SBLAAR24 in Review

Every year in the weekend preceding Thanksgiving, Scholars of Bible and Religion flock from across the world to some unexpecting town. This was my second year attending the conference and got back from San Diego last night. A majority of the weekend is attending paper presentation sessions where scholars argue of things like “What is Paul’s theology on xyz?,” “How can we apply an awareness to ambiguity to the text of Psalm 68?,” or “How do the New Testament author interact with the Book of Jubilees?” A little overview of some of the sessions I attended:

• The Catholic Epistles (Favorite Paper: Reading Peter and Jude as Theological Dialogue Partners
• The Enoch Seminar (Reviewing Paula Frediksen’s New Book: Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years
• Early Christian Judaism and Jubilee (Favorite Paper: Renewing the Luminaries: Deforming and Reestablishing Cosmic Order in Jubilees and Paul
• Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
• Paul within Judaism
• Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
• Book of Psalms (Favorite Paper: Death of the Allotted Gods of the Nations in Psalm 82 in Light of Functional Ontology in the Ancient Near East)
• Disputed Paulines (Favorite Paper: The “Teachings of Demons” as Illicit “Magical” Practices in 1 Timothy 4:1

On top of all of this there is the book floor (which if you know me is one of my favorite parts). A little taste of my book haul:

• Modern Genre Theory: An Introduction for Biblical Studies (Andy Judd) with a matching mug!
• A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (Matthew Thiessen)
• Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Paula Fredriksen)
• The Pastoral Epistles (Stanley Porter)
• Plus some Lexicons, Grammars, and Primary Texts!

The most important part of the conference for me though is the connections with other people! Just a few of my memorable moments were:

• Impromptu Dinner with Joshua Baker and David Burnett
• The Institute of Biblical Research Coffee (a few people I met: Seth Ehorn, Phillip Marshal, Joshua Harper)
• The Graduate Student Reception (The only name I came remember is Lexian because of the Unique name, whoops)
• The Enoch Seminar reception (meeting people like Andrew Higginbottom, Jackie Wise-Rhodes, and many others who’s names I have already forgotten)
• Ring Them Bells Meetup (Jason Bostow, Matthew Bates, Matthew Halstead, Carmen Joy Imes, Mark Reasoner, Mike Chu, James-Michael Smith)
• 2 AM debate between David Burnett and Joel Korytko on Exodus
• Houston Christian University Breakfast

That launches me into my final parts of this weekend review, “what’s next for me?” Well as you can tell I was at the HCU Breakfast. This last summer I got accepted to their MA in Classics and Early Christianity program and after many conversations throughout the weekend I have decided this will be my next step! I will finish up my MA in Biblical Languages here in the next month, and launch into HCU this spring!

Lastly, what is my plan going forward with this blog? I plan on relaunching it a little bit come January. My first steps as I work it out will be reviewing many of these topics I have mentioned in this post. Deep diving into a topic, reviewing the Major Takeaways of a Book, pulling back the curtain on what goes on in scholarship, and a few sneak peaks on some projects I am working on. As well I will be playing around with a few possible other medias (TikTok, Instagram, etc) but this blog well be the central place for my work.

Hope y’all will join me in the journey!