Stuff in the Pipeline

For all none of you who are interested, the following are paper topics that are currently on my radar screen and hope to get published in one form or other:

1) Hospitality in 2 and 3 John. The seemingly diverging instructions given by the Elder in these 2 short epistles have been used by scholars to arrive at all kinds of readings and conclusions, mostly negative. My goal here is to attempt to put the Elder's instructions within their proper Mediterranean hospitality context and argue that said context demands a better reading of these epistles than Brown, Strecker, Lieu and others have proposed in recent decades. My goal is to have a working draft of the article done by the end of March, with formal submittal to the Westminster Theological Journal by the end of April.

2) The Alleged Sectarian Language of the Fourth Gospel. Beginning w/Wayne Meeks, and then continuing through Neyrey, Malina, Peterson, Kysar, and even more conservative scholars like Gundry, an influential niche in Johannine scholarship has proffered that the Fourth Gospel is a sectarian document based on socio-linguistic theory. The idea here is not so much that the content of the FG itself reveals sectarian ideas (though the above scholars would affirm this as well). Instead, they shift the sectarian emphasis to the Fourth Gospel's linguistic strategy and extrapolate that such a strategy is indicative of sectarianism. In this paper, I will analyze this increasingly popular assertion with the intent of showing that Malina, Peterson, and Gundry in particular have overstated their respective cases considerably by selectively (rather than thoroughly) employing socio-linguistic theory and minimizing the considerable amount of data that contradicts their theories.

3) Once I get on the sectarian kick, I may also write a paper that deals with the Fourth Gospel (and epistles) content that is most often cited as evidence of a burgeoning sectarianism within the Johannine community. Attention here will necessarily be paid to Brown's structuralist theory on the alleged development of the community's tradition, as well as on the view of NT ethicists that the Fourth Gospel's supposed conversion of the Synoptic 'love your neighbor' command into a communal (sectarian) 'love one another' command was a sectarian regression.

4) Lastly, I'd like to scope out the possibility of doing a paper that will compare the respective Gardens of Scripture - the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and the Garden of Gethsemane in the Synoptic material. I'm still in the thought stages of this (which for me, is about 80% of the battle). But in casually thinking about this, I have been struck by the contrasts between the two events in terms of Adam & Eve's behavior and thought process, versus Christ's in Gethsemane. Maybe there's nothing here worthy of exploring, but at least right now, some interesting and potentially significant implications might be drawn from such a comparison that would be practical for Christian living.

I'm also still hoping to submit a paper to ThirdMill on Derrida's vision of hospitality and how it contrasts with the Johannine material in particular. Others such as Boersma have devoted a good bit of scholarly attention to Derrida's hospitality, so I'm a little torn as to whether I would be making any real contribution over and above what better scholars have already done. I'm still debating it.

At any rate, this is what my writing plate currently looks like.