NT Gateway Weblog

Thanks to Holger Szesnat for pointing out to me that the Hendrickson's web site features dozens of sample chapters from their books. Some of these will be well worth my while looking through and linking to on the NT Gateway. In the meantime, why not browse through yourself and let me know of any you think would make particularly worthwhile links (at blog@NTGateway.com)?

Hendrickson Publishers

Here are a few of interest. The main link is to the PDF sample chapter; the second link is to the Hendricksons page on the book:

A. Andrew Das, "Undeserved Grace versus Strict and Deserving Obedience in Early Judaism", Chapter 1 in Paul, the Law and the Covenant (Peabody, MA: Hendricksons, 2001)

Michael D. Goulder, "Gods Ascending", Chapter 1 in Paul and the Competing Mission in Corinth (Peabody, MA: Hendricksons, 2000)

Halvor Moxnes, "Honor and Shame", Chapter 1 in Richard L. Rohrbaugh (ed.), The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation (Peabody, MA: Hendricksons, 1996)

Stanley Porter, "Methods and Assumptions in this Study of Paul in Acts", Chapter 1 in Paul in Acts (Peabody, MA: Hendricksons, 2001)

More later.

---

One of the new articles on the SBL Forum (see previous blog entry) is an article by Mary Ann Tolbert in which she laments the current state of Graduate Biblical Studies:

Graduate Biblical Studies: Ethos and Discipline

Indeed, I think that we are on the verge of, if not in the middle of, a crisis in doctoral education in biblical studies, and it is a crisis of creativity. For a number of reasons many doctoral programs encourage preservation over creativity and safety over risk-taking. There are many factors leading to this situation, I think, including the present "conservative turn" of many religious traditions, which then tend to funnel more financial support toward conservative or ideologically supportive projects, producing what L. William Countryman has called "domesticated scholarship" and "stables of domesticated scholars." Another factor, which I would like to explore here at greater length, is certainly the internal multiplicity, perhaps even fragmentation, of the discipline itself.

Another article sounding a rather negative note and also in the current SBL Forum is by Thomas E. Philips:

Contingent Faculty and the Future of Biblical Studies

With provocative articles like these appearing, I think the lack of a forum in which SBL members can react to and engage with the views expressed is keenly felt. Some years ago, SBL experimented with an e-list called Graphai which sadly never really took off, perhaps largely from lack of focus. I'd have thought that now would be a good time to begin the experiment again. The fine-looking new web site, which is after all labelled a "forum" would be the ideal place to add in a forum in its technical sense, e.g. using the free Snitz software. If there are concerns about posting of inappropriate material, a small group of coordinators could straightforwardly moderate. At the moment, I'm not sure what the forum would be for discussing interesting articles like the one above.

---

The SBL Forum has been updated today with fresh material, including a "See you in Atlanta!" tag, a short report on the International Meeting in Cambridge in July, and some interesting articles:

SBL Forum

---

Peter Kirby, creator of fine websites including Early Christian Writings and Gospel of Thomas Commentary now has another major web site:

Early Jewish Writings

Though I've not had time to explore it all yet myself, it certainly looks like it could be as useful as his Early Christian Writings web site. Thanks to Hypotyposeis for the link.

---

Stephen Carlson comments with insight on the vexed question of the naming of Synoptic theories, following on from my own comments on Kirk's review of the Goulder volume. Stephen makes his own proposals for how to attain some degree of clarity; one thing I find useful is his suggestion for how to use "theory" and "hypothesis". Stephen also notes that one of the problems with "eponymous names", like the Farrer theory, is that the wrong person can be credited. Farrer was scooped by James Hardy Ropes in the 1930s. I suppose the only thing I'd add is that Ropes's espousal of Markan Priority without Q (another name for it!) was somewhat brief and was only suggestive (see this excerpt from The Synoptic Gospels). He gives the impression of someone toying with the idea; Farrer was the first to work the theory out with rigour.

With many thanks to Michael Pahl for what follows, these issues came home to me today in a quotation from a recent book review by Craig Blomberg in JETS, Robert Thomas (ed.), Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels. The three views are "Markan priority" (Two-Source and Four-Source Theory), Griesbach and literary independence. Blomberg apparently criticizes the book for the choice of these three "dominant" views and adds, "Had the book truly presented the three most common perspectives, we would have read about Markan priority, the Augustinian hypothesis (and its recent Goulder-Goodacre modification), and Griesbach." I am almost speechless. While it's nice to be mentioned and even to be thought of as an advocate of a "common" view, it is troubling that Blomberg apparently does not know what theory Goulder or I propose. That it is not only called a modification of the "Augustinian hypothesis" but that it is also listed as something different from "Markan priority" shows what a lot of work still needs to be done by Q sceptics like me to get our views known. In his recent article review of my Case Against Q in NTS, John Kloppenborg suggests that we use the term "Markan Priority without Q" or "MwQ" for short. I have used this myself in the past and it's tempting to use it more often in the light of comments like Blomberg's.

---

Bobby Louser has sent over this -- it's a call for papers for the New Testament Society of South Africa's Conference 2004:

Final Call for Papers: NTSSA 2004

This page looks very yellow, so I'm going to reproduce it here to save your eyes:

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS: NTSSA 2004

GO TO NEW TESTAMENT SOCIETY HOME PAGE

Dear Colleagues! Our next NTSSA conference will be held from the 13th-16th April 2004 at UNISA (Pretoria). The main theme of the Conference is: “Textual Features of Revelation”. Please reply to this as follows:

Main Group: Please supply the names, themes and abstracts of your four main speakers (one of which is your keynote speaker). Send it directly to Paul Decock (decock@eject.co.za), and cc it to me: jlpw@lw.rau.ac.za.

For subgroups, we have four time slots of 70 minutes each available in our parallel sessions. One is normally used for a business meeting. We need your speakers, themes and abstracts to finalise the program. Send it directly to Paul Decock (decock@eject.co.za), and cc it to me: jlpw@lw.rau.ac.za.

For individual speakers who would like to deliver a paper not connected with one of the subgroups, we have four time slots of 40 minutes each. Please submit your proposal together with an abstract to Paul Decock (decock@eject.co.za), and cc it to me: jlpw@lw.rau.ac.za.

The cutoff date is 15th November 2003.

Regards,

Hansie Wolmarans

---

Even if you're fatigued with the James Ossuary business, there are a couple of things well worth reading here. First, Bible and Interpretation have published the following useful article:

Jeffrey R. Chadwick, "Indications that the 'Brother of Jesus' Inscription is a Forgery"

This is apparently an article that Chadwick initially offered to Biblical Archaeology Review but which was rejected. The "Final Observation" at the end of the article is particularly interesting, drawing attention to Oded Golan's knowledge of ossuary 570 in Rahmani's Catalogue, which has a crucial similarity to the James ossuary (the reference to and the spelling of achui, "the brother of").

Then have a look at a fascinating entry in Stephen Carlson's Hypotyposeis blog:

More on the James Ossuary

featuring some discussion of Daniel Eylon's views from a recent talk.

---

The University Church in Oxford (just across the way from my old college, Exeter -- ah -- happy memories) has its own web site including texts of sermons and articles. Here's one that interested me:

Richard Bauckham, "Macbride Sermon on the Application of Messianic Prophecy"

It was given on 23 January this year. A list of other university sermons from this year is found here:

University Sermons

---

Quite by chance, while looking for something else, I ran across a useful resource:

Biblical Studies Bulletin

It's a kind of quarterly "newsletter" on issues connected with academic Biblical Studies and is edited by Michael Thompson of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Each issue has some news, some book notices and reviews, some humour, some computer resources and so on. All 29 issues are available on-line, from 1996 to the present. The most recent is September 2003.

---

Thanks to Jim West for drawing attention to an interesting and well-written article about The Passion of Christ, situating it in Gibson's career and noticing the recurring crucifixion, violence, death, resurrection and martyrdom motifs that occur throughout his films. It's in a journal called The Village Voice:

Jessica Winter, "Mel Gibson's Jesus Christ Pose"

I would have thought that some of this is straightforwardly explained by the suffering / death / resurrection schema that is common to many films, E.T. being a classic example, and some is explained by Gibson's obsession with showing graphic violence, but in spite of that, I think Winter is on to something here.

---

I've been doing some writing today for a publisher who asked for all Biblical quotations to be from the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version). Since it's easier to copy and paste than to re-type, I had to refresh my memory on the best internet resources for searching the NRSV. Crosswalk.com (formerly Goshen) provide a searchable NRSV as part of their Bible Study Tools and for a while I've had a form for searching this on the All-in-One Bible Versions and Translations page. One thing I'd always found a bit frustrating about this was that one could search for a word but not for a passage. Or so I thought. It seems that you can enter any given passage into the same search box and you'll get your results. So it's an even more useful resource than I'd realised. Perhaps it was just me, but my guess is that it is not. So I've made a mini-adjustment to the All-in-One so that it now says "Enter passage or search term" on the Bible Study Tools entry and "Enter passage or English word" on the Interlinear. I suppose it shows that web authors should keep using their own products to find out what works, what doesn't and how best to package it all.

---

This just on tc-list:

The Faculty of Theology of Leiden University is pleased to announce the

Distance Learning Course

TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND TEXTUAL HISTORY
OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

This course is aimed at MA and PhD students in Old Testament and related
subjects. For general information, a brochure and an application form see

http://www.leiden.edu/index.php3?m=7&c=620

For further information please contact Dr. W.Th. van Peursen at
w.t.van.peursen@let.leidenuniv.nl

Prof. Dr. A. van der Kooij
Head of the Department of Old Testament of the Faculty of Theology

Dr. K.D. Jenner
Director of the Peshitta Institute

Dr. W.Th. van Peursen
Coordinator of the Distance Learning Programme of the Faculty of Theology

---

One of the new RBL reviews (see below) is Alan Kirk's of The Gospels According to Michael Goulder. He comments at the end of his review:

The essays in this volume mark significant points of advance in contemporary debates. Taken in aggregate they are weighted against Goulder's various positions, and for the sake of critical balance one could have wished for a contribution by a scholar or two more sympathetic to aspects of Goulder's work.

Agreed; the volume could do with a little more balance. I think my invitation must have been lost in the post! Kirk makes some good points throughout in the review. Goulder is not at his strongest on the lectionary theory, though I argued in Goulder and the Gospels that it deserves a more sympathetic hearing than it usually receives. For example, it is not simply about the existence of correspondences but about where they occur. Kirk draws attention to Matt. 9.1-17 falling on 9th Ab in Goulder's scheme and finds the connection "tenuous". But how many references to fasting are there in Matthew? I can think of only one other, in Matthew 6, and Goulder's point would be that it is striking that one of the only two references occurs here. Kirk also comments that the point of a lectionary is for "commemoration" and suggests that Goulder is deficient here; perhaps so, but I think Goulder is thinking more broadly in terms of "fulfilment", rather like modern day lectionaries.

Kirk summarises Kloppenborg's sophisticated critique of Goulder effectively. I wonder whether either Kirk or Kloppenborg quite deal with the force of Goulder's point about Occam's Razor; the point for Goulder is dispensing with an hypothetical document, i.e. being able to explain the data plausibly without invoking an additional hypothetical document. If I've read Goulder right, it's not simply about auxiliary hypotheses.

Kirk also summarises Derrenbacker's critique of Goulder effectively; as I've said before, I find Goulder's Luke's scrolling backwards through Matthew one of the most implausible elements in his Luke.

I would add that one of the disappointing things about the volume overall is that it gives critics of Goulder a bit too easy a ride -- one might easily get the impression that Goulder's work on the Gospels is all pretty implausible if two of the pieces specially highlighted are the lectionary theory and the backwards-scrolling. This relates to another of my often-expressed concerns. I have objected to the use of the term "Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis" (e.g. in Case Against Q, Chapter 1) because it too easily ties Q scepticism to Goulder's particular take on it, thereby making it much easier for critics to reject opposition to Q. Kirk, for example, says "John Kloppenborg's essay probes for weak points in the Farrer-Goulder hypothesis (FGH)", but I don't think it does. It probes for weak points in Goulder's particular thesis, or Goulder's particular take on the Farrer Theory, Goulder's dismissal of the value of the Gospel of Thomas providing a good example. Overall one of my problems with the Kloppenborg essay discussed here by Kirk is that it does not distinguish clearly enough between the eight or so points that make up Goulder's "new paradigm" generally and the Farrer Theory specifically. The fact that some hold to the latter without by any means endorsing all the points that make up Goulder's "new paradigm" should give one pause.

---

New NT related reviews on the Review of Biblical Literature:

Anderson, Janice Capel, Phillip Sellew and Claudia Setzer, eds.
Pauline Conversations in Context: Essays in Honor of Calvin J. Roetzel
Reviewed by Matthew W Mitchell

Baird, William
History of New Testament Research: Volume 2: From Jonathan Edwards to
Rudolph Bultmann
Reviewed by Alicia Batten

Rollston, Christopher A., ed.
The Gospels according to Michael Goulder: A North American Response
Reviewed by Alan Kirk

---

I've often talked about the Gospels as pieces of "propaganda" about Jesus, especially when introducing them in teaching or in media contexts. I find it helps to explain the concept of books about "good news". I always add a rider that this only works if we can get the negative associations of the word "propaganda" out of our minds. I've been doing some writing today and wanted again to use this term or perhaps something similar; I began to wonder what alternatives there might be. I clicked on the MS Word Thesaurus to find "misinformation, party line, half-truths, cant" listed as synonyms, so perhaps in future I need really to stress that rider about getting the negative associations out of our heads.

---

A brief interlude of general internet interest. I'd never heard the term "Googlistas" until Saturday's Guardian which had an interesting article on the attempts by Microsoft to buy up or replace Google:

Googlistas will never be Mooglesofters

I hope that Google can stay independent and maintain the quality of its service. Who now uses anything else? I suppose that if Microsoft does develop a rival, it needn't mean the end of Google just as Internet Explorer has not meant the end of Netscape. I still use Netscape a good deal -- and Netscape 7 is a great improvement on previous versions; e.g. for some reason my Netscape seems to find it much easier to read sites using unicode fonts than does my Internet Explorer. Looking at browser share among users of the NT Gateway, just over 6% of users access it using Netscape and just over 93% using Internet Explorer. Although overwhelmingly dominant, it hasn't completely usurped Netscape yet.

---

Thanks to Rod Decker for reminding me to update some details on my Fonts page. His very useful PDF paper on Unicode has been reworked and retitled:

What a Biblical Scholar / Student Should Know About Unicode

While on that page I also deleted a line about the Tyndale Fonts Kit; there was a problem with the final sigma in that kit, which was the vau/digamma rather than final sigma proper, but it was fixed after David and I had some interesting email exchanges on the topic several months ago. It's a good one-stop solution for your font needs, though in the long run we are all going to be using unicode so the sooner one gets used to it, the better.

---

Oxford University Press have announced an autumn sale, everything half price or less. Includes one of my colleague Sugi's books (Prof. Sugirtharajah). Here's the link to Bibles and Religious Studies titles in the sale:

Bibles and Religious Studies

---

Tonight's Quote . . . . Unquote on Radio 4 began with a nice quotation I'd not heard before:

"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark cellar at midnight looking for a black cat that isn't there. He is distinguished from a theologian, in that the theologian finds the cat. He is also distinguished from a lawyer, who smuggles in a cat in his overcoat pocket, and emerges to produce it in triumph."

William L. Prosser, "My Philosophy of Law," Cornell Law Quarterly, 1942

I've picked up that version of it from Lawyer Jokes Etc. after having gone searching for it; on Quote . . . . Unquote I think it was given out as anon., but from 1942.

---

Also on Paleojudaica today is a link to the Baraita blog by Naomi Chana:

On Divine Histories

It's an informative addition to the discussion about The Passion of Christ because it can speak with authority on The Mystical City of God, or the Divine History of the Virgin Mother of God by María de Agreda (1602-1665), and The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), allegedly used by Gibson to fill-out the screenplay for the film. Hollywood Jesus still lists the second of the two as a source for the film, but it seems that overall the claims that the film is based on this have diminished.

---

The programme to air in the US tonight on the sensationalist idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene etc. has generated a fair bit of media coverage. Jim Davila blogs on this today. He recommends reading Richard Bauckham's Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church and I'd second that -- it's one of my favourite recent books on the New Testament. Bauckham has an excellent summary article here that's worth reading (and listed on my Historical Jesus: Books, Articles and Reviews page):

Richard Bauckham, “All in the Family: Identifying Jesus' Relatives”, Bible Review April 2000

---

This article on NewsMax provides another perspective on The Passion of Christ -- it's an interview with Maia Morgenstern, the Romanian actress who plays Mary and who is apparently the daughter of a holocaust survivor:

Jewish Actress Proud to Be Mel Gibson’s Virgin Mary

The same story appears here, by Naomi Pfefferman, in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles:

Actress Defends Gibson’s Jesus Film

---

AKMA points out to me that I'd written arms for an ex-leper rather than "alms for an ex-leper" last night. Perhaps it was a hangover from an exercise my older daughter (aged 9) brought home from school the other day to list as many homophones as she could. There's a certain delight in my error -- mishearing elements from Life of Brian is of course the premise for the opening (post-credit) scene of the film, Blessed are the Greek, blessed are the cheesemakers etc.

There's a further odd little story I have related to this. A few years ago, when I was first putting together pages on Jesus Films, I went looking for an on-line script for Life of Brian. I found one headed "The world's most accurate Life of Brian script" and in it, Scene 2 begins "How blest are those who know that He's a god". This is nonsense -- the person taking down the script has misheard it; Jesus actually says "How blessed are those who know their need of God" -- it's the New English Bible version of the Beatitudes that's used in the rest of Jesus' speech. So I wrote to the person who was hosting the site and explained to him the correct wording. He wrote a kind email back saying that my interpretation was one of the more plausible interpretations he had heard of these opening words, but that he could assure me that he had listened to the film at full volume on his hi-fi and that his "interpretation" was the more accurate. I found this delightful in the light of the whole "Blessed are the cheesemakers" thrust of that scene and I shared the story with the Xtalk list. Steve Davies, who used to be the most regular and always the most stimulating poster on Xtalk, wrote a fine email that I wish I'd saved. He explained how the "pseudo-Python" reading, "How blest are those who know that he's a god", should not be dismissed too lightly since it fitted rather well with Thomas's view of Jesus.

---

With a TV programme to air in the U.S. on Monday evening on the topic, the Da Vinci Code is discussed in this balanced article by Gary Stern in The Journal News:

Experts Dismiss Theories in Popular Book

---

Latest Explorator now available:

Explorator 6.27

---

Just announced on b-greek, Rod Decker has posted a beta of the unicode version of his Galilee font. You will find it here:

Galilee Unicode Greek Font

Rod has provided lots of useful information about how to download the font, design features and so on. If you don't yet know anything about unicode and you work with Biblical languages, then you need to know this: it is the future. Rod has one of the best pages available for explaining to scholars and students about unicode and it is here:

Biblical Language Fonts and Unicode

---

On the whole The Gospel of John has steered clear of the controversy that has dogged The Passion of Christ but here is an article asking "How does Garth Drabinsky get away with what Mel Gibson can't?" It's pretty negative towards Drabinsky's film:

Martin Knelman, "Gospel according to GarthFilm raises concern"

---