Author: Chris

The third day of the symposium was only a half day, and revolved around three plenary sessions.

Reinhard Kratz opened the morning with an in depth paper looking at the parallels between 4Q246 and the Old Testament backgrounds that it presumes and envelops. This paper expanded and explored aspects of metalepsis in the DSS that George Brooke set out the framework and groundwork for in the fourth plenary on the first day.

Jan Joosten then continued with the New Testament side of the pivot, looking at how Wisdom 2:16-18 may be seen as a sort of mediator in parallels between Ps 22:9 and Matthew 27:43. These two papers together helpfully explored the Hellenisation of Jewish thought, and how scripture was used and engaged with in this context.

The final paper for the conference was a sort of ‘State of the Union’ address from N.T. Wright that sought to place the conference topic within the broader history of research, and offer some suggestions of where research should continue. Notable points here include the note of challenge in observing that ‘Early Christology is Confrontation not Derivation’ and his continued emphasis on Temple shaped Christology (as is present in the Christian Origins works). In some ways this paper could have been split into book ends that introduced and closed out the conference, but coming at the end provided a good ‘where to from here’ engagement for the symposium.

All in all a great conference, and very well organised by the research students at St Andrews. Well done.

After the conference I had a bit of time to catch up with Ken Mavor (a previous tutor/teacher at ANU) and Stephen Reicher to talk Social Identity Theory for a while. One of the great things about St Andrews is that the Schools of Psychology and Divinity share the same quad, and so there is space to foster the overlap of disciplines. Here is a rare selfie (on this blog anyway) of the gate to that quad, Psychology on the left, Divinity on the right.

Now onwards to London and the St Mary’s Conference.

Day two of the St Andrews Symposium started with a bang, as Michael Peppard presented a strong argument for the need of Christological research to engage with the pervasive imperial cult, rather than merely focusing on the Jewish origins. To put Peppard’s perspective on the imperial cult in his own words it is “not looking under every rock for Imperial ideology but acknowledging that on thousands of rocks the imperial cult is already found….” [through inscriptions]

This second day focused more on parallel sessions, rather than plenaries, with some interesting papers from David Moffitt on parallels to Sonship Christology in Hebrews 1-2 (leveraging Umberto Eco); Mateusz Kusio on divine fictive kinship in Hebrews; David Ritsema on Jewish Divine Messiah expectations and their parallels in John’s Gospel and finally Daniel McClellan on Cognitive theories of Divine Agency (taking an internalist cognitive approach from Cognitive Models of Religion)

Matthew Novenson gave our second plenary for the day on the topic of Sonship and the Messiah, highlighting the breadth of Messiahs who are not the Son of God, and Sons of God who are not Messiahs (presumably some in the former category are merely very naughty boys). Novenson’s overview of the interaction of messianic expectation and patronymics is an area that should be engaged with further.

The second parallel sessions engaged with aspects of Christology and Early Christian Origins. Stefan Mulder presented a heuristic model for describing Docetism in the ancient world (a very good descriptive model); Mina Monier presented on the Christology present within the Epistle of Barnabas; Tavis Bohlinger presented on Messianism in Pseudo-Philo, and I presented on Christological Salience in the First Century.

The second day finished with a lovely string quartet concert headed by the multi-talented Madhavi Nevader, and then dinner at a local pub with plenty of stimulating and erudite conversation. Here is to another good day.