vividreports: In paradisum

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

In paradisum

I'm at Princeton Theological Seminary for the Symposium for Markus Barth. Ellen drove me here and then went on to Swarthmore. She was sort of miserable with a cold or with allergies - not sure which - and I hope she gets to feeling better. We were delayed a bit in our departure from Brattleboro because during the night last night I remembered that when the Subaru was serviced last June, they had mentioned that "the front control arm bushing had started to tear." (I couldn't actually remember exactly what they said but I got up and found the invoice). We had driven over 10,000 miles since then and I was worried about whether the car was safe to drive. So after we got packed up and left at 8:00a.m. (good for us!), we stopped at Subaru and I asked about it. They inspected the bushing and after they showed me a photo of it, I decided to have it replaced to be on the safe side. So they did the job on the spot, without an appointment, and we were out of there by 10a.m. That put my mind a bit more at ease. Yesterday, I got a new battery - after our experience a week or so ago of having the battery go dead in the Hannaford parking lot. I guess we have come to that time in the life ofour Subaru - things need to be done.

We were here before 4:00p.m., and I checked in at the Erdman Center, which is guest housing for the seminary. It is a nice little room and only $60 a night, which seems reasonable for this area.

My single room at the Erdman Center

Right across the street is a huge library that has immense holdings in the field of biblical studies. Being here is like being in paradise for me. I spent about four hours or so tracking down books I had identified through the on-line catalogue earlier this week, and I felt I was just scratching the surface. I had a chair and table in the stacks where I could bring books I found in the stacks, examine them and photograph relevant pages.

My little work station in the stacks

One of my finds was a Festschrift for James A. Sanders, who is probably more than anyone else the scholar who seemed to appreciate my work and take it seriously back in the 1970's and 80's. I think a number of other scholars were introduced to my dissertation through his writing. So I am grateful to him. The Festschrift had a nice portrait of him as the frontispiece.

James A Sanders

I think I ended up looking at 15-20 different books and made a lot of photos of pages. I found probably 6-7 authors who cited my work that I had not been aware of before. One of them thought that some of my ideas were "a bit far-fetched," and another that my thesis was "incredibly complex." They just might have a valid point! But another one, a scholar in New Zealand, quoted me extensively in his effort to make a case that Jesus had a very open attitude toward other religions. So it all balances out.