GOOD PAPERS AT THE BNTC: I don't have the energy to summarize (even briefly) every paper I heard during the conference, but these struck me as particularly interesting. I enjoyed other papers as well, so no offense to those I don't mention.

James Harding, (title changed to something like the following) "Noah, Enoch and Mediatorial Polemics in Luke 17:22-37."
Follows recent proposals by VanderKam and Orlov that Enoch sees the Son of Man as his heavenly double in 1 Enoch 71. Proposes that in the Gospel of Luke (at least), Jesus regarded the Son of Man as his own heavenly double, as with Enoch in the Similitudes.

Jonathan Campbell, "Early Jewish Scriptures: Eight Theses."
I reproduce his eight theses from the handout with his permission, with one or two clarifications in square brackets:

• (1) late Second Temple scripture was essentially bipartite [Mosaic and prophetic]
  
• (2) presumed antiquity was the main desideratum for all scripture
  
• (3) previously unknown scriptures were periodically '(re-)discovered'
  
• (4) neither the Torah nor the Prophets constituted canons
  
• (5) disputes sometimes arose about scriptural authority
  
• (6) pseudepigraphy does not relate primarily to scripture's reception
  or pseudepigraphy pertains chiefly to the production of scripture
  
• (7) the compositional-redactional production of scripture continued up to 100 CE [and beyond]
  
• (8) geography and finance impacted on both scripture's production and reception

Peter Williams, "Farewell to the Prologue of John" (abstract here).
The prologue of the Gospel of John is uncontroversially taken today to consist of John 1:1-18. But Pete showed in a dazzling, graphics-rich presentation that the ancient manuscripts of and commentators on John did not divide the text up this way. Their paragraph markers and comment show that generally saw a strong break after verse 5, and weaker breaks in other spots, but no strong break after v. 18. So 1:1-18 was not widely accepted as a unit until the early modern perod.

Grant Macaskill,"Calendar and Polemics in 2 (Slavonic) Enoch."
The calendrical system described in 2 Enoch has suffered enormous corruption in the surviving medieval manuscripts, but it refers to an annual solar cycle of movement through "gates" over a period of 364 days. The text of the parallel lunar cycle of "gates" is extremely corrupt in the manuscripts but could possibly be reconstructed approximately along the lines of the Qumran/Jubilees year of twelve 30-day months with four intercalary days, one in each of the four seasons. But this is by no means certain.

UPDATE (5 September): Conference roundup info here.