Back from NAPS

I am recovering from the 2012 NAPS conference in Chicago. I should clarify: that's the North American Patristics Society conference. On Thursday evening, Nathan Howard and I went to a very good Thai restaurant a few blocks from our hotel, and we told a lady sitting at a nearby table that we were attending a NAPS conference, and she gave us a funny look and asked "What's that?" I suppose she imagined sessions devoted to the pros and cons of spending a few minutes sleeping every afternoon, and theorizing on where the best place is to get catch a snooze.

This year I roomed with the aforementioned Nathan Howard, and also Everett Ferguson. I enjoyed getting to know both of these men, and it was an honor especially to share a room with Prof. Ferguson, internationally acclaimed patristics scholar and past president of NAPS itself.

Of course, I attended some sessions, learned some about areas of patristics I don't research as well as about areas directly relevant to my own scholarship. The banquet on Friday evening was fund, though expensive. And, I saw my book on display for the first time at a conference--Brill did come to this one. 

I did present a paper. It was titled, "Why Did Jerome Translate Tobit and Judith?" It was generally well-received; nobody threw anything, and several people afterwards mentioned that it was helpful. I plan to work it up into an article for submission to a journal, so I'll probably post some more about this later. For now, I'll just copy below the conclusion as I presented it at the conference. 

Why did Jerome translate Tobit and Judith? Our study has isolated several possible factors. First, he seems to have viewed these two books as authentic ancient Israelite literature, albeit written in Chaldean rather than Hebrew. He did not view the books of Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, or Sirach as ancient Israelite literature. Second, his classification of these books as Agiografa increases their prestige, even though he uses the term to mean something different from his earlier use of it in the Preface to Daniel  and the Prologus Galeatus. Third, the peculiar translation process he describes in the Preface to Tobit allows these Chaldean books to share—however tenuously—in the hebraica veritas, so that his translation will be truer and more correct than the Vetus Latina. Though a first or second reading of these prefaces, especially the Tobit preface, may leave the impression that Jerome would rather not have translated these books at all—an impression created, I think, by Jerome’s desire to stress the noncanonicity of these books—nevertheless, the translations themselves and certain elements of the prefaces reveal that Jerome does want these translations to find an audience that will profit from reading Tobit and Judith.

NAPS 2012 Program

It seems that the program for the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society is already available. On the homepage of the society, it says that the program will not be available until April, but if you click on the annual meeting call for papers, you will find at the top that it says: "The 2012 program may be opened by clicking here." So, click on it and voila, the program. Also, on the 'call for papers' page, it says the program was released on Feb. 13.

It's nice to see the program released a bit early--it helps with planning the trip to Chicago. The opposite happened in the case of the SECSOR program, which was just released a week or so ago even though the conference itself is the first weekend of March. Mostly I don't stay for entire conferences, so I like to know when I'm presenting a paper so I can book the hotel for that night.

I still don't see any information on the NAPS website about registration or housing--they say that information will be available in March. I remember last time (in 2010) the hotel rooms were $142/night, which I thought pretty good for late May in Chicago, but I have no recollection about how much the conference itself ran.

Anyway, back to the program, I'm sure you'll want to examine the whole thing yourself, so I'll just point out the two places where my name appears. On Friday morning at 9:00, I chair a session on Jerome (session 30). That's pretty cool--I'm quite pleased not only to chair a session but that they assigned me that particular session. The first paper in that session is by Thomas Hunt at Cardiff, whom I met this past August in Oxford at the International Patristics Conference, and with whom I shared a brief email exchange about Jerome. I look forward to seeing him again. The other papers--by Stuart Squires (DePaul), Christine McCann (Norwich), and Peter Anthony Mena (Drew)--also look very interesting.

Later that same day, at 4:20pm, I'll present my own paper in Session 47. The session itself is called "Scripture: Commentary and Translation," and it is chaired by Mischa Hooker, whose website I use constantly. Other than me, the session features some big names: D.H. Williams (Baylor) on "The First Gospel in Service of the Early Fathers," Thomas Scheck (Ave Maria University) on "A Brief Introduction to Jerome's Commentary on Isaiah" (I'm very interested!), and Paul Blowers (Emanuel Christian Seminary) on "Anastasius of Sinai's Hexaemeron: Negotiating an Exegetical Via Media."

My own paper is called "Why Did Jerome Translate Tobit and Judith?" This is a topic I've been thinking about for some time, though I still have yet to put everything together into a coherent paper. That's why I like presenting at conferences--they give you a deadline to write the paper! I'll have to have it done by May 25.

I'll have more to say about my paper as the conference draws closer--you know, after I've actually written it.

UPDATE: Just a couple hours after I posted this, the NAPS website issued an announcement about the meeting, pointing to the conference program available on the site. But the homepage still says the program will be available in April.