Conference Program
Zoom Registration

In New Testament studies today, the inherent Jewishness of the early Christian movement is taken into consideration to a much greater extent than only a couple of decades ago: both the historical Jesus and the historical Paul are now firmly situated in late Second Temple Judaism, and the post-70 C.E. writers of the New Testament—Paul probably being the only exception—form  their theology and write their texts in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, when all branches of Judaism had to cope with the fact that the Sanctuary was no more. When a growing number of current scholars read New Testament texts, they do not portray Judaism as the gloomy background from which Christianity had to be removed in order to glow and grow; on the contrary, they understand that one must return to the Jewish matrix in order to appreciate the New Testament texts more fully. It is as if the renowned, yet enigmatic words of T. S. Eliot could be applied to this area of research: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The Corcoran Chair conference in the spring of 2021 will seek to arrive where Christianity started, and seek to know the earliest Christian movement for the first time, before the supersessionism paradigm—which sets Christianity over against Judaism as if they were two separate religious systems—began to govern most of the theological imagination. Papers will explore the consequences of pre-supersessionist readings of the New Testament.

Presenters
Mary C. Boys, Union Theological Seminary
Wendy Farley, San Francisco Theological Seminary
Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Seminary of the Southwest, Austin
Peter C. Phan, Georgetown University
Dieter T. Roth, Boston College
R. Kendall Soulen, Candler School of Theology
Jesper Svartvik, Boston College
Daniel C. Ullucci, Stonehill College
Respondent
Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley