Looking Back on 2020

by Beth Langstaff

It is hard to believe that it is a full year since I first came face to face with the realities of the coronavirus pandemic – a conversation in late January 2020, after a Theological English class, with a South Korean student who was planning to fly back to Seoul within a matter of days. In Germany, COVID-19 was barely on the radar at that time; in Asia, by contrast, it was already a full-blown crisis, and the student was worried about her family and about the risks of travelling during a pandemic.

The past year has been challenging – shifting to "home office," as it is called here in Germany; navigating online meetings and new technology (on more than one occasion, I had to get my daughter's help to unmute my microphone); postponing and cancelling planned events and visits.

But there have also been bright sides . . .

• Birgit Hallmann and I have continued our weekly staff meetings online via Zoom with occasional meetings outside (in warmer weather).

• Birgit and I have been invited to attend the weekly TCM staff prayer meeting; it has meant a great deal to share the challenges and concerns, the joys and griefs of the past months with this online community.

• Online teaching has meant that the NT Colloquium can include speakers and attendees from all over the world, from as far away as India and the United States, and to meet online with old friends of the Colloquium.

• We've had time in the calendar to work on projects such as the volume of papers from the Symposium on the Lord's Prayer.

There have also been farewells during 2020. We were very sad to hear the news of Ottie Mearl Stuckenbruck's passing in September. I last saw Ottie Mearl at the EES Board meeting in 2016; we were able to sit and talk together, looking through photos of the Institute’s work in Tübingen through the decades. I am so thankful for her encouragement and support, not least for the cards she sent me while I was on medical leave. A photo of Ottie Mearl and Earl hangs just inside the entrance to the Institute, and that portrait has prompted more than one student or visitor to ask about them. It is good to tell their story!

Happy New Year 2021

by Beth Langstaff

News from Tübingen

 Greetings from the snowy Black Forest, where I live. It has been a quiet Christmas; Germany is still on partial lockdown. Our family celebrated this year's Christmas Eve – Heiligabend – by gathering in our living room to watch an online church service. Here in our local church, the usual children's programme had to be cancelled, so we packed and delivered gift bags to the Sunday-school families instead.

The lockdown has meant that classes for the winter semester are all taking place online. The English-German Colloquium in New Testament has been meeting every two weeks via Zoom – and one advantage of a Zoom meeting is that we can welcome participants from all over the world, including from India, the United States, Italy, Switzerland, as well as Germany. It has been great to see old friends of the Colloquium again. Our last meeting of the year was a lecture by Dr. Claudia Bergmann from Erfurt on the intriguing topic: "A Dry World? The Lack of Beverages in the Ancient Jewish Texts about the Meal in the World to Come."

Loren and Lois Stuckenbruck visiting the Institute in March

NEWS FROM TÜBINGEN

By Beth Langstaff

We were very pleased to welcome Loren and Lois Stuckenbruck back to the Institute in the first week of March (our last visitors for quite a while, I suspect).    

Loren is Professor for New Testament at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and a member of the EES Board. 

Loren and Lois also came bearing gifts—the two volumes of the recently published T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism (https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/tt-clark-encyclopedia-of-second-temple-judaism-volumes-i-and-ii-9780567661449/) which Loren edited along with Daniel Gurtner. This donation is a very valuable addition to the Stuckenbruck library.

While they were here, Lois and Loren also filmed a video of the new Institute facilities and of the library in particular, in which they very generously ask for donations to the Institute library to mark their respective birthdays. Loren is celebrating a “round birthday (einen runden Geburtstag)”, as one says in German, next week—his 60th.

password (Kennwort): Stuckenbruck

Happy birthday and many thanks to both Loren and Lois.

Germany has been hit hard by the coronavirus. Birgit Hallmann and I are both working from home. The summer semester is supposed to start on 20 April; as any classes as possible will be offered online via Zoom.

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

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)

Theology in an Apron

by Birgit Hallmann

Here in Tübingen we are in the middle of an intense summer semester.
It is always a special blessing for me when former students at the Institute drop by to talk about their work in their home countries. Last Friday, Eva from Hungary came by to bring us her two books, which she had written with our help.
She has studied the Christian spirit of women in their everyday lives (“Theology in Apron”) and the effect of the Christian faith on the diaconal movement in Hungary. Both books have led to Eva being appointed to the Writers Society in Hungary two years ago.
So I can see that one small stone dropped into the water here in Tübingen can produce wonderfully wide circles.