The bloggers at D33 enjoyed a week at the annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio last week. As usual, we were busy with presenting and listening to papers, perusing the exhibit hall and bookstore, and connecting with colleagues, students, publishers, and others.

Stan presented three papers at ETS, the first entitled, “Jews, Gentiles, and Salvation in Luke-Acts” in a section entitled “Luke-Acts – Sin and Salvation in Luke-Acts.” This paper opened a session on various dimensions of salvation in Luke-Acts. Stan’s paper focused upon the words used in the semantic domains for “sin” and “salvation,” according to the Louw-Nida lexicon. An examination of the major passages with these words (suitably culled) showed that Luke and Acts have similar perspectives on the relationship of the Jews and Gentiles to sin and salvation. Both Luke’s Gospel and Acts open with passages that ground the concepts of salvation in the Old Testament, and then move to describing various people within the respective books in need of salvation. The focus is upon Jesus directly or indirectly by proclamation in the two respective books. Acts closes with Paul meeting with the Jewish leaders where their hardness and resistance is noted by means of citation of Isaiah, but a word of hope is also extended to them. Nevertheless, the Gentiles are also included within God’s salvation in a parallel fashion.

Stan’s second paper was “Authors, Authorship, and the New Testament Canon” in the section “New Testament Canon, Textual Criticism, and Apocryphal Literature – The Canonical Approach to the New Testament.” This session included two papers advocating a canonical approach to the New Testament and two papers raising questions about it. Stan’s paper was one of the two raising questions. Most canonical approaches recognize a place for authors—until they do not when the issue of authorship poses a problem, such as some of Paul’s letters. Stan argued that in the continuum of author–text–reader, the author plays a vital role of creating and positioning a text in relation to a reader, what is sometimes called the author function. The author may not be as important as the text, but it is nevertheless vital to the interpretive process and cannot be neglected as it has been in some canonical approaches. This paper provided a defense of authors, while not resorting to overly specific views of intention, and problematized the notion of pseudepigraphal authorship, a limitation of some canonical approaches.

Stan’s third paper was “A Natural Language Approach to Koine Greek Exegesis” in the section “New Testament Greek Language and Exegesis – What is Missing in Greek Exegesis?” The three papers in this session were all focused upon various ways of using Greek in exegesis. Stan’s paper defined what he called a “natural language approach,” by which he means that the Greek of the New Testament is the Koine Greek of the Greco-Roman world and should be described using pertinent linguistic categories. It should not be treated as a special or Semiticized form of Greek. In light of this foundational view, Stan examined how lexical semantics and grammar are handled in two recent introductions to exegesis. Stan called into question the continued dependence upon diachronic word studies and overly limited views of Greek grammar. He also observed that there are various presuppositions about language that are often found in exegetical works, especially related to the use of language to solve theological problems. Stan argued that a natural language understanding of Greek provides a better basis for exegesis than other approaches that burden the language with unnecessary presuppositional baggage.

Dave’s paper at ETS was “Conditional Immortality under Fire: Identifying the Semantic Fallacies of Annihilationism” in the section “New Testament – Studies in Greek Language and Exegesis.” Noticing a growing trend among evangelicals to adopt the doctrine of conditional immortality, Dave sought to examine the major arguments put forth by the leading conditionalist scholar, the late Edward Fudge, and to show how they are based on some key semantic fallacies. He identified three major exegetical arguments: (1) the semantics of eternal punishment, (2) the semantics of immortality, and (3) the semantics of destruction and fire. In many cases, arguments for conditional immortality conflate English and Greek meanings of words and confuse grammatical categories. In particular, the so-called class of “result nouns” is a major argument for the meaning of “eternal punishment” that does not work. 

Dave’s paper at SBL was “Critical Discourse Analysis and the Antioch Incident: A Power Shift through Language” in the section “Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics.” He delved into a political or ideological approach to language called Critical Discourse Analysis, which attempts to show how language is used to assert power, especially in unequal power relations. In analyzing the Antioch Incident (Gal 2:11–21) through this lens, Dave showed that Paul used language to assert power over Peter, which would have been surprising since Peter was the more well-known apostle and an apostle of higher status than Paul at the time. Thus, the Antioch Incident was a pivotal point in the development of the early church, with Paul gaining more power and influence among the churches in the ancient Mediterranean area.

We will most likely be publishing our papers in various places, so stay tuned for where they can be accessed in print. But aside from the papers, we enjoyed the social and interpersonal aspects of the conferences, including the MDC dinners (for friends of the college and prospective students), ETS banquet (where Timothy George gave an interesting plenary on the history of ETS and a prospective trajectory for ETS), publishers’ receptions, and of course perusing the book displays.

It looks like ETS and SBL are getting back to normal after a few years of diminished numbers. We look forward to next year in San Diego.

— Stanley E. Porter and David I. Yoon