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| Photo richardbauckham.co.uk |
On June 10 and 11, I and the other Jesus Bloggers (except Brant Pitre!) will gather at St Mary's University, Twickenham along with a host of other scholars for the
Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible's conference "Memory and the Reception of Jesus in Early Christianity." Quite a number of people are already registered, but there's still a few spaces to attend if you'd like to join us. Information, a list of presenters, and registration (including a special discount for students) are available at
this link. (I'm especially desirous that students attend. We design our conferences purposefully to be low-key with lots of tea and coffee breaks so that the participants can actually chat with each other. There are thus lots of opportunities for students to speak with the scholars presenting and attending.) From what I can gather as the organizer of the conference, many of the presenters (including me) are viewing this conference as an opportunity to clarify precisely what the "memory approach" is and is not, as many of us feel that there's quite a bit of misinformation being reported in journal articles and SBL papers.
In the lead-up to this conference, I want to introduce a few of the presenters and their topics. Today's focus is on Richard Bauckham. Bauckham is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and currently resides in Cambridge. Among his numerous, numerous publications, his blockbuster
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses caused a tremendous amount of agreement and disagreement and engaged directly with memory theory. He is currently working on a second edition of that important book, which I'm told is finished and hopefully will be out by SBL.
Bauckham is the only scholar at the conference who will be presenting directly upon cognitive memory research (though I suspect that Alan Kirk will also address the topic in his paper) and his paper is titled "The Psychology of Eyewitness Memory." I've seen the paper. I don't want to give away too much, but I'll say this: Bauckham thinks that Dale Allison got the implications of research on eyewitness memory wrong in Allison's own blockbuster
Constructing Jesus. Want to hear more and hear Bauckham tangle with Allison? Come to the conference!
Chris Keith has mastered the art of the tease.
ReplyDeleteFor those of us who cannot attend while there be the possibility of viewing/hearing these lectures? A simple audio would do just fine.
ReplyDeleteWe will record most the lectures and put them on the website for the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible.
DeleteI am not a student or professional, but a very interested lay person. And I live in Australia, so I won't be there. But will there be a book of the papers afterwards please?
ReplyDeleteMost--though not all--the papers will be published as part of a three-volume reference work, The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, which I am editing with Helen Bond, Jens Schroeter, and Christine Jacobi. It will be published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
DeleteWhen someone says "Reception of Jesus," why do I always imagine a cash bar?
DeleteBecause, Larry, you are apparently a man who knows his way around a reception. In my experience, though, the best receptions have "open" bars, not cash ones.
DeleteJohn's memory of Jesus and Receptions didn't involve much in the way of cash bars....
DeleteI soooo wish I could be there. :-(
ReplyDeleteI cringe when I see the words 'reference work' because they are so often very, very expensive. Does the fact that it is Bloomsbury T&T Clark mean that it will be available in paperback for those of us who are not university libraries? :-)
And on the issue of memory approaches, have you read Ruben Zimmermann's Puzzling the Parables? He doesn't really address the psychological material at all, but I think he has done a very good job of picking up the implications of social memory studies in a systematic way.
Should have read the list of contributors before posting - I see that Zimmermann is one of them!! My comment about his book still stands though.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to this, the collision of worlds has begun. Time to start brushing up on the recognition and semantic memory work we did a while ago.
ReplyDelete