My Main Takeaway
From November 21 to 25, I attended the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. It is the largest conference for religious and biblical studies, with an estimated attendance of 9,000 members from all over the globe. My favorite presentation was by Danish scholar Jacob Mortensen (Aarhus University), who discussed genre detection of the Gospel of Mark using hierarchical centroid-based clustering. Essentially, he and a programmer have created code that compares the language of the Gospel of Mark with that of various other Greek texts, such as novels, tragedies, biographies, and Greek Old Testament texts. The findings clearly indicate that Mark’s genre is closest to the Greek Old Testament texts. This was interesting to me because I have argued for a similar genre classification of Matthew, albeit without the additional evidence provided by the computer program.
Presentations
I presented two papers. The first was in the Bible and Ethics session, where I presented on 2 Samuel 6, in which David brings the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem with dancing and sacrifices. Rather than seeing this as the high point of the Israelite monarchy, I argue that it is an ironic fulfillment of 1 Sam 8 and serves as a critique of David and human kingship. This goes against the grain of much scholarship, both current and historical. While some remained critical and unconvinced, others were quite supportive and excited about my proposed reading of the text.
My second paper was in the Intertextuality and the New Testament session, where I offered a comparative reading of Matthew 19:28 in light of the Targum of 2 Sam 23:1-8 (an ancient Aramaic poem describing David’s role as a future judge in the eschaton). This paper was well received and will likely be published with Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
Networking and Representing Vanguard
It was a pleasure to represent Vanguard at this conference, and I made numerous new acquaintances as well as nurtured existing professional relationships. In addition to presenting and strengthening publication prospects, I was approached by Professor David Moffitt of St. Andrews University (Scotland) to serve as co-chair of the Steering Committee for the Intertextuality in the New Testament group. This is a tremendous honor and a valuable next step for me professionally, as well as for Vanguard’s ongoing visibility on the biggest stage of biblical scholarship. I am grateful for the funding opportunities to continue advancing my scholarship and representing our community globally.
