Skip to content

Program

CBA Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting

Event Details

Saturday, March 15, 2025

8:30 am - 10:30 pm

Hybrid: Princeton Theological Seminary and via Zoom

8:00 AM	–	8:45 AM		Breakfast	Erdman Center
8:50 AM	–	9:00 AM		WELCOME	Cooper Room
				JONATHAN LEE WALTON, President Princeton Theological Seminary
9:00 AM	–	10:30 AM		SESSION 1: PANEL	Cooper Room
				Panelists: MAHRI LEONARD-FLECKMAN, College of the Holy Cross JAMES VANDERKAM, University of Notre Dame PETER SPITALER, Villanova University ELIZABETH SCHRADER POLCZER, Villanova University The panelists will discuss the following questions: What authoritative traditions of the ancient texts/world were prominent in first-century Christianity? How has the conception of authoritative traditions changed in our current cultural setting? What is the relationship between these ancient sources and emerging sources of foundational authority for Christianity?
10:30 AM	–	10:45 AM		Coffee Break	Cooper Room
10:45 AM	–	12:15 PM		SESSION 2: PAPER PRESENTATIONS
				"Stigma: A Strategy for Implicitly Promoting Gentile Inclusion in Acts 13:4-12" MICHAEL KOCHENASH, Independent Scholar
				Abstract: The conversion of Sergius Paulus in Acts 13 is significant for the narrative’s development of the theme of gentile inclusion. The account marks Paul’s first conversion of a non-Jew and forms the foundation for what would become his testimony against requiring the circumcision of non-Jewish devotees in Acts 15. Despite its thematic importance, the episode lacks explicit argumentation on the question of including non-Jews. I argue that the episode is nevertheless designed to persuade readers with respect to this issue. Acts 13 exhibits structural and circumstantial similarities to, especially, the book of Exodus and Euripides’s Bacchae. Readers who recognize these similarities can understand them, because of how they are arranged, as stigmatizing Elymas by associating him with the opponents of Moses and Dionysus. Because Elymas opposes Paul’s ministering to a non-Jew, the narrative can be understood as stigmatizing opposition to gentile inclusion even among the readers of Acts. Thus, despite its notable lack of explicit argumentation, Acts 13 can be understood as contributing in an important way to the narrative’s theme of including non-Jews.
				"Was Luke a Plagiarist?" JOHN J. PETERS, Independent Scholar
				Abstract: The notion of plagiarism has played little or no role in the formulation of the prevailing source theories for the Synoptic Gospels. Consequently, most NT scholars presuppose compositional theories depicting the author of Luke’s Gospel as simply copying, sometimes verbatim, the work of prior authors as if plagiarism was acceptable in the ancient world. Some, like B H Streeter in 1924, the Jesus Seminar in the 90s, and more recently Pieter Botha and Bruce Malina, have more or less argued that the “concept of plagiarism was unknown in the ancient world. Authors freely copied from predecessors without acknowledgment,” (The Five Gospels, 22). This view is demonstrably false. Bart Ehrman was the first to identify the problem in Synoptic scholarship in “Apocryphal Forgeries: The Logic of Literary deceit” (2017) and E. Randolph Richards responded with “Was Matthew a Plagiarist? Plagiarism in Greco-Roman Antiquity” (2018), while Ian Nelson Mills devotes eleven pages to it in his Duke dissertation (2021). From the premise that “plagiarism” is the “culpable reuse of earlier texts, customarily described in terms of stealing, in which a person wins false credit by presenting another’s work as his own” (McGill Plagiarism in Latin Literature, 3), I will show that Ehrman, Richards and Mills do not succeed in obviating the charge of plagiarism. The problem is particularly acute for Luke in view of the evidence, marshalled especially by Steve Reece (LNTS 2022), suggesting Luke was a πεπαιδευμένος (“educated man”) who completed at least the first two stages of the ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία (“curricular education”) and thus knew better. Contra Ehrman and Richards, the author did not write anonymously and, contra Mills (following L. Alexander), Luke emulated historiography rather than technical/scientific literature. Was Luke a plagiarist? The prevailing Synoptic theories (2DH, Farrer, 2GH) seem inescapably to necessitate the conclusion that he was.
12:15 PM	–	1:00 PM		Lunch	Erdman Center




7:15 PM	–	8:45 PM		KEYNOTE ADDRESS	Cooper Room
				“Jesus and the Scriptures: Skepticism versus Patterns” DALE ALLISON Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary Abstract: Some important scholars have been inclined to dissociate Jesus from most of the scriptural quotations and clear allusions that are attributed to him. They assign them rather to the post-Easter community. This presentation outlines the reasons for their position, critically analyzes and rejects those reasons, and mounts a case to the contrary. It then contends that one plausible way of approaching the topic of Jesus and the Scriptures is to hunt for patterns that run across the sources. One outcome of doing this is that Jesus appears to have had a strongly Mosaic self-conception
8:45 PM	–	10:30 PM		Social	Erdman Center