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1. I was very excited to start teaching Greek. I felt a little guilty to be teaching, because I felt like I still had a lot to learn. I sometimes say things like, "Do I know Greek? Well, I haven't even taught it yet."
There were two of us. The senior Teaching Fellow was Bill Patrick. He was quite intelligent, far more intelligent than I am. He was the only Teaching Fellow I know who taught for four years. Cheated me out of ever being the senior Teaching Fellow. :-)
Bill always seemed to know what the latest scholarship was. I envy people like that. How do they always seem to know the latest book or article? Certainly Google and social media have helped tremendously. Now we have bloggers like Nijay Gupta or Mike Bird who let us know the latest and greatest.
Back then, Bill always knew. That was also a great thing about the annual Society of Biblical Literature convention. Milling about the book hall quickly let you know what the latest "it" books were. My book purchase each conference was proportional to the amount of money in my account.
Bill went on to teach for a while at the Asbury Orlando Campus, which unfortunately was sold recently. Bill never wanted to do a PhD even though he could have done it in his sleep. I even offered to take dictation. At some point, he came to see academia as a game. He enjoyed pouring into students lives. He didn't want to play the game.
There is of course a certain reality to power. I always enjoyed a line in Bobby Clinton's The Making of a Leader. Somewhere in there he mentions an aha moment he had when he realized that the one with the most power typically wins against you whether you're right or wrong. Few of us can get through life without playing the games thrust upon us.
Duh!
2. Bill was probably my closest friend during those years. We had a lot of fun going to Ramses in Lexington. Joseph-Beth Booksellers was a never-ending favorite. I don't know if he introduced me to Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, but they certainly featured heavily in all conversation. He still jokes about one time I remarked in inferiority after reading one of them, "He's a master."
I would say Bill was a better teacher than I was. I was a more entertaining teacher. Probably, students enjoyed my Greek classes more than his--especially the average students. But I venture to say that more of his students actually passed the compentency exam than mine did.
I was full of silly gimmics. On "subjunctive day," I would put a note on the board that said we might be in a different room down the hall. I used the songs that Rory Skelly had developed before us. I use them to this day and have developed a few of my own to memorize paradigms. I've heard that some of my students (and their children) have remembered those songs years later, long after they remember what they meant.
The Teaching Fellow I replaced left a note on his desk: "Just remember. People are stupid." I didn't think that was very nice at the time. But you have to remember how smart some of these teachers were. And the average intelligence of most people out there is, well, average. I always felt like I wasn't a bad teacher because I was somewhere between the brilliant and the academic struggler. I thought maybe a biography of me might be titled, "Not Quite a Genius."
I was so excited to teach. The night before I started I had these ideas like drawing a huge paradigm box on the lawn and having students hold signs with the endings on them. Never did that one.
3. Bob Lyon oversaw the Teaching Fellow program. I had never been invited into his Lo Society. I suspect I was too conservative at the time. Then when it started becoming popular, he ended it. That wasn't what it was supposed to be.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed getting to know him some. That was around the time that Fazolis came into the world. He always thought he was funny when he would order a "Freddie" (fettucine alfredo). Bill and I used to beat him to say, "Humor isn't what it used to be." He didn't find our mocking very amusing.
That was also about the time that Walmart started being open 24/7. That was really weird back then.
I also enjoyed the occasional Chinese with Dr. Bauer. I sometimes joked that I wouldn't have been surprised if he had ordered by saying, "There are three reasons why I would like Cashew Chicken. First..."
Joe Dongell came the year after I graduated, so I never had him. Unintentionally, I had somewhat been following his path. He went to Central; I went to Central. He went to Asbury; I went to Asbury. He became a Teaching Fellow; I became a Teaching Fellow. He did a master's degree at the University of Kentucky... well, I decided to start that degree in the spring of 1991, my second semester as a Teaching Fellow.
I wouldn't follow him to Union. Who knows, though? If Paul Achtemeier hadn't retired, maybe I would have.
4. One of the books that Bill Patrick used in his Intermediate Greek class was G. B. Caird's The Language and Imagery of the Bible. I didn't use it when I came to teach that class, but I did read it. I found it a breath of fresh air.
It's hard to describe the thrill of reading something that just makes so much sense. It's like finding words to describe reality. Those experiences would slow down over time, but they often happened when I was in my 20s and 30s. I hope to share some of those moments.
The book is about the meaning of words. The later parts of the book were most striking to me. For example, he notes that language like the sun darkening and the moon turning to blook probably wasn't meant to be taken literally. N. T. Wright has hammered this home in his writings as well. Steve Lennox once told me that he found some of those last chapters a little difficult to swallow, although perhaps not that point.
I suppose my main take away from those last chapters is that end of history and the world language didn't always mean a literal end of the world. Ezekiel 37 wasn't about a literal resurrection of the dead originally. It was about the revival of Israel collectively as a people. Similarly, I'm not sure that Isaiah 66 was originally about a literal new heaven and earth.
G. B. Caird died in 1984, way before his time. But most of his work that I read made a lot of sense to me (not that I agreed with everything). His method of starting with the clear and moving to the unclear really resonated with me.
Caird had been working on the ICC (International Critical Commentary) on Hebrews when he died. Congratulations to David Moffitt for taking up the torch, although I would have liked to do it. :-) To be frank, I think my approach to Hebrews is more in keeping with the historical flavor of the series than the theological interpreters who reign at present.
Both Tom Wright and Lincoln Hurst studied under Caird at Oxford. Hurst was an early influencer on me with regard to Hebrews as well, particularly his work on Hebrews 1 and his analysis of "copy and shadow" in chapters 8-10.
I was very interested in Wright's work in those early days as well. I finally plowed through The New Testament and the People of God while I was in Sierra Leone in the winter of 1997. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I waited anxiously for the second volume but probably had moved beyond him by the time it finally came out.
These were high days for me. I was so happy. And despite what Jim McNeely might say, I had become funny.
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