Preparing for Edinburgh

Tomorrow I will fly out to Edinburgh. I have been invited to the University to hold a faculty lecture ("Northern Scholar lecture"), and I will also present a paper in a seminar. The main lecture will be a revised version of a paper that I presented at the SBL together with Jennifer Wright Knust, “Earth Accuses Earth: Tracing Jesus’ Writing on the Ground” (see report from SBL here). Earlier this week the article on the subject was accepted by Harvard Theological Review, for which we are very pleased. It will hopefully appear in a few months. We are now contacting various institutions to get permission to include some nice images.

The paper for the less formal seminar will basically be on the nature of the "original text." This material will also be published later this year in Eve-Marie Becker & Anders Runesson, eds. Mark and Matthew, Texts and Contexts I: Understanding the Earliest Gospels in their First Century Contexts (WUNT; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).

Now I look forward to meeting Larry Hurtado, Paul Foster and all the staff in Edinburgh. I can't believe it was almost three years since I last visited Edinburgh during the SBL International Meeting, 2006. That was a very nice meeting, above all some evening fellowship with Martin Heide and Ulrich Schimd at local pubs. (Unfortunately, the German soccer team beat Sweden in the FIFA World Cup but otherwise it was nice.)