Philo at SBL Annual Meeting (I)

It is time for some of us to start preparing for travelling to the SBL Annual Meeting. For my part it represents registering, booking hotel, and looking for the cheapest tickets. This year we will stay some days in New York ni the days before the conference in order to do some sightseeing, visiting relatives, and not the least,- getting over the worst of the heavy jetlag that always strucks me when going to America. Going home is much easier…

Philo is surely to ‘be present’ this year too. Here I just provide a listing of the Philo Seminar at the SBL Annual Meeting in Baltimore, USA, in November this year. It is good to see that Philo is also present in any other papers to be presented at this meting, and I will list them later.

S24-334

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Philo of Alexandria
11/24/2013
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: 321 – Convention Center

Theme: Philo’s Sources, Session One

Thomas Tobin, Loyola University of Chicago, Presiding
Michael B. Cover, University of Notre Dame
The Sun and the Chariot: The Respublica and the Phaedrus as Rival Platonic Models of Psychic Vision and Transformation in Philo (30 min)
David Runia, University of Melbourne
Philo and the Opinions of the Philosophers (30 min)
Break (15 min)
Carlos Lévy , Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
About Some Concepts of Philonian Epistemology (30 min)
Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer, University of Aberdeen
Philo’s Sources for His Arithmology in the Quaestiones (30 min)
Discussion (15 min)

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S25-137

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Philo of Alexandria
11/25/2013
9:00 AM to 11:45 AM
Room: 349 – Convention Center

Theme: Philo’s Sources, Session Two

Sarah Pearce, University of Southampton, Presiding
David Lincicum, University of Oxford
Philo’s Library: The Scope and Shape of Philo’s Indebtedness to Non-Biblical Texts (30 min)
Pura Nieto Hernández, Brown University
Philo of Alexandria, Reader of Homer and the Archaic Poets (30 min)
Break (15 min)
Gregory E. Sterling, Yale Divinity School
From the Thick Marshes of the Nile to the Throne of God: Moses in Ezekiel and Philo (30 min)
Francis Borchardt, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong
Philo’s Use of Aristeas and the Question of Authority (30 min)
Discussion (15 min)
Business Meeting (15 min)

The World of the New Testament

Last week I received the author’s issues of a book published by Baker Academic:

The World of the New Testament
Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts
Edited by Joel B. Green, Lee Martin McDonald
Baker Academic, August 2013. 616 pages

The book contains 5 main sections, all containing several subchapters: 1: Setting the Context: Exile and the Jewish Heritage; 2: Setting the Context: Roman Hellenism; 3: The Jewish People in the Context of Roman Hellenism; 4: The Literary Context of Early Christianity; 5: The Geographical Context of the New Testament. My contribution (Philo and the New Testament, pp. 405-412), falls in the 4. section.
The Publisher describes the volume thus: “This volume addresses the most important issues related to the study of New Testament writings. Two respected senior scholars have brought together a team of distinguished specialists to introduce the Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman backgrounds necessary for understanding the New Testament and the early church. The book includes seventy-five photographs, fifteen maps, numerous tables and charts, illustrations, and bibliographies. All students of the New Testament will value this reliable, up-to-date, comprehensive textbook and reference volume on the New Testament world.”

New website, honoring Raymond E. Brown

A person otherwise unknown to me, Matthew D. Montonini, has set up a New website, honoring Raymond E. Brown (1928-1998). This will be one in a row of several others, honoring deceased persons, and in this case fully deserved. It is good to have a place on the Internet where one can get an overview of a scholar’s publications, and even be able to download some of them.

On this website, you will find pictures, Recollections of Ray as a Scholar, Teacher, Friend, and Colleague, downloadable pdf’s of some of his articles, and some video clips from is teaching.

Hopefully, Matthew D. Montonini will be able to share a lot more from R. Brown’s life and work on this site.

Death of Robert Hamerton-K​elly

Robert Hamerton-K​elly passed away early in July after a severe stroke. He was not active as a Philo scholar in the last decades of his life, but he is nevertheless to be remembered in this context as one of the pioners who was engaged in getting The Studia Philonica up and running.
Among his articles in that setting should be mentioned “Sources and Traditions in Philo Judaeus: Prolegomena to an Analysis of his Writings,” Studia Philonica 1 (1972):3-21.