I LEAVE FOR BIRMINGHAM first thing tomorrow morning for the annual British New Testament Conference. Follow the link to see the program. Most of the papers are represented at least by abstracts. (I'll be responding to a paper in the Second Temple Judaism Seminar, but since the full paper isn't online, I'm not going to post my response either. Sorry.) Some of the papers are given in full in PDF format. Some of these are marked as such, while for others you need to click on the paper title to access the full paper. Poke around in all the sections; there are plenty of papers scattered throughout which are of considerable relevance for ancient Judaism. If you want to read any of the complete papers, be sure and download them right away. They're generally taken down not long after the conference.

The conference lasts for three days and I expect to be home late on Saturday night, with blogging resuming on Sunday. I don't plan to do any blogging while I'm away. If you want something to look at in the meantime, go to Mahlon Smith's website "Into His Own: Perspectives on the World of Jesus", which contains a wealth of information on ancient Judaism, including excerpts from numerous primary texts, introductory material on Josephus, on the Dead Sea Scrolls (including a timeline of the story of their discovery and publication), and on rabbinic literature, and much more. It could be a very useful resource for your undergraduate and even postgraduate students. Also, of course, keep an eye on the blogs in my weblog links section to the right.

And if we're lucky, maybe Mark Goodacre, whose institution is holding the conference, will blog it some.

Look for me again on Sunday. Have a good week.