This response was held during the 2020 Annual Meetings of the SBL on Zoom. (The program of the session could be found here.)

Let me first say that you three made my job easy. Each paper offered new and fascinating insights. You offered the only kind of feast we can share virtually and it’s a pleasure to dine with you. Further you share some of the tables set in Luke and John, so your papers speak to each other, giving us much to reflect upon as we move from one stage of our meal to the next.

Nils, you bring a new approach to a question that has long interested this group, were there women at Meals? Which meals? How did that work? You are wonderfully clear in the way you ask the question: “What happens if a female takes part” in a symposium? Applying your exploration to the gender conflicts in Luke 7:36-52, as a woman shows up and washes the feet of Jesus. You considered narrative schemes in light of Propp and Eco and offered fruitful intertexts of women entering (or not entering) banquets, in the banquets of Xenophron by Demonsthenes (4^th c BCE), Philodamos by Cicero (1^st c BCE) and Lysimachos by Diogenes Laertios (3^rd c CE), as well as naming the rarity of the phenomenon. No one wishes for longer papers in virtual formats, but I did wish there was more time to spend on your findings. Your wonderfully succinct list of functions “in at least two” of the sources begs to be really explored, and I trust you will do that in another format.

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