Christians might be “clients of God” - said at least partly tongue-in-cheek. The paper after morning tea in that session also sounded interesting, but I had a session booked with my doctoral supervisor, who is now based in New Zealand.
I will try to write more over the next few days, but it appears that I am now the only person awake in the household - I am staying with my brother and his family - which probably means that everyone will be up and enthusiastic quite early tomorrow morning.
I’m looking forward to going to Auckland for this year’s SBL International Conference. As well as presenting my own paper, I’m looking forward to hearing quite a number of others, to being able to catch up with friends and colleagues whom I don’t see very often and to find out a bit more about Maori culture. The conference begins with a Powhiri (welcome ceremony) at the Marae at Auckland University and I am booked on the Tamaki Hikoi guided tour which introduces Maori culture. When I was in Christchurch last year on my way home from Texas, I was able to get a tiny taste of Maori culture and am really interested to hear more. It is particularly interesting that there are significant similarities between Maori art and the art of the Canadian First Nations people in British Columbia.
I have found the research that I’ve been doing for my paper really fascinating, if slightly “off topic” for my thesis. The topic is “Eyewitness Testimony in Psychological Research: Some Consequences for Richard Bauckham’s Work.” The work I’m referring to is, of course, his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006). If you’re interested, you can read the abstract on the SBL conference website. I didn’t realise just how huge the corpus of psychological eyewitness/memory literature is until I started reading. You could read until the cows come home and still not be on top of every aspect!
It’s interesting that there is so little cross-pollination between the disciplines. There are books on memory in oral traditions, on memory and retelling of stories, how culture affects memory, things that psychologists take for granted about eyewitness accounts (or autobiographical/recollective memory) that just don’t appear in the literature of biblical studies.
I know - so many books to read, so little time, but still…
The person who found this page because they did a keyword search for “Snodgrass gospel Thomas” is almost certainly looking for:
Snodgrass, Klyne. “The Gospel of Thomas: a Secondary Gospel.” Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 1 (1989-1990): 19-38.
No idea where you might find it electronically, mind you, but it’s the only thing I’m aware of that Snodgrass has written on the Gospel of Thomas, although he does mention Gos Thom in his new book on parables whenever it’s relevant.
Recently, April DeConick updated her website on the Codex Judas Congress to be held at Rice University 13-16 March 2008. All the paper titles are up now and it looks really fascinating, with a wide range of speakers presenting papers - a real who’s who of gnostic studies from a range of perspectives, including Prof Majella Franzmann, my doctoral supervisor. Pity it’s on the other side of the world and outside my actual research area. 
I am trying to stay away from the site to help control my basic envy, but I did notice on my last visit that there are some very useful links to pages on the web about doing poster presentations. Although I have seen some very effective science-based posters presented at conferences, I have always found the concept of presenting a poster for a religion/humanities topic rather puzzling, so have never offered one. These links are helpful.
In the course of looking at my blog stats this morning, I noticed a link to here from John Hobbins’ Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog and wondered why, seeing I never write anything about ancient Hebrew poetry. I discovered that as well as doing the latest Biblical Studies Carnival, he has produced a really amazing list of bible-related blogs which, of course, includes mine. There appear to be two listings - one which divides the blogs into categories - “very insightful laypeople”, “students”, “professors” etc, and another that is simply alphabetical.
Very well worth a visit, unless you’re trying to work to a deadline that doesn’t allow the luxury of surfing the web!
As some will be aware, I was working at Rice University when April DeConick’s new book The Thirteenth Apostle was in the final stages of preparation. I proofread the main body of the text and one or two of the appendices that April was preparing. I was impressed enough to want my own copy of the final book, even though Gospel of Judas isn’t my particular area of specialty, because it contains a very good overview of Gnosticism and a number of other useful features as well as the commentary on the text of the Gospel.
I looked at the Coptic text of the relevant passages and read her arguments for her interpretation of the text through very carefully and they make sense to me. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my own copy - it’s due within the next few days - and plan to write a review once I’ve finished writing the conference paper that’s been hanging over my head for the last several weeks. In the meantime, you might like to look at the review on the Baptist Press website that also includes a report of an interview between April and Gregory Tomlin. My only criticism of it is that it lists the Gospel of Thomas as a Gnostic text and I don’t agree with this! You might also like to read what she has to say about her translation and about the problems that scholars are having in gaining access to the facsimiles of the text.
Update 9 Nov
My copy has arrived and I am very surprised. I really thought I was going to get a paperback, but it’s hardcover. I cannot believe that I paid $13.57 US for a hardcover new release book! Of course, the postage and handling were almost as much as the book itself, but it’s still amazingly reasonably priced, especially given the very favourable exchange rate at the moment. The last DeConick book I bought cost waaaaaaay more. 
I was recently taken by something that R McLean Wilson wrote in his very early Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (A R Mowbray and Co, London, 1960). He introduces his consideration of the Gnostic element in Thomas by saying:
In the study of an ancient document much depends upon the pre-suppositions with which we begin, on the questions with which we approach the examination of the text.(p 14)
He goes on to say that if you concentrate on details and isolate passages from one another, while you may produce useful information, you may also miss the “range and sweep” of the document. General impressions acquired by looking at the text as a whole, however, may be misleading if not combined with a detailed examination. As Wilson so rightly states, if you start with the assumption that Thomas is dependent on the Synoptics, you can find evidence for dependence, and if you start with the assumption that it’s independent, many of the same things will provide evidence for that, so your initial assumptions are important.
I think Wilson’s comment is sound advice for all studies of ancient text. The challenge is to approach texts with a reasonably open mind and to look at the problematic elements and ask “What sorts of things might cause/explain this? Which of these is most likely and why? What are the minimum conditions that need to apply in order for explanation A to be true? And explanation B? And C, if there is a C? If it doesn’t fulfill either/any of the minimum conditions, what have I missed?”
I try to use this methodology on all occasions and hope that I am usually successful.
Tim Bulkeley at SansBlogue is the presenter of Biblical Studies Carnival XXII - well worth visiting, and not just because it’s by a fellow antipodean. Tim provides links to some non-English-language blogs including the two new theological language blogs - Theological German/Theologisches Deutsch and Theological French/Français théologique, which provide opportunities for people to brush up on their theological vocabulary and expression in these two important languages.
So many biblioblogs, so little time. It’s such a pity there aren’t more hours in the day!
Jim Deardorff asks in the comments section of my last post
Where do heavily redacted eye-witness accounts fit into this? Are they considered non-eye-witness accounts?
I’ve moved this out of the comments section to respond to it, because I think it’s moved away from the purpose of the original post.
This is an interesting question although I think I’d pose it slightly differently and ask how heavily an eye-witness account needs to be redacted before we stop regarding it as an eyewitness account. I would suggest that once it gets to the point where none of the people present at the original event would recognise it as something they witnessed, you no longer have an eyewitness account. Of course, we have no way of determining this because of the distance between the events and now.
It’s possible that when we have accounts in several gospels of which we ask “is this the same story?”, we have several heavily redacted pieces of eyewitness material. We might, however, equally have accounts of several different events. For example, in the various accounts of a woman washing/annointing Jesus’ feet (John 12: 1-11; Matt 26: 6-13; Mark 14: 3-9) I think it’s quite likely that we have material that is so heavily redacted (by John) that it has almost moved to the stage where it can no longer be called “eyewitness” because I think it’s fairly unlikely that this kind of event happened more than once. When we’re dealing with different versions of parables, however, I think it’s equally likely that we have examples of Jesus using the same basic illustration but with different twists to illustrate slightly different points on different occasions. An example of this would be the Treasure parable in Matt 13:44 and Thomas 109.
How you deal with this question depends, of course on what you understand the canonical and non-canonical texts to be. At one end of the spectrum, you get an approach that accepts that Jesus was a real, historical figure and treats the canonical gospels as virtually minutes of Jesus’ life and ministry and the non-canonical texts are heretical documents written to draw people away from the One True Faith. At the other end are people who believe that Jesus was not a real historical figure and that the various canonical and non-canonical texts were written by people who were either attempting to illustrate what they considered were spiritual truths or to trick the gullible into doing what they wanted, depending on how charitable the person is feeling towards the early Christians.
Somewhere in the middle you get those who, like me, believe that Jesus was a real, historical figure but do not consider the early Christian documents as minutes of Jesus’ ministry. Rather, they are accounts written by early Christians whose lives had been changed by an encounter with God to help others to understand how God was working in their lives. Some people in this group believe that all the canonical gospel material is based on eyewitness accounts of contact with the historical Jesus, while others believe that some has a basis in fact and some is myth, written to illustrate Truth.
I don’t happen to think that picking up eyewitness accounts from several different times and putting them together for the purposes of furthering a theological argument renders the individual pieces of material “non-eyewitness”, even though the longer theological passage cannot be viewed as eyewitness.
April DeConick, over on The Forbidden Gospels blog, has three posts (starting here) reflecting on why the Society of Biblical Literature hasn’t set up a panel to discuss Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, which has not exactly received a standing ovation in biblical scholarship circles. If you want to see why, Gerd Lüdemann’s review in Free Inquiry provides some information from a secular humanist perspective.
I haven’t read the book and don’t have time to, but Geoff Hudson’s first comment on this post raises a bigger issue on which I do want to comment. He says:
So how did the public ‘religious illiteracy’ come about, if not through the academics who trained students and ministers?
This is something I have strong feelings about. As I say in my comment on April’s blog, during my ministry training and in conversations with colleagues, I have reasonably frequently heard it said that telling members of congregations about ‘modern’ biblical scholarship is not appropriate either because they wouldn’t understand or it would destroy their faith. I find this elitist and condescending and have been known to ask whether the person making the statement has understood the scholarship and if so, whether it has destroyed their faith.
In fact, quite a number of people have the opposite response when they are told about it - excitement that it helps them to make sense of things they’ve wondered about for decades and anger that no-one has told them before. Unfortunately, since preachers have, by and large kept this stuff under wraps for well over a century, there’s a lot of catching up to do, so the prospect of dealing with it is quite daunting but, at least in my experience, very worthwhile.
At the other extreme, I get really frustrated when biblical scholars try to use historical-critical method to ‘prove’ things that are actually faith-based. Bauckham’s work on eyewitness accounts in the gospels springs immediately to mind, but there are other examples. I continue to return to the fact that what makes the gospels trustworthy from the Christian perspective is that we believe that we have documents that are inspired by God, so that the processes through which they went to reach the final version were guided by God and can therefore be trusted to preserve “truth”. If someone is not reading them from a faith perspective then it doesn’t matter whether they are eyewitness accounts or not, there is no way to prove that they are accurate accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings. They are simply a corpus of writings that a group of people believe to be true and upon which they base their lives and the non-believer examines them from that perspective. It appears that a particular part of the Christian church is trying very hard to change Christianity from something that is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Co 1:23, NRSV) to something that can be scientifically proven to be correct and I really don’t see it happening this side of the eschaton. That is, after all, the point of Christianity being called a “faith” and there really is no way to stop people who don’t share that faith from thinking that you’re anything from not overly bright to seriously dangerous.
Update 15 Sept: Over on Euangelion, Michael Bird posts about developing a theology of early Christianity which takes seriously both what we know about the history Christian origins and the fact that the early Christians were writing about their encounters with God (sorry, Michael, if I’ve oversimplified).
The latest Biblical Studies Carnival was put together by Dr Claude Mariottini. Claude was the July biblioblogger of the month.
