NT Gateway Weblog

A good on-line exhibition with some high quality photographs, with thanks to Stephen Goranson for drawing it to my attention and also Gary Dykes on the TC-List:

Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book

Lots of material of interest; includes the following:

Pauline Fragment

It's from a Coptic version of the epistle to the Colossians, dating from the third century (text critic experts: what is this?).

You can also download all the photographs in a zip file -- scroll down to the bottom of the page.

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For a long time there has been a short section on the NT Gateway on the formation of the canon. Holger Szesnat commented that it was rather tucked away (on the Early Church and Patristics page) and that he had only run across it by accident. So what I've done is to release it up from there and give it its own page: Formation of the Canon. It's a short page so there is plenty of room for expansion. I've also taken Judaica and Early Church and Patristics out from under the "Ancient World" heading on the front page so that they are listed more prominently (NT Gateway: main page).

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N. S. Gill's Ancient / Classical History draws attention to a complete on-line book on that site

Robert F. Pennell, Ancient Rome from the Earliest Times Down to 476 A.D.

It dates from 1890 and I've enjoyed browsing through it, especially at the Specimen Examination Papers from late 19th C. Harvard.

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Harold Scanlin on the TC-List draws attention to a fine high res image of P³⁹ in the ATLA Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative. It seems to be impossible for me to provide a link to the page directly (I've tried), so you'll have to go to the main link and search. There are 29 images of Oxyrhynchus papyri in the collection altogether. There's no straightforward way that I can find to browse the collection, but a good way of making sure you are seeing everything is to go to this page: Limit by Collection, tick the box you are interested in and return to the main search page, leave all fields blank and press submit. That then brings up everything within that particular collection.

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Christianity Today rounds up some comments on concerns about gratuitous violence in The Passion of Christ:

Film Forum: Is The Passion More Violent than Kill Bill?

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Back to NT matters, Jim Darden has added a couple of improvements to:

Greek New Testament Grammatical Search

(See yesterday's blog entry on this). Neuter added and it is viewable in 800x600. Thanks, Jim, it's looking good.

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A bit removed from the NT, I know, but there was an interesting In Our Time yesterday on:

The Schism - the thousand year fault line between East and West in Christianity

Follow that link to view the web page and listen on-line.

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Those outside the UK, or those within it who don't listen to Today, might have missed the Archbishop of Canterbury's first interview since taking up the post, on just after 8 this morning:

Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

Lots more information and news on the BBC web site:

Church split over gay bishop election

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Jim Davila refers to this article from NBC 17 giving a little more on the name change:

Gibson Renames Movie About Christ

The article says that the title The Passion was already claimed by another film. It also says that internationally it may still be released under the original name.

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I referred the other day to the latest Tyndale Tech email. David Instone Brewer has now uploaded it to the web:

Tyndale Tech, October 2003: Lexicons for Biblical Languages

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Peter Head on TC-List draws attention to the following article:

Art expert sued over Gospel deal

Apparently it's about P³⁹. Peter also provides this link to the Sotheby's Catalogue:

Gospel of St John

It features a fine photograph of the fragment.

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This link just posted on b-greek:

Biblical Greek Words and New Testament Greek Grammar

The author, Jim Darden, says that it's "just for simple look-ups". I've tried a few searches on it with mixed success rates. It looks like it could be useful. A few suggestions: I had to go to 1024 x 768 to see it properly, which should be unnecessary with such a simple design. I'm not sure either why there's no neuter under gender. Tony Fisher's search is at the moment better but that could change.

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From BBC News, this feature puts two opposing views on the question of gay bishops "head to head", Dr Philip Giddings first and Revd. Gareth Williams second:

Head to head: gay church debate

One could blog all day on this issue, of course, but what I've tended to do is stick to features that deal with questions of Biblical interpretation.

Giddings: "What is wrong, from the Bible's standpoint, is homosexual practice. That's because the Bible clearly teaches that the only acceptable context for sexual intercourse is within marriage, and marriage is only between a man and a woman.

Therefore, sexual intercourse outside heterosexual marriage is sinful and must be repented of. Homosexual practice falls within that category."

Williams: "As regards the Bible, the problem I have is that many people who take the view that the Bible is against homosexuality are approaching a rich and complex text rather too simplistically.

Two thousand years on we know so much more about what makes us human.

Reading the Bible with a naivety that pretends to know nothing of what modern human psychology tells us about the givenness of our sexuality only perpetuates injustices towards lesbian and gay people."

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I've adjusted my links so that they are now The Passion of Christ rather than The Passion. I've also added a link to the Hollywood Jesus page on The Passion.

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The 8th International Conference on Rhetorical Criticism and Scriptures (South Africa, 2004) entitled THE RHETORICS OF BODY, POLITICS, AND SCRIPTURE has been announced by Tom Olbricht on Rhetoric-L. The announcement is too large to reproduce in the blog, so I've posted the Word document here:

The Rhetorics of Body, Politics and Scripture

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Just noticed that my Textual Criticism: Journal and E-List page was out of date so have refreshed all the links. When I adjusted the main E-Lists page, it looks like I forgot to change the relevant pages elsewhere.

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Wieland Willker on the TC-List draws attention to the following article:

Christopher W. Skinner, '“Whom He Also Named Apostles”: A Textual and Narrative-Critical Solution to Mark 3.14'

It's a well-written and thorough piece and good to see textual criticism working alongside narrative criticism.

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I've just added Dale Martin's faculty page at Yale University under Scholars: M.

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From Paleojudaica.com, a note about an article from Index-Online on Jesus in the Talmud; Jim includes a link to Google's cache of the article by Steven Bayme that is under discussion. If this doesn't make sense, just go to Paleojudaica and follow the links from there.

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Jim West notes updates on The Passion from the Passion-Movie web site. Apparently the aim is to get the film out in the USA on 25 February 2004 and it is now to be called The Passion of Christ. As usual with all these things, there is no indication of potential release dates outside the US.

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Richard Bauckham has made available the following paper ahead of the SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia coming up in November:

Richard Bauckham, "For Whom Were the Gospels Written?" (web)

I've also made it available at the NT Gateway in PDF:

Richard Bauckham, "For Whom Were the Gospels Written?" (PDF)

For details of the session of which this will be the lead paper, see:

Society of Biblical Literature Synoptics Section

Or follow the links from the NT Gateway: Gospels and Acts: Web Sites page. One addition to the electronic programme (though it does appear in the print programme) is that Theodore J. Weeden will be responding along with Dwight Peterson. It's a session I am looking forward to very much since the book on which it is focused, Richard Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians? Rethinking Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) is an important one and deserves more attention than it has received so far. I'll blog any updates as they come in; Margaret Mitchell's and Mark Matson's papers will also be available for uploading to the web soon.

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Jeffrey Gibson is reading a paper to the Mark group at the forthcoming SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. He has uploaded the paper to the web for people to consult and provide feedback. In order to access it, you first have to join a Yahoo! Group here:

J. B. Gibson Writings

Once you've joined, go to this PDF:

The Function of the Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14.64

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Some more details on the Brown / Moloney book are available on the Doubleday web site:

An Introduction to the Gospel of John

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From Bible and Interpretation, a link to an article in something called the Desert Sun announces posthumous publication of material from Raymond Brown on the Gospel of John:

Scholar's Conclusions about the Gospel of John

Brown was revising the commentary when he died in 1998, and material he completed has been issued as a new and important book, "An Introduction to the Gospel of John" (Doubleday), edited by the Rev. Francis J. Moloney.

The short article doesn't say a lot, though it does have time for some caricatures of what "liberals" say. It's an Associated Press piece which probably means something similar will crop up in several other papers, though I haven't looked. But it's at least interesting to hear about the new book.

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Stephen Carlson points me to Matthew Baldwin's current homepage (see previous blog entry on)

Homepage of Dr Matthew Charles Baldwin

which includes one other unpublished piece from last year's SBL (PDF):

Jewish and Christian Ritual in the Ps.-Clementine Recognitions

But the website overall looks a bit half-done.

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Since I wasn't around to blog over the weekend I didn't do my usual link to the latest Explorator from David Meadows. It comes out each Sunday; you can sign up to get it by email if you wish. It's always well worth looking at. This is the web version:

Explorator 6.24

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David Meadows blogs about a BBC programme on tonight entitled Colosseum: Rome's Arena of Death. Looks like good viewing to accompany my washing up. Meadows mentions an article from the Scotsman but for more detail, there's one of those nice illustrated BBC web sites here:

Colosseum: Rome's Arena of Death

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Over the weekend, Torrey Seland has updated his pioneering web site:

Resource Pages for Biblical Studies (October-November 2003 edition)

There's some useful looking new material there which I look forward to exploring.

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Many thanks to Steve Walton, Holger Szesnat, Stephen Carlson, Helen-Ann Hartley and Jim Davila for their feedback on the experimental new front page for the NT Gateway. It seems to be popular, so I've decided to implement it. One of the advantages appears to be that it helps users to get more quickly to where they want to be on the site, i.e. everything is one click away. If you haven't had the chance to give your feedback yet, it's not too late. Let me know what you think because I'll be doing more adjusting yet.

In my redesign, I've tried to keep to W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional but I've failed; this comes partly, I'm afraid, from working with FrontPage. I used to hand-code everything (as did Viola when she did some work on the site a couple of years ago) but have recently done most of the updating on FrontPage for speed's sake. For updates, it's OK, but for this kind of redesign it's not so good. But I'm gradually stripping out some of the rubbish I've introduced and will make sure it validates again asap.

Note that I'm keeping the old design (if I was into marketing, I'd call it the "classic design"!) for all the other pages except the Blog. I think it works well there, where one may want to continue to navigate around the site, but needs it compactly on the left. But there's a little work still to be done there, e.g. to introduce a Weblog button at the top.

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I was at a most enjoyable Laurel and Hardy day yesterday here in Birmingham at the MAC. I noticed on repeated films that the cinematographer was one George Stevens. Could it be the same George Stevens who over thirty years later directed The Greatest Story Ever Told? I looked it up on the IMDb and indeed it was. It seems that he did the cinematography on a run of Laurel and Hardy shorts from 1927 to 1930.

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Peter Head comments on my blog entry on Matthew Baldwin's thesis "I say: If you are going to do it a single pdf file is not the best idea! Not for viewing at home. Some sort of abstract/introduction and then chapters in pdf would be a whole lot better." I say: maybe, but when I've ordered a dissertation from UMI they come in one big PDF file just like this. You can order them printed out but that costs more. Also, if you have it in one file it is easier to search. And it's better than nothing. Peter also points out that it doesn't say on the web page whether or not it was a successful thesis; but it is headed by "Matthew Charles Baldwin, M. Div., Ph.D.", so I think it's implicit.

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