BNTC: Day 2, afternoon

Friday afternoon is designated free time, but for many of us that is the time when we get to pre-arranged meetings to move forward on different projects. After tea, the Simultaneous Short Papers. Of the three on offer, there's no question that David Horrell's was the most popular. He practically filled the main lecture theatre and not without reason -- it was an excellent paper. I think that when Sean the Baptist and I walked in at 4, we were the first there and wondered why the room was so empty. But it took it 20 minutes to fill and David handled the steady stream, coming in for at least the first half of his paper, with great humour, and had fresh starts, false starts, summaries, summaries of the summaries and so on. The gist of his paper was to look at Paul's letters in the light of Bauckham et al's Gospels for All Christians, questioning the very descriptor "Pauline church", patiently taking us through the Pauline correspondence in sequence and making a case that each church is not accurately described or identified by using the term "Pauline". It was excellent stuff, with a good question session, and I am very much looking forward to seeing it in print. I told David today (Saturday) that I thought it was the highlight of the conference.