Washington, D.C.

I just arrived into D.C. this afternoon and I am excited about a week of stimulating conversations with old friends and hopefully some new. I trust that the papers will be as stimuplating; typically, though, I am disappointed.

I usually go to ETS, but this year I have decided to attend the annual meeting of ASOR . This will be my first go at ASOR and I hope to meet people and develop relationships. I have an interest in New Testament archaeology and I hope to develop it over the early years of my career. My experience is that attending conferences is one way of doing this.

I will be attending ETS on Friday morning to hear the review of Larry Hurtado's book Lord Jesus Christ in the Synoptic Gospels section. Richard Burridge will be presenting a review of the book and I really like his stuff on genre criticism of the Gosples as well as his Four Gospels One Jesus? The latter is a phenominal introduction to the Gospels, by the way. I use it in my John course.

I look forward to presenting a paper at SBL on Sunday afternoon in the Matthew Section entitled Matthew's Messianic Shepherd-King. It will be a synopsis of my Ph.D. thesis.

I hope to see some of you around.