Last week, my friend, Kevin Scull, and I attended the Enoch Graduate Seminar in Budapest, Hungary (see his post about the experience). The seminar was unlike any conference I’ve ever experienced or even heard about. It was run more like a graduate seminar course at a university than a conference, but even more intellectually fulfilling than that. It had both Kevin and I wondering about conferences that we’d like to see happen in the future.
Format. We all distributed our papers ahead of time. Our presentations were supposed to be more like introductions to the discussion than a verbatim recital of our written work. We had ten minutes to make these introductions, and then the discussion was scheduled for one hour past that. Inevitably, some discussions might bore you to death (the nature of things), while others would stimulate promising new thoughts. Unlike most conferences, you were expected to stay for all the sessions, read all the papers, and contribute to the discussions (as you are able).
The conference lasted about four days, two of which were full with six papers, two of which included only three papers. Most days ended with a final paper/lecture from a scholar. Except for Wednesday, when we took a “field trip” over to the city of Budapest, we ended our day at 7pm. As you might imagine, the conference was exhausting. And, while the host campus was a beautiful little spot outside Budapest, it appears that Hungarians do not believe in air conditioning. Sitting through roughly eight hours of discussion/presentations until the early evening in a hot and humid seminar room made for a more “memorable” experience.
The Enoch Grad Seminar is the graduate student version of the larger Enoch Seminar, which gathers to discuss a particular topic each time. I understand that the larger conference for established scholars (invite only) does not have the same kind of intimacy as the graduate seminar, but I like the idea of having a set topic. Their first meeting, if I heard correctly, was to discuss the proofs of George Nickelsburg’s Hermeneia commentary on 1 Enoch. To me, that sounds like a fabulous idea, and easily transferable to other fields.
Content. The Seminar is not only about Enoch, as the name of the conference might suggest. Rather, Enoch is used more as a reference point because, as Prof. Boccaccini noted, “Enoch is everywhere!” It’s used as a way of marking off a couple centuries before and after the turn of the common era. On the whole, it was a conference mainly on Second Temple Judaism, with only about four or five papers explicitly dealing with New Testament documents. When Christianity was discussed, it was as a part of the larger umbrella of Second Temple Judaism. Unlike the lip service I’ve seen given to this idea in the past (that the early Christian movement was a part of early Judaism), the discussions from this conference represented a really robust approach to Second Temple texts and issues.
Boccaccini offered a kind of plea for New Testament scholars to engage in greater depth with the texts and issues of Second Temple Judaism. He also seemed to have a desire to have studies of Second Temple texts interact more directly with New Testament texts. As it stands, they are two different fields, when they really should be more integrated.
International Connections. At the conference, we had five grad students from the US (UCLA, Michigan, and Marquette), one from Canada (McGill), three from the UK (Cambridge, Durham, and Nottingham), three Hungarians, an Argentinian currently studying at the Sorbonne, and individuals from Greece, the University of Copenhagen, Israel, and Russia. The intensity of the experience helped us all to deepen our global networks, not to mention friendships. We all had a great time together.
The next Enoch Grad Seminar is more accessible for those of us in the states at Notre Dame. I certainly recommend grad students in the field to seek out this conference in two years, when it comes around again. I’m worried that it will not be quite as international as this one was, given the location, but I imagine it will still be fulfilling either way.
