With almost 200 in attendance here in Durham (vs ~150 last year in Exeter), I thought this year’s British New Testament Conference went very well.  One big difference was that there were at least 2x as many postgrads, if not more, here this year from last year.  Much of the PG increase was from Durham, but I also noted several from Edinburgh and Oxbridge that were not in attendance last year.  Durham was quite well represented at the conference with papers given by John Barclay (plenary), Loren Stuckenbruck (response to Dale Martin), John Goodrich, Kristian Bendoraitis, Nijay Gupta, Dave Morlan, Mark Mathews, and me.

As with last year I was very pleased with the opportunity to meet new scholars (e.g., Prof John Riches) and also catch up with friends (e.g., Joey Dodson and Preston Sprinkle).  In particular, George van Kooten and I had a good chat about his upcoming book which has relevance to my thesis.  In many ways this conference is better than SBL because of the ability to meet a relatively large number of people.

As for my own participation, my own paper received a few clarifying questions, but no challenges to my basic thesis.  Fortunately for me once registration was over, my responsibilities were virtually finished.  It did take quite a bit of time in preparation between local team meetings, etc., but everything ran very smoothly due to Bill Telford’s organisation and attention to detail.  I look forward to attending the conference in Aberdeen next year.