New Orleans Gumbo

I suppose I should have known it would happen someday. Perhaps the next thing will be a Ph.D. dissertation analyzing the “BAR phenomenon.” The scholarly community sometimes can’t quite understand us—so it tries to explain us. Absent a full-fledged doctoral dissertation, a scholarly paper was devoted to the phenomenon at the Annual Meeting of Bible scholars in New Orleans last November.^a Speaking before a capacity audience of academicians, Philip R. Davies of Sheffield University, England, read a lecture entitled “A Reader-Response to ‘Shanks’s Bible.’” In it, he analyzed BAR (and our sister magazine, Bible Review) from four viewpoints: the advertisers’, the readers’, the editor’s and the scholars’.