Thank you!

I'd like to say a massive thank you to so many who have sent their congratulations and good wishes and encouragement on my forthcoming move to Duke. It is really appreciated and I'm really touched. I'll answer all the emails in due course, though I am going to be away from the blogging machine for a week from Friday morning onwards. But thanks for the blog comments, currently a record for me at fourteen, the comments in the blogs (Hypotyposeis, Paleojudaica, Ralph -- but someone will need to explain the Krzyewski reference --, Stuff of Earth, Helenann Hartley, The Anglo-File and of course Biblical Theology -- typically Jim was there first!). Thanks too for the comments on Xtalk, especially Ken Olson's ditty and cf. Michael Pahl's commiserating. To be honest, it is all really overwhelming. Thanks everyone for your kind thoughts, friends, acquaintances and new friends and well-wishers.

Briefly in answer to queries: (1) the NT Gateway should carry on unhindered and from the same address. I enjoy doing the NT Gateway and don't foresee a time when I won't enjoy it. (2) More specifically, this blog will continue unhindered, I hope, and there will be moments when it will morph, temporarily, into a travel diary on the transition from living in the UK to living in the US. I have toyed with the idea of opening a separate blog but have scrapped that -- all is going to be here, I am afraid. (3) Yes, I suspect I will lose some of my media work, especially with the BBC, though I hope that I can minimise that. There is already a project coming up in the autumn that I may struggle to be involved with in spite of earlier plans to be closely involved.

The most important thing to me in this context is my scholarship, and one of the appeals of Duke is that it is clear that it will give me more time to devote to research and writing, in a context in which there will be the strongest kind of intellectual exchange. That is something I am looking forward to very much, even if in the interim there is going to be a huge amount of upheaval in moving from here.

Update (12.06): thanks also to Torrey Seland and congratulations to Torrey on his move to the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger as a professor in New Testament studies.

Thanks too to Steven Weiss on Canonist.