washington report: caesar salad in caesar's empire

The ETS and SBL annual meetings are over for another year. I'm absolutely exhausted after this year's meetings, but they were well worth the trip.

Two highlights stood out on Wednesday. First, I met up with Mike Bird and Alan Bandy for lunch, enjoying Caesar salads in the heart of Caesar's empire (pic 1). I'm sure we made quite a motley crew (and the opening to a bad joke): an effervescent and incandescent Australian exiled to Scotland, a staid Canadian (i.e. a non-American North American), and a friendly Southern Baptist American. Wednesday afternoon I presented my paper. I think it went well, and there were even a couple of extra people that weren't bribed to be there. It was a special treat to have a former professor of mine at my presentation, Chip Anderson, as he's the one who really provided the initial spark of interest for me in New Testament studies. Unfortunately, I had the disadvantage of presenting at precisely the time the book exhibit first opened for the conference, and attendance at those parallel sessions dropped significantly from the previous ones. Or it was because of my garlic breath from the Caesar salad at lunch.

First thing Thursday morning I ran into the book exhibit and snapped up some books, including Richard Bauckham's new book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (the ink was still wet) and Ben Witherington's long-awaited commentary on the Thessalonian epistles (I immediately checked: he's got the "word of the Lord" in 4:15 wrong, along with almost everyone else). Much of the rest of the day was spent as I spent a good chunk of time during the rest of the conference: meeting with potential candidates for our College's vacant position in Old Testament, and hanging out with my roommate and colleague Oz Lorentzen.

Friday was more of the same, but I did manage to click a pic of D.C.'s contribution to New Testament scholarship: Q Street (pic 2). It does exist, it seems to be fairly well-defined, there's evidence of prior work on it, and it appeared to have a well-established community around it. And as far as I could tell it didn't seem to meet up with anything called Atonement.

On Saturday morning I cruised the Mall with my former theology professor, Ken Radant. We first paid homage to the civic religion of the locals at its westernmost temple (pic 3 and pic 4), after which we strolled eastward past the OOUS ("Obelisk of Unusual Size") (pic 5). A highlight of the day was the exhibit on "Bibles before the Year 1000" in the Freer Gallery: they had the opening leaves of the Gospel of Thomas, the Egerton Papyrus, and several other treasures on display. Here we duly paid homage to our own scholarly religion: shuffling past one another in hushed silence, broken only by unintelligible expressions as we genuflected before the display cases to see the relics better. After performing my religious duties for the day, I rushed to the Convention Center in time to catch the ubiquitous Mike Bird present his birthday paper. I then ran into a few people at the book exhibit (they weren't too badly hurt), including Tyler Williams and Mark Goodacre.

As far as conference papers go, Sunday was the best day for me. I began the day, though, with a quick breakfast and general catching-up at the University of Birmingham reception. It was good to see my doctoral supervisor, David Parker, though it brought back terrible memories of dissertation deadlines which I've worked hard to suppress over the past three months. My first afternoon session was the lively Synoptic Gospels one with Simon Gathercole, Deirdre Good, Rikk Watts, and Jimmy Dunn (hey, everyone else calls him Jimmy, and I have met him, so lay off). After this I and other bloggers (and, judging from the tight fit, most of the conference attenders) went to the John, Jesus, and History session. Sean Freyne, Craig Evans, and Richard Bauckham presented interesting papers, and Ben Witherington's paper was especially memorable. Then Mike Bird, Joel Willitts, Brandon Wason, Danny Zacharias, Matthew Montonini, and I crashed the Hendrickson reception for supper before Matthew and I headed over to the IVP reception for dessert. The evening was topped off with a terrific presentation by N. T. Wright on the problem of evil and the cross. There's nothing like a Starbucks coffee, a couple of caramel squares, a little return from exile, a dash of covenant faithfulness, a pinch of reversal of Caesar's empire, and some good company to finish off a terrific but tiring conference.