Loading...I had a good and interesting first day at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting here in Baltimore. This society comprises professors and other scholars of biblical literature mainly from the U.S., but with some attendees from overseas as well. It meets along with the American Academy of Religion, which is the professional society for all professors of religion who are not teachers of biblical studies (so experts in Christianity outside the NT, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, anthropologists of religion, historians of religion, and so on and on). All together it is a very large group. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think maybe there are 10,000 or 11,000 people here for the meeting. That’s a lot of experts on religion in one place!
One of the most important aspects of the conference for me is the book display. Dozens of publishers of books in every field and aspect of religion are here – from major well known pubishers such as Oxford University Press and Princeton University Press to religious publishing houses such as Eerdmans and Zondervan to small nich publishers to … you name it). These publishers all set up an enormous ballroom with their exhibits, which are mainly copies and posters of the various books they’ve published. The publishers obviously can’t bring every book they publish on the topic, and so typically bring only what has come out over the past year. There are many, many thousands of books here.
Attendees can browse the book display, look through whatever books they’re interested in, buy books at a discount, make notes on what books to buy later, and so on.
To see this and other posts in full go to https://ehrmanblog.org/sbl-books-members/ and join the blog by clicking the “Register” button!
Interesting stuff like all of your blogs. I always like your more personal commentaries:
1. My best psychiatry teachers also did not get tenure. They taught well, but did not write enough grants. If one is writing grants, then one does not have time for much else.
2. Publishers creating a need for books reminds me of drug companies creating a need for drugs by creating new illnesses which just happen to require drug treatment with drugs the companies just happen to make.
This question is only somewhat related. And forgive me if you’ve addressed it elsewhere. When you write your books, I’m sure you do multiple passes. You write, you rewrite, and you edit until you feel it’s done (or until you don’t want to look at it anymore). Every scriptwriter I know, including myself, write several drafts of a screen play. Do you think NT authors, or authors of the Hebrew Bible for that matter, wrote in drafts? Is there any evidence of this happening?
I suppose they did — but possibly not as much as we do today, since materials were expensive. But I don’t have a definitive answer! I’ll need to think about it…
With regard to this point (the effect of “expense” on the number of drafts) this is something many of us “of a certain age” have seen happen in our own lifetime.
It wasn’t that long ago that the life-cycle of a drafs of a paper (or report, etc) was something like the following:
– One or two people get together and put together a first draft.
– The original copy (typically hand-written) was passed on to the departmental secretary (or typing pool) to be typed up.
– The typed-up draft (often a single copy) was passed around among readers for comments, corrections, grammar/spelling-fixes, etc.
– The final author then marked up the copy and sent it back to the typing pool for a clean copy.
There might be a couple iterations this cycle, but it was rare for this to take more than two or three passes
before the last copy was passed through the hands of a copy-editor and a “fair-copy” generated.
But with the advent of word-processors, suddenly everyone became an editor. And the life-cycle became something like:
– The initial author puts together a rough draft (typed into the computer)
– The same person spends a couple of days making a huge number of tweaks (often wasting time playing with page-formatting, etc)
– Eventually the initial author emails copies to a (possible large) number of readers and/or co-authors.
– The readers/co-authors now go through their own infinite-tweak cycle.
– As individual “proof-read” copies drift back in via email, the original author starts going back to step 1.
(I leave it to the reader to decide which is the more expensive mechanism: Two or three drafts being generated, at the cost of a couple of trips to the typing pool; or, often literally, hundreds of micro-drafts being cranked out by a small army of amateur editors playing with MicroSoft Word. 😉 )
Academia’s “publish or perish” culture is so dysfunctional, but I have never so much as heard of any plan to reform it.
I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, generally, at this event. While I’m not eager for another commentary on Philippians, either, I wish you’d write a commentary on the Gospels with all the important variants described and listed (in English, not just Greek.)
I watched the entire debate with Dr. Evans. Wow! I think his argument about discrepancies being derived from ancient teaching methods, a different historical genre, and an ancient standard of history is interesting, but not convincing. It would be interesting to see each of you make a list of what is historically accurate about Jesus and see how the lists compare. Of course, you have already done this in your book on the subject and perhaps he has done it in his writings as well as he kept mentioning “eleven” items. It is good seeing this topic discussed with civility and not rancor. Thanks for sharing this with us.
You must have a wide knowledge of what has been published in your field. Do you know of anyone who is writing for the layman about the OT is the same way your write about the NT? I am referring to the history of it. Who wrote it, in what historical context and how it got to us in the form it is in?
Yes, there are good books like this. I’d suggest you start with Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
Richard Friedman’s book was amazing. If you can’t thrive for more scholarship after reading that book, you just need to stop all together. Funny, because it was wrote in 1986. I read it a few years ago and still love to read it from time to time.
And then there’s the way that book reviews that state that the book should not have been written tend to go down incredibly badly, and not just with the author who had nothing to say…
I find it fascinating that so many books have to be written by lesser minds to explain a book that was supposedly written by the greatest intelligence in the universe. I guess God needs our help to express himself clearly.
I’d say that about whoever wrote the gospels. 🙂
Didn’t you once say on the blog that you’d learned to “speed read” as a grad student to increase your capacity? If so, does it really work?
Well, I’m not a bona fide speed reader, but I did train myself to read fast, and I’m faster than normal. It certainly *does* help. The key is *retaining* what you read….
Bart,
It is indeed surprising to see the glut of books being written these days, but what’s even more depressing is how they are received by those who crave mythology more than reputable treatments of history. Besides being poorly researched, these popular productions are frequently sensationalized just to make a profit or a name for their authors.
Here’s my take on two of the latest *mythmakers*…
“For the first time in recent history two biographies about Jesus Christ have become bestsellers. One was produced by a Fox News celebrity called Bill O’Reilly, the other by an obscure Muslim academic named Reza Aslan. What’s so disturbing about these popular reconstructions, at least for me, is the fact that my book is so much better than theirs. It’s shorter, simpler, and much more visual, to say nothing about the caliber of the information presented. (This, of course, is also true of a few other texts I won’t bother to mention, for obvious reasons.)
So if you are the least bit interested in history’s most remarkable rabbi, please forward this message to other like-minded friends, and then check out JESUS THE JEW NO ONE KNOWS. It is modestly priced at $16.20 for the black and white version at Amazon, and $9.99 on Kindle. And, for a short time, starting on my birthday (November 27), the digital version will be discounted even more.
Needless to say, YOUR HELP WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED! 🙂
Thank you — D. C. Smith
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Jesus+The+Jew+No+One+Knows+by+D.+C.+Smith
Bart,
If you think *you* and your scholar friends have a hard time, try being a layman in this field! My offering is the only book anyone needs to read to get the entire gist of the mystic nature of the Bible and all the other period sources and no one will touch it, because I don’t have ‘Ph. D.’ after “Robert Wahler”…
My book was there, at ‘Scholar’s Choice’ (how ironic). I can “significantly advance” knowledge in biblical studies, not because I am so smart (ahem..) but because of knowing an expert in the field who doesn’t care a whit for publishing — a living spiritual savior. Scoff if you want, but it’s completely the case. I know the Bible in ways scholars could only dream of. No one cares. If only ..
One of my favorite features of this ‘blog –and articles like this (particularly the first part)– is the view it gives into the day-to-day life of a real live scholar. (Thank you.)
Concerning your tour of the publisher’s displays: If you have a chance could you say a word or two about some of the new books that especially caught your eye? And, in particular, any unexpected delights that might have ended up “following you home”?
Good idea. I never *buy* books there because I don’t want to lug them around. But most are offered at good discount.