Last week I visited my 12th Annual Meeting of SBL. As usual,
it was a huge conference, with more than 10,000 scholars attending. The venue, McCormick Place,
is probably the largest convention center of North-America, and its size
occasionally resulted in the feeling “Hey, where is everybody?”
Three things struck me in particular during this conference.
The first point is that, for me, SBL-AAR has become the
place to meet my colleagues and friends from abroad. The individual and
business meetings I have been in were actually at least as important to me as the
academic sessions. If you want to arrange things with your colleagues, SBL-AAR
is the place to do this.
A second point I noticed was the lively character of the
sessions on textual criticism. The crowds drawn to these sessions were large,
and the presentations were generally good. This was also the case in the
“Constructing Christian Identities” section – here, the study of the second
century leads to new insights and progress of the field. Unfortunately, I have
not been able to attend the other groups I am always stimulated by: the
sections on Early Jewish and Christian Relations and on Religious Experience in
Early Judaism and Early Christianity. In my experience, these groups ask the
questions that I am most interested in. Their questions concern the textual
transmission of the writings we study and the socio-religious contexts out of
which these writings originated.
The third point I want to share here regards a
disappointment. I was rather disappointed with the book exhibition. For those
of you who haven’t ever attended an SBL-AAR: the book exhibit at these meetings
is huge. It may be regarded as the Frankfurter Buchmesse for Biblical and
Religious Studies. Among the thousands of new books, I could hardly find any
really exciting material. It amazed me to see how many new commentaries have
been published on Romans, on Luke, on Mark, how many introductions to Paul, to
the NT in general and to the historical Jesus were presented here. A certain
fatigue got to me. It made me realize that many of us spend our time and energy
on rewriting (or unwriting!) books that have already been written, sometimes
even long ago. The good news is, that it also made me realize that I was
looking for that one book I could not find. And now you may wonder about the
subject of that book. If I will be given the time, you might actually get to
see the result at a future SBL Annual Meeting...
And thus, in the end, I return from Chicago satisfied and
full of plans.
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