Again no running, though conference walking is making up some of that difference. I visited the Johannine Literature seminar first, where I gave the paper on ‘John, Jesus, and Jolene: Popular Music Explains an Exegetical Problem’ went down well. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but nobody hooted or jeered, and the questions weren’t hostile. I had the chance to hear our Oxford PG student Tyler Brown (J. Tyler Brown, that is) speak on the presence of Matthew’s Sign of Jonah as it is received into John’s Temple Incident/Nicodemus narrative, and James Bell’s paper on the Shepherd metaphor in John 21 as having drawn on Ezekiel 34 and Zechariah 13. After the coffee break, I returned to my meber-seminar, the Reception, Critical Theory, and Interdisciplinary Studies seminar. There I heard Cambry Pardee talk about the reception history of 2 Corinthians 11:14, U-Wen Low about ‘the mutable body of Christ in the Book of Revelation’, and the irrepressible James Crossley (not related to the Crossleys of Abingdon) on ‘The Bible of the English Uprising of 1381: The Cases of William Grindecobbe and John Wrawe’, a good helping of radical politics and the clergy guerillas who participated in rebellion and resistance in response to wealth inequality. I will have a more persistent imagination of the mutable body of Christ in Revelation, now, and will be more alert to the ‘Satan as angel’ trope when it resurfaces in our discourses. Coffee break, short papers, annual General Meeting, followed by a panel discussion of Decolonising New Testament Studies (good, provocative, hard) and dinner and pub for the night.
I’ll see the world tomorrow morning at 4:00 (wheee!).