Stone Campbell Journal Conference

I’m currently in Cincinnati attending the Stone Campbell Journal Conference at Cincinnati Christian University. This morning the conference opened with a presentation by Loren Stuckenbruck on demons and exorcisms in the Gospels and their possible background in Jewish literature, in particular 1 Enoch and the Book of Giants. A particularly intriguing idea is the suggestion that the notion of demons inhabiting human bodies may reflect the mythology of demonic origins which regards demons as the spirits of the giants who lost their (bodily) lives in the flood, and so in envy of humanity which survived as bodily entities thanks to Noah, demons torment humans and take up residence in their bodies whenever they get an opportunity.

If anyone is interested in this topic, Loren discusses much of the material that made up the substance of his presentation in his chapter in the book that was the focus of the panel review that I participated in immediately after: the volume edited by Larry Hurtado and Chris Keith, Jesus among Friends and Enemies: A Historical and Literary Introduction to Jesus in the Gospels forthcoming from Baker. I’ll share my thoughts about the book in a separate post in the near future. The other reviewers were Michael Cook and Tom Thatcher (the latter filling in for Mark Matson), with Christ Keith as the respondent. I joked that the session should have been called Jesus among Friends and Enemies among Friends and Enemies. 🙂 But I think we all agreed that, whatever criticisms we might have been able to offer, this multi-author volume intended to serve as a textbook is engaging, provocative and pedagogically useful in numerous ways. I’m looking forward to tidying up my notes and saying more about it in a separate post. But as I told the attendees at the session, when I read the book I took notes which ended up filling 17 pages of a Word document, and the fact that I found that much that was interesting or worth discussing or commenting on itself says something about the volume.