Month: November 2018

The second day of the annual meeting was significantly more relaxed. There were no Christian Apocrypha Section sessions scheduled, so I was “free” to go to anything that interested me. But before the sessions began, I attended the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. I joined the board last year to review apocrypha-related submissions. It’s a surprisingly large group but run like clockwork by General Editor Adele Reinhartz, though she is stepping down now after many years in the role to be replaced by Mark Brett. I sat down next to Mark Goodacre (Duke University) and we talked about what we were presenting on. I began explaining my paper from day 1 by saying, “It’s an eighteenth-century manuscript containing apocryphal texts that no-one really knows anything about.” When I was finished, Mark said, “I thought you having me on for a second there.” I didn’t realize how much my description sounded like the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, a text that both Mark and I are interested in but disagree completely about its authenticity (I do not believe the theory that it is a forgery, created by its discoverer, Morton Smith; Mark refuses to see reason).

After breakfast, I hustled over to the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship session, which focused on the Museum of the Bible. I have been following the steady stream of criticism about the museum that began even before it opened, and enjoyed Candida Moss’s and Joel Baden’s investigation of it in …

Another year, another SBL Annual Meeting. And now it’s time to compile my thoughts about the experience for my traditional roundup of the event—the sessions I attended and/or participated in, meetings I had with scholars and publishers, books I purchased, and receptions I crashed. I do this for those interested in Christian apocrypha who could not attend the meeting and also in lieu of tweets because Wi-fi access tends to be somewhat spotty (and generally a pain to do while trying to listen to papers).

Travel is always part of the experience. For me, the process of getting to Denver began on Friday at 8am with the drive to Pearson airport in Toronto for a noon flight. The previous day had made travel on the roads very difficult. I went to a concert (The Alarm, a kinda Welsh version of U2) in the city and the drive took four hours (it should have been 1.5). I mention the concert also because it damaged my hearing, so I really had to struggle to hear anything for the first few days of the conference. I need not have worried about getting to the airport on time; all was clear Friday morning, so I had a smooth, uneventful drive. Not everyone was so lucky; friends of mine from Sudbury and London had an extra day of travel due to delays in connecting flights. The only wrinkle for me was a 2.5 hour stopover in Detroit. Every time I book flights I pick the …