2019 SBL Diary: Day One

Every year I sit down between grading papers to compile my thoughts and experiences from the SBL Annual Meeting. This process takes several days, so bear with me as I sift through my notes and memories and try to put together a useful and mildly entertaining overview of the event. The highlights include NASSCAL’s celebration of the debut of the Early Christian Apocrypha series, the night I was abandoned by a grad student on a boat, and the day another grad student stopped me on the street to give me edibles. One of those students can look forward to a lifetime of glowing reference letters and offers to collaborate, the other is dead to me.

My SBL experience began with travel, which can be fraught—flight delays, cancellations, encounters with customs and security. This year, travel went without much trouble. I chose a six am flight out of Hamilton, Ontario—closer to me and easier to navigate than Toronto’s Pearson airport. The early flight time was chosen for cost (it included a stop-over in Calgary) and because I wanted to arrive in plenty of time to set up for a NASSCAL reception celebrating the release of our premier volumes in the Early Christian Apocrypha series. As it happens, the executive later decided to move the reception to Saturday night. Ah well, it can’t hurt to get there early.

The plane touched down around 1 pm. I managed to find the bus to downtown (I swear they hide the affordable transit option so that you are forced to hire a cab) but missed my stop by about a mile. So I trudged back along the route to my hotel (the Hyatt) and checked in. I dropped my things and went for a walk to the conference center, finally able to relax and take in the incredible San Diego weather. Why can’t we just have the meeting here every year? (said every SBL/AAR member ever).  Though there are around 10,000 people at the meeting, somehow I immediately ran across my “conference wife” Bradley Rice, sitting out front of the book display, looking a bit forlorn. He had arrived earlier than me but did not think he would be able to check into the room himself. Since the book display was not yet open, we headed back to the hotel to catch up over tea.

Before long it was time for dinner. We arranged to meet up with some Canadian friends for tacos at Puesto in Seaport Village. This was our introduction to the Wonderfront Music Festival, which was taking place over the weekend at the same time as the annual meeting! The thumping bass of the musicians made conversation difficult and could also be heard during sessions throughout the weekend at the conference center (one of the stages was right beside the building). Who planned this? Sheesh. All of the Canadians were prepared to party and as the night wore on and we began to feel weary, we checked our phones and watches only to find out it was only 8:30. We surrendered to jet lag and headed back to the hotel. A sleeping pill made all of the noise from the festival go away and I woke rested and ready to take in the conference.

The first order of business was to wander around the book display for a while. I made my first purchase at Fortress Press, picking up Jill Hicks-Keeton’s and Cavan Concannon’s Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction. I am teaching my History of the Bible course next semester (covering canon formation to modern text criticism) and thinking about taking the class on a field trip to the museum. The book should come in handy for context and criticism of the institution. At 11:30 I headed outside for lunch with Chance Bonar—doctoral student at Harvard and my collaborator on 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John for More New Testament Apocrypha vol. 2. One of the challenges of eating lunch in San Diego is that all of the restaurants seem to serve breakfast until around 2 o’clock, seriously limiting one’s choices from the menu. That’s San Diego culture for you.

Finally, lunch finished, I went to my first session of the conference: “Postmortem on the So-called First-Century Mark Fragment.” The session took place in a packed ballroom; the recent news about Dirk Obbink and the missing Egypt Exploration Society papyri have drawn more attention to the manuscript and the controversy surrounding it. None of the papers focused on apocrypha, so I won’t discuss them here, but see Brent Nongbri’s useful summary on his Variant Readings blog. For those interested in reading a timeline of activity concerning the manuscript, Elijah Hixson’s handout was tweeted by Candida Moss. For me, the highlights of the session were the comments from the floor from Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman’s exasperated response, and Jill Hicks-Keaton’s description of the search for the “Reliable Bible” as the white-maleist endeavor ever. Hicks-Keaton mentioned also the lack of diversity on the editorial board of the Evangelical Textual Criticism editorial board. Do you think ETC will take this opportunity to think about expanding the diversity of voices on the blog? If the comments to Peter Gurry’s post on the session are any indication, no. Unfortunately, as a result of several fire alarms, there was no time for questions after the papers.

I headed next to the “Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds” session for Dylan Burns’ (Freie Universität Berlin) paper “Revisiting the Codicology of the Berlin Gnostic Codex (BG 8502).” Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much new in this revisit. Burns mostly presented opinions from previous scholars on the codex’s size, binding, etc. But things got more interesting when Burns turned to discussion of the leather cover, which features an inscription that has been reconstructed to read “Zacharias, arch-presbyter, abbot.” From this information, Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott concluded “that this codex belonged to an abbot in the sixth, seventh, or eighth century, and testifies to the continued use of books with contents like the Nag Hammadi Codices in Egyptian monasticism long after the time of Athanasius’ 39th Festal Letter” (The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices; STAC 97; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015; p. 164). But Burns, and others in the room, expressed doubt about the reading of the inscription, which is now quite faded. Perhaps planned Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) on the cover will reveal more letters and lead to a better reading.

After dinner, we headed up to the Top of the Hyatt for our NASSCAL reception. We tried to choose, from afar, a location that would not be too noisy (and thankfully this was far above the festival) or too busy, so that we would have opportunity for conversation. It ended up being ideal and we were joined by a few dozen of the NASSCAL faithful and friends. The reception was to celebrate the publication of the first two volumes in our Early Christian Apocrypha series: The Protevangelium of James by Lily Vuong, and The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary by Brandon Hawk. We worked hard over the past months to generate interest in the books and we were pleased to discover that Lily’s book had sold out by Sunday and Brandon’s was not far behind. The reception gave me the chance also to talk to Melissa Sellew and Jacob Lollar about future volumes in the series. The event broke up by 10 pm and it was time for another early night.

Stay tuned for day two: rumors of a complete Gospel of Mary manuscript and I’m on a motherf*cking boat.