Well, SBL International 2008 was fantastic. The academic environment was superb, and the bookshop – especially BRILL- made the experience fantastic. The highlight for me was probably hanging out with Warren Carter, and then Bruce Winter. Both men were friendly and very forthcoming with helpful ideas and critiques of my suggested research areas. Carter alerted me to some material he had written on 1 Peter, and then invited me to respond to him. I’ll be distilling my thoughts and then blog my response. Bruce Winter was so kind and helpful, a stunning example of scholarship and piety. Winter has done quite a bit of work on 1 Peter, but hasn’t published much of it. As my interests are now focussed on 1 Peter, he offered to review some of the stuff I’d be working on.
The best session for me was the Symposium on Bob Jewett’s Roman’s commentary. Doug Campbell, Paul Trebilco and Jewett’s response were outstanding. Eddie and I walked out thinking “do we know anything?” The level of discussion was just superb. Jewett even made his way over to us to find out what we were studying, how we found the session and what our thoughts were. WOW! My friends have now graciously agreed to buy me this commentary for my B-day. I love my friends…
The bookshop was quite helpful, especially the Brill titles that were heavily discounted. My semi-embarrassing moment came when I began to chat to a guy about Reinhard Feldmeier’s newly translated commentary on 1 Peter (which I’m hoping to review soon). This guy was quite persistent that this was one of the best commentaries on 1 Peter. I was a bit hesitant, and I’m quite happy that Achtemeier and Green are the best commentaries on 1 Peter, with Elliott a close second. The banter when back and forth for a while and then we parted ways. Later on, I was told that the person I was talking to was Carey C. Newman, who is down to write a commentary on 1 Peter for the Smyth & Helwys series! Next time I’ll be more careful before I just start blabbing… PS: I still think I’m right about Achtemeier and Green. Feldmeier is helpful, but nowhere near as helpful or insightful as the former two.
After SBL, I had lunch with my former mentor Mark Keown, lecturer in New Testament at Bible College of New Zealand. Mark had just come back from the Tyndale fellowship where he presented a paper on gospel proclamation in 1 Peter. I’m hoping to interact with Mark’s paper in a forthcoming blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment