Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Travel Diary 1: On the way to Baltimore

It's a while since I have had a travel diary on the blog, but I have a brief one over the next day or so because I am on the way to the SBL Mid-Atlantic Region Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland where I have been invited to speak on the topic, "The Devil is in the Detail: Dispelling Doubts about Dispensing with Q". I know, it's horribly alliterative but I just couldn't resist it once I started with "the Devil is in the detail". The occasion for that was Christopher Tuckett's review of my Case Against Q in Novum Testamentum a couple of years ago, which ended with the point that "the devil is in the detail", i.e. there are lots of natty little details among the Synoptic data that my case does not deal with. I am not going to use the occasion tomorrow, except briefly, to respond to critics, however, but will instead focus on why the details matter for my case too, and how a careful look at them can encourage us to dispense with Q.

The conference gets underway tomorrow morning, but I am flying in tonight and am currently enjoying a Sam Adams and a "Seattle Chicken Club" sandwich at the sports bar in Raleigh Durham International Airport. I am one of those people who generally fills one's day so full that I love travelling to give me a chance to take it a little easier, to catch some time to read, think, relax, sleep, oh, and blog. It is particularly welcome that I have this time now since I have been recently been deep in another paper, on Thomas's use of the Synoptics, which I gave at our New Testament Colloquium last night.

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