Enoch Graduate Seminar: Best Conference Ever?
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.
"Already But Not Yet" Theology in the Dead Sea Scrolls
This week in our seminar on Wisdom and Apocalyptic with Boustan, we read about and discussed apocalyptic thought in Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were a couple quotes from our readings that stood out to me as the New Testament guy in the seminar:
The last days are thus a period already started but not yet completed, somehow coextensive with the present of the community. As CD 4:4 put it: “the sons of Zadok are the chosen of Israel, ‘those called by name’ who stood up at the end of days.”
(Florentino García Martínez, “Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 1, pg. 175)
And then, this one . . .
This community’s wisdom texts, listed above, seek the proleptic realization of the future through wise actions. The sectarians believe that by their ritual purity and ethical behavior they are able to live eschatological reality into existence and to participate in the transformation of the new creation.
(Leo Perdue, Sword and the Stylus, 384)
Sounds pretty New Testamenty to me. An intriguing line of thought.
Four Views of Second Temple Judaism
One of the things I appreciate about working with Ra’anan Boustan is that no assumption is safe from questioning. In his courses, you have to define what you mean by words or phrases like “Hellenism,” “anti-Semitism,” “the parting of the ways,” and of course, “Judaism.” Consensus is no excuse.
This is why I sit up and take notice whenever Boustan delineates a topic in explicit categories. I love to fly amidst complicated whirlwinds of nuance, but at the end of the day, I need some solid footing so I don’t get too dizzy. Yesterday, he offered one such footing: four basic views found in scholarship regarding Second Temple Judaism. Here goes:
- There is one “normative” Judaism. This older view posits that there is a clear orthodoxy in Second Temple Judaism and there are those who do not accept that orthodoxy. To come up with this “normative” orthodoxy, these scholars have homogenized the messages of the Rabbis, then retrojected that homogenized vision back into the Second Temple period, thus establishing an anachronistic orthodoxy. [Incidentally, and this is my own comment here, this pitfall often occurs outside scholarship. Watch out for it, Rob Bell fans.]
- There are (too?) many “Judaisms”. As a corrective to the earlier view, this approach sees a multiplicity of microformations of Judaism in the Second Temple period, each of which are represented by separate texts. Here we are speaking particularly of Neusner, who I believe coined the term “Judaisms”. One potential problem, however, is that this view takes every text as having its own community and worldview, borrowing a similar approach from New Testament studies (i.e., the Johannine community, the Matthean community, etc.). That is, this view helpfully corrects the monolithic and anachronistic “normative Judaism” approach, but it may simply have too many Judaisms.
- There are basically two major streams of Judaism. In this view, we have the existence of variety, but each of the major streams are relatively homogeneous. For instance, there might be an Enochic stream and a Mosaic stream. Enochic literature is seen at its core as “non-Torah-centered” and not centered on the Jerusalem cult. Boustan cited Gabriele Boccaccini here, who emphasizes distinction and coherence in his treatment of Second Temple Judaism. Boustan himself admitted to skepticism of reified boundaries between major streams. I have not yet closely read Boccaccini myself.
- There exists a variegated Jewish society. In this view, we see tensions between multiple different standpoints. We do not have a single totality of views, nor is Jewish society factured into a million pieces, nor is it two big streams. Our textual evidence comes from a small elite group, fractured by a range of interests with changing alliances over time. Boustan finds himself in this camp, along with others we read for this week’s seminar session, Martha Himmelfarb and Annette Reed (Reed and Boustan both worked under Himmelfarb at Princeton). Boustan suggests that the field of Second Temple studies needs to incorporate some of the insights of social history here. Further, we need to pay attention not only to abstract ideas, but to practices that bound people together (e.g., the common practice throughout the Judean heartland of pilgrimage to the Temple).
One scholar who defies these categories to some extent is E. P. Sanders. Sanders is a kind of “neo-holist,” arguing a common Judaism, but bases it upon beliefs rather than practices. Sanders, of course, has been interested in correcting trends in NT scholarship that have depicted Judaism as legalistic–hence, the emphasis on belief rather than practice.
What do you think? Are there other scholars that fit well into these categories? Scholars who don’t? Are there additional categories not mentioned here that might be helpful? Should this qualify for IVP’s “four views” series? 
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