Month: September 2025

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!).

I skipped my morning run in order to have breakfast with Margaret at R&R before leaving for Manchester’s British New Testament Conference. Everything went swimmingly until I disembarked in Mancs and was obliged to swim, almost, from the station to the University, and then the University to their housing block for delegates.It’s a good thing Margaret supplied me with a rain poncho, because otherwise I’d have been drenched absolutely to the bone. (Now I’m just relatively drenched.) (I don’t know what that would mean.)

I caught the bus with Tom de Bruin, whom I didn’t recognise, alas. This seals my entry into Stage Five of the Conference Scholar Aging Process: Stage One, eager pre-degree fan of senior scholars, hanger-on of [academically] hot junior scholars; Stage Two, junior scholar making connections with senior scholars; Stage Three, senior scholar hanging out with other senior scholars and junior colleagues; Stage Four, Past Peak senior scholar seeing many more people at this conference whom I just don’t recognise; Stage Five, I don’t even recognise all the senior scholars who are younger than me (i.e., Tom); Stage Six, Margaret has to remind me who everyone is. Tom is polite and gentle, and pointed me in the correct direction for obtaining my room keys.

Now that I think about it, I was on the younger end of the scholars I used to hang out with, many of whom are now retired and don’t always come to conferences. And it won’t be that long before I’m retired.