First guests at the new location of the Institute (Hintere Grabenstr. 20)

By Beth Langstaff

Greetings from Tübingen!

Last week,we were very happy to welcome Thomas and May May Blanton as our first guests in the Institute's new rooms. Tom is a Research Fellow of the Max-Weber Kolleg in Erfurt. He received his doctorate in Biblical Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His most recent book is A Spiritual Economy: Gift Exchange in the Letters of Paul of Tarsus (2017). He is in the process of writing a book titled The Circumcision of Abraham: Modeling Ritual from Genesis to the Letters of Paul, and he read a section from this project for the English-German Colloquium.

May May writes:

We were the first visitors to stay at the guest room in the Institute's new location. We stayed there for two nights. Beth and Birgit were excellent hosts, and we were pleased in all respects. Since I work remotely as metadata analyst for Atla (formerly American Theological Library Association), wi-fi access is necessary; there the access was excellent, and I was able to finish all of my work each day. I felt very much at home working in the Institute's new facility.

Tom writes:

My first visit to Tübingen was prompted by an opportunity to give a lecture at the English-German Colloquium in New Testament on October 29, 2019, jointly hosted by the Institute for the Study of Christian Origins and the Institut für antikes Judentum und hellenistische Religionsgeschichte at the University of Tübingen. Considering all of Tübingen's historic associations with excellence in biblical studies, of course I was very pleased to be able to participate in the colloquium. The paper that I presented showed how the Jewish philosopher-exegete Philo of Alexandria (Egypt) reinterpreted the texts of Genesis 17 in the first century CE. Philo largely avoided the biblical view of circumcision as a "sign of the covenant" between God and humans; instead, he interpreted covenant as a gift given with no stipulations. He did nevertheless advocate the practice of circumcision among male Jews, supplying medical, ethical, and philosophical rationales not present in the biblical text. The discussion that followed the paper was lively and thought provoking. I am grateful to Beth Langstaff, the Institute's Director, for the invitation to visit, and to Birgit Hallman, the office coordinator, for advice in planning the logistics of our visit. Based on my experience, the Institute is doing a great job promoting research on Christian origins at a high level of international scholarship.

Move of the Institute from Neckargasse 7 to Hintere Grabenstr. 20

(27. Sept. 2019)