May 09 2008
Of the making of many lists there is no end
One or two people have been blogging on which scholars have most influenced them. Nijay Gupta started it, Rick Brannan followed suit, and Nick Norelli (who never knowingly lets a bloggy bandwagon pass him by) joined in. I must confess to finding it extraordinarily difficult to do the same exercise. I think, however, that if I were to compose such a list, Tom Wright and Ed Sanders would be vying for top place for the role they’ve played in my own development (Sanders purely through his writing). Tom is oddly missing from Nijay’s list, yet was Dunn’s doctoral student at the time they were both discovering Sanders, and was a significant mentor to John Barclay. It is odd, therefore, to see him left out of the “Durham posse”. Also in my list would be Rowan Williams and Jürgen Moltmann. In terms of sheer ability to provoke different thinking about familiar texts, I would probably want to include Dale Martin.
The problem with this kind of list is that, for example, I couldn’t name a single Tom Wright book that would be among my top ten most influential books, despite listing him as one of the most influential scholars. Equally, I would have to list, as a matter of developmental fact, The First Urban Christians as one of my most influential books, even though Meeks wouldn’t appear in my top ten list of scholars. I’ll leave this is an askance comment on the listing game, rather than trying to actually produce my own lists.