Baker Academic

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

The Jesus Conference Roster: Helen Bond—Chris Keith

The 2016 "Memory and the Reception of Jesus in Early Christianity" Conference at St Mary's University is now a matter of days away.  If you haven't registered yet, there are about eight spots left:  register here.  There are many reasons for you to come to this conference when it comes to the presenters and attendees:  you can ask Anthony Le Donne about "triangulation"; you can ask James Crossley about social upheaval; you can ask Christine Jacobi about Jesus in Paul; you can ask Chris Tilling about the apocalyptic Paul; you can ask Mark Goodacre about Q; you can ask Joan Taylor about Jesus and archaeology; you can ask Richard Bauckham about Dale Allison and eyewitness testimony; you can ask Rafael Rodriguez about performance and narrative and liturgy; you can ask Ruben Zimmermann about John Meier and Jesus' parables; and on and on it goes. But here's one of the best reasons to come:  Helen Bond will be addressing the issue of eyewitness claims and the Gospel of John from a memory-inspired perspective.

We all know Helen as one of the top Jesus scholars in the world, from her books on Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas to her introductory The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed.  You may also remember her from a powerful post about her experience as a female biblical scholar, which is one of the most read posts on the Jesus Blog.  But what some readers of the blog might not realize is that Helen has written perhaps the most-read contribution to the so-called "memory approach" to date--a 2013 New Testament Studies article entitled "Dating the Death of Jesus and the Religious Imagination" (NTS 59.4 [2013]: 461-74).  At the SNTS meeting last Summer in Amsterdam, Francis Watson, editor of NTS, announced that this article had been downloaded more than any other article in the journal in the previous year.  Want to hear Helen's presentation and meet her?  Join us Friday, starting at 1:30pm in the Waldegrave Drawing Room of St Mary's University (registration begins at 12:00pm).  See you there!

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