NT Gateway Weblog

The NT Gateway blog is now taking a break for a few days until the weekend. I would like to wish you a very happy new year and thanks for reading and sending feedback and contributions. I look forward to seeing you in 2004.

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The web pages for the final programme of the BBC Radio series The Good Book have now been added:

The Good Book: Paul

It includes some excerpts from the Accompanying CD Pack to which I contributed. I'm afraid it's been a bit clumsily abridged (e.g. hanging colons where there the booklet contains quotations from the Bible). But let me take this opportunity to do a commercial for the thing that is here excerpted: the Good Book Pack features the entire series on CD and accompanying illustrated materials, the NT parts written by me. I haven't seen the OT materials but I know that at least some has been written by Walter Moberley. It's only £7.95 including p & p and you can order it now -- should be available in January. One of the reasons it is so well-priced is that it is a non-profit making educational resource funded by the BBC and the Jerusalem Trust (And I'm not on commission!).

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It's all Tom Wright these days and according to yesterday's Independent, "The new Bishop of Durham has arrived with a bit of a bang" and "Yes, you can expect to be hearing a lot more of Dr Tom Wright":

Tom Wright: It's not a question of left and right, says the combative priest who opposes the war in Iraq and gay bishops
The Monday Interview: The bishop of Durham
By Paul Vallely

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It's the time of year for news reviews; one that may be of interest to readers of this blog is the BBC Religion and Ethics News Review for the year. It includes topics that have been discussed here (e.g. Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ) and hyperlinks to BBC on-line articles and audio clips from the Sunday programme:

BBC Religion and Ethics News Review 2003

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Over on N. S. Gill's Ancient / Classical History blog is a link to a useful essay on Ancient Biography:

Ancient Biography: Cornelius Nepos - Plutarch - Tacitus - Suetonius

It looks like it's been adapted from a piece by Robert W. M. Greaves on Suite 101. Both sites are so cluttered with advertisements and pop-ups that it becomes tough to read or concentrate on reading, but the essay is of interest.

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I've been noting reviews of Geza Vermes's new book, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ as they appear (e.g. here). The latest is in last week's Daily Telegraph and is by Damian Thompson:

Jesus Christ, in his own words

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Bible and Interpretation today flags up this article from Beliefnet by John Dominic Crossan:

A Christmas Message From Matthew
What was the gospel writer trying to tell us about Jesus in his opening chapters?

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On Point radio, which is based in Boston, MA, USA, broadcast an interesting discussion of The Passion of the Christ on Friday. It features several of those who have been at the centre of the controversy over the film , Peter Boyer, Michael Medved and Paula Fredriksen. It is an interesting listen of about 35 minutes or so:

The Gospel According to Mel

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

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Tom Wright had an article in the Christmas Eve edition of The Times reflecting his irritation with people cleverly telling him that Christmas is really an ancient pagan festival:

The origins of Christmas Day are no mere pagan festival

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It's the sixth and final part of The Good Book on BBC Radio 2 tonight. It's entitled Paul - The Founder of Christianity. You can listen live at 8 p.m. on the radio or via the web; or subsequently you can listen on the web site. There will be some clips of me tonight, and also of Paula Gooder, Jimmy Dunn, John Barclay, Helen Bond, Kenneth Newport and Ian Boxall. The web site will also be updated with fresh information after the broadcast:

The Good Book

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Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar both featured in the 100 Greatest Musicals on Channel 4 this Christmas, Godspell at 72 and Jesus Christ Superstar at 28. The Godspell section included some footage of David Essex and Jeremy Irons in the stage version of the show from 1971 and a clip from a 1972 programme called Box Office Christ -- an interview with David Essex. Matt Lucas was one of those commenting on Godspell and said that the best way to punish your children is to sit them down in front of it. I know whenever I show clips to students, they usually roar with laughter.

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The latest Explorator has been posted by David Meadows:

Explorator 6.35

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The NT Gateway blog is now taking a Christmas break, probably until the weekend. Wishing you a very happy Christmas.

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Thanks to Helen-Ann Francis for pointing out that in this week's Times Literary Supplement Christopher Rowland reviews Geza Vermes, Larry Hurtado and Jimmy Dunn. Wow -- that is some heavy reading! Unfortunately they are not on-line, though the on-line samples of the 18 Dec. edition include this review by David Melling of Margaret Barker's The Great High Priest:

Solomon and Jesus

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In the USA, Discovery have a day of repeats of NT related documentaries on Christmas day, three of which I was involved with either as a participant or consultant or both, Jesus: The Complete Story, Mary: Mother of Jesus and Who Was Paul?. Thanks to Bob Schacht on Xtalk for drawing attention to this.

Meanwhile on the History Channel, there is a programme called Banned from the Bible, blogged by Jim Davila the other day. It's in a series called Time Machine but there is nothing much on the History Channel web site about it. Don't know if or when we'll get this one in the UK.

As for me, I'll probably watch the Bond film and Some Like it Hot!.

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While listening to BBC Radio FiveLive this morning, I caught a trail for The Real Jesus Christ. This is an hour long documentary introduced by Clive Anderson which was first broadcast on Christmas Day last year. It's to broadcast again on Christmas Day this year at 9 a.m. I was one of the participants (though not a consultant on this one so I am unresponsible for all the other content!) and there are also contributions from Tom Wright, Bishop Spong and lots of others. There's no sign of any repeat fee in the post yet. I've had a look and it is already available on-line / still available from last year:

The Real Jesus Christ

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Also alerted in Bible and Interpretation, who are on top form today, is a review by Gary Anderson of Tom Wright's latest massive tome on the resurrection. It is taken from the journal First Things 137 (November 2003): 51-54:

Books in Review: The Resurrection of the Son of God

Anderson makes some useful observations but I am troubled by the conclusion of this paragraph:

I believe that Wright has shown with utmost clarity that the doctrine of the resurrection was deeply embedded in the fabric of the early Christian movement. The tendency among certain scholars to claim that a wide swath of early Christianity, represented by the circle of “Q” (a presumed common source of the synoptic Gospels) and the Gospel of Thomas, advanced a view of Jesus bereft of crucifixion and resurrection is just not tenable. Whatever one makes of “Q,” it should be clear by the close of this volume that the thought-world of the Gospel of Thomas is a late development and best understood against the backdrop of second-century Gnosticism. Indeed, most serious scholars of Gnostic sources have been saying this for some time. The explanation for why the books of Crossan and Elaine Pagels have such currency lies within the realm of the sociology of knowledge, not the history of early Christianity. That story has yet to be told.

I think one has to be careful of remarks about "serious scholars of Gnostic sources" lining up behind one particular view. This approaches polemic and is unhelpful. Though I don't always agree with them, and although I was disappointed by Pagels's recent Beyond Belief, I regard Pagels and Crossan as serious, imaginative, exciting scholars whose work is not so quickly dismissed. As it happens, I don't think that Wright does that with Crossan, at least not in Jesus and the Victory of God, but I've yet to read the latest book on the resurrection. I'll get round to it at some stage but it is so long. Why have all the recent books from British scholars all been so long -- Dunn, Hurtado, Wright? How do they expect us to find time to plough through them when we have books of our own to write?!

Labels: Elaine Pagels

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This one alerted in Bible and Interpretation, an article by James Carroll in Boston.com News:

Questions about the Nativity

It aims to set out some of the facts on the Birth Narratives in Matthew and Luke and is a useful introduction to the issues. It's interesting that even in this kind of article, though, the author imports elements from our oral tradition of the birth narratives, ". . . . that the three Wise Men traveled from the East". He also begins with "Our calendar assumes that Jesus was born in the year 0". No it does not -- it assumes he was born in the year 1. I still find it very common for people not to realise that there was no year 0. I sometimes ask students why it was that some people were making a fuss about 2000 not really being the millennium and it is very rare for people to know. (As for me, I had a party in both 2000 and 2001!).

The article ends with quite an interesting challenge:

Most Christians are effectively fundamentalist in their beliefs, with little capacity for critical thought about sources, doctrines, and theology. Church leaders and scholars have kept it this way for the sake of their own power, but in a new era of inflamed religious conflict, childish passivity by a broad population in matters of faith is irresponsible.

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Someone over at SBL was working late last night and sent round the latest update from Review of Biblical Literature. Here are the NT related titles:

Beaton, Richard
Isaiah's Christ in Matthew's Gospel
Reviewed by Daniel M. Gurtner

Cantalamessa, Raniero
Frances Lonergan Villa, translator.
Life in Christ: A Spiritual Commentary on the Letter to the Romans
Reviewed by Jeffery S. Lamp

Koester, Craig R.
Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community
Reviewed by Eric Wallace

Nave, Guy D.
The Role and Function of Repentance in Luke-Acts
Reviewed by F. Scott Spencer

Smith, Dennis E.
From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World
Reviewed by Jonathan Schwiebert

Wenham, David
Paul and Jesus: The True Story
Reviewed by Craig A. Smith

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I referred recently to a feature on Geza Vermes in The Independent. Jim Davila blogs the review in The Guardian and now we can add a third review, this time by Karen Armstrong and in The Sunday Times:

Review: Religion: The Authentic Gospel of Jesus by Geza Vermes

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There's a most entertaining article on Joseph in The Times by Waldemar Januszczak:

Art: No Ordinary Joe

The article is essentially about the depiction of Joseph in art, but it involves some reflection too on the Biblical account. A couple of excerpts:

It occurs to me that you may not, perhaps, be fully au fait with Joseph’s story, and that before we embark on any explanations of why the poor blighter has been so badly coloured by artists, we need first to agree on his basic outlines. These are godless times we are living through, and even among Sunday Times readers there might be those who have never picked up a Bible and familiarised themselves fully with Joseph’s tale, or considered properly the psychological dynamics of his impossible situation. Until you think about him specifically, he is, after all, just the old boy at the back. That is his tragedy.

[ . . . ]

Now, you do not need me to tell you what Middle Eastern men are really like. You do not need me to tell you what all us men are really like when it comes to the subject of our wife’s fidelity and her required ability to keep her knees clenched for anyone but us. The Bible demands many difficult reactions of its heroes, but surely the reaction it demands of Joseph — that he allows himself to be cuckolded by the Holy Spirit, then joyously permits his spouse to be used as an incubator by God — is the sternest test of religious devotion set to anyone in the 2,337 pages of the King John. Would you do it? Would I do it? Would anyone do it?

Joseph is the ultimate dumb consort. And, inevitably, a certain amount of stupidity is assumed of him as he fulfils this role. His modern equivalent would be Denis Thatcher or the Duke of Edinburgh. Like them, his job is to be there, yet somehow not to be there. But whereas Prince Philip is excused the odd foray into eccentricity and naughtiness, and Denis was allowed his tipples and his interesting array of awful opinions, Joseph is trapped for eternity in a state of profound goodness. See how Giorgione has him glowing like a log fire with golden kindliness. Joseph is simply not allowed to have any foibles or eccentricities, because anything that draws attention away from the miraculous scene we are witnessing must, in these circumstances, appear flippant or, worse, heretical.

Januszczak wonders at why Joseph does get depicted as an old man in contrast to the youthful Mary given the absence of any indication from the New Testament. But while absent from the New Testament, apocryphal texts do make Joseph considerably older than Mary, e.g. the second century Protevangelium of James in which Joseph is already a widower with sons.

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I caught this fascinating programme earlier today on Radio 4:

Sir Frederic Bartlett – The War of the Ghosts

This is another blog entry (see previous) not directly connected to the NT but of related interest. The programme explores Bartlett, a psychologist at Cambridge University in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and his experiments on memory. Here's the programme's blurb:

When the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett was working at Cambridge University during the First World War, memory had only just started to be considered a psychological rather than a philosophical subject. A German psychologist called Herman Ebbinghaus dominated the field. He had spent days at a time learning lists of nonsense words, testing himself to see precisely how many he could remember. But a game of Chinese Whispers gave Bartlett an idea which he developed into a radically different approach to the study of memory. He discovered that when he asked people to repeat an unfamiliar story they had read, they changed it to fit their existing knowledge, and it was this revised story which then became incorporated into their memory. Bartlett's findings led him to propose 'schema' - the cultural and historical contextualisation of memory, which has important implications for eyewitness testimony and false memory syndrome, and even for artificial intelligence!

You can listen on-line. There are presumably some implications here for the question of memory and oral tradition in early Christian literature; cf. Crossan's interesting discussion of the issue in The Birth of Christianity.

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Thanks to David Gentile on Synoptic-L for the link to this very interesting article by Erica Klarreich from Science News Online:

Bookish Math: Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries

Its theme is the use of stylometry to solve difficult literary problems, with a special focus on The Royal Book of Oz, which has been subjected to analysis by José Binongo. He has been able to demonstrate that it was written by Ruth Plumly Thompson and not Frank L. Baum. The article does not discuss the New Testament though there have been some attempts to use stylometry to analyse problems in NT texts. The difficulty, I suppose, for many of the NT issues is that one does not have the same kind of definitive, large samples of writings from the authors in question, as one does have in the case of Ruth Plumly Thompson and Frank L. Baum. David Gentile, who provided this link on Synoptic-L, has his own Statistical Approach to the Synoptic Problem.

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Thanks to Holger Szesnat for drawing my attention to this journal:

Word and World

This quarterly journal of theology is based at Luther Seminary, St Paul, MN, USA and it is "meant for readers throughout the church who are concerned for Christian ministry in and to the world". There is detailed information and full text availability on many back issues, all of which are helpfully indexed by theme and author. There is lots of interesting material here and I hope to draw attention to some of the interesting articles in the near future. But in the mean time, do browse around it. I've also added it to my Journals page.

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My colleague Rod Mullen has a new book just out from Brill. Details:

The Expansion of Christianity: A Gazetteer of its First Three Centuries is published in the Vigiliae Christianae Supplements series. The volume covers the geographical spread of Christianity in its first three centuries. It is arranged by continents - Asia, Europe and Africa - to show the gradual development of Christian communities down to the Council of Nicaea in 325. The area surveyed stretches from Wales to the borders of India, and from the Northern coasts of the Black Sea to the plains of Morocco. The result is a picture not only of the outward development of early Christianity but of the variety that existed within it as well.
Leiden: Brill, 2004
ISBN 90 04 13135 3 (hardback)

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Many readers will have seen this, but the consistent high quality of Stephen Carlson's Hypotyposeis blog is maintained in a fascinating post on the James Ossuary:

James Ossuary Analysis Flawed?

It makes some very useful observations on James Harrell's questioning of the Israeli Antiquities Authority's report on the ossuary.

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The fifth programme in the BBC Radio series The Good Book aired tonight (last night) at 8 p.m. If you missed it you can listen on-line. There are a couple of bits of me in this one; there was also a little bit of me at the end of the Isaiah programme. Here's the link to the web site for the latest programme, which features interviews with Ben Witherington III, Richard Burridge and me, some material written by me, a quiz and the link to the audio of the programme:

The Good Book: Jesus

The piece headed Biography is excerpted from a booklet I wrote to accompany the programme, but unfortunately it's been excerpted in such a way that the connecting links between the sentences and paragraphs do not always make sense.

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The latest Explorator has been posted by David Meadows

Explorator 6.34

It includes a round-up of the latest on the James Ossuary.

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Nice article in last week's Guardian on some quality British weblogs:

The best of British blogging

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There was an article on Geza Vermes in yesterday's Independent, referenced by Bible and Interpretation:

Geza Vermes: A child of his time

The occasion is Vermes's new book The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. I've not yet seen it myself and probably won't rush to do so -- I found the other follow-ups to Jesus the Jew (an all time classic) pretty disappointing. The article, based on an interview with Peter Stanford, doesn't tell you a lot; there is some spurious journalistic nonsense about Vermes easily being able to "pass for one of Santa's elves"; but there's an interesting concluding passage, the first line of which is pretty exaggerated, but the rest is worthwhile:

"For years," he says with a chuckle, "before Jesus the Jew, there had been no books on the historical Jesus, but since then one book after another has been published and what sounded at that time something absolutely revolutionary and very sensational has become almost a cliché. Everybody talks of Jesus the Jew today."

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There's an enjoyable article in The Economist, taking its lead from the fact that The Passion of the Christ has Latin dialogue. One interesting note on the film is that William Fulco, who provided the Latin and Aramaic dialogue, clearly agrees that the Latin is not appropriate, "You could argue, as he does, that Greek would often be more appropriate, and that the conscripted troops in Judea spoke little Latin". It does make one wonder about the tortuous process that led the film to use Latin (cf. earlier comments on this). One cannot help thinking that it must have had something to do with Gibson's alleged fondness for the tridentine mass. Anyway, here's the article:

Latin Today: Roman Rebound

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I thought I'd try Google Print for New Testament titles. At the moment Print.Google.com New Testament brings up just two offerings, a very short excerpt from Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament and a fairly short excerpt from Walter M. Dunnett, Exploring the New Testament. So at this stage at least there is vastly less than is available on Amazon's "search inside the book", e.g. the latter has the entire text of Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament. But no doubt this will change as time goes on.

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Google has been testing a new service which will search the texts of published books, thereby imitating and rivalling the recently launced service from amazon to do the same (see recent blog entry following on from Tyndale Tech). It's not been launched with any sort of major fanfare but news features have begun to appear on this over the last day or so, e.g. this one at ZDNet:

Google tests book search

And Google itself has a short page here:

About Google Print (BETA)

The latter has the following great introduction, "Google's mission is to provide access to all the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online."

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As Jim Davila blogged, the October edition of New Testament Studies is now available on-line, contents and abstracts for all and full text for individual or institutional subscriptions:

New Testament Studies

Vol. 49/4 (October 2003):

‘Christus starb für uns’. Zur Tradition und paulinischen Rezeption der sogenannten ‘Sterbeformeln’.
CILLIERS BREYTENBACH

The Justification of Wisdom (Matt 11.19b/Luke 7.35)
SIMON GATHERCOLE

‘Ungefähr 30’: Anmerkungen zur Altersangabe Jesu im Lukasevangelium (Lk 3.23)
CHRISTOPH G. MÜLLER

Can Everyone be Wrong? A Reading of John 11.1–12.8
FRANCIS J. MOLONEY

Of Cherubim and the Divine Throne: Rev 5.6 in Context
DARRELL D. HANNAH

Recapitulation and Chronological Progression in John's Apocalypse: Towards a New Perspective
MARKO JAUHIAINEN

Does the ‘We’ in Gal 2.15–17 Include Paul's Opponents?
WILLIAM O. WALKER

Rm 1.11–15 (17): Proemium ou Propositio?
LUCIEN LEGRAND

What did Paul mean by ‘Those Who Know the Law’? (Rom 7.1)
PETER J. TOMSON

Labels: Simon Gathercole

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I wrote up Stephen Goranson's report that "the Greek letters [on the Absalom tomb] were first noticed by an art history student," but John Poirier writes that "in his presentation at the SBL meeting in Atlanta, Joe Zias was very clear in saying that, when the art student showed him the picture, he (Zias) noticed what looked like an inscription above the portion of the photograph that the student was interested in, and that when Zias pointed out the possible inscription to the student, she denied that there was anything there. So, while it's true that the inscription was first noticed in a photograph owned by an art student, it was Zias (not the student) who first saw the inscription."

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Here's a fuller article on the Pope's viewing of The Passion of the Christ; it's by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

'It Is as It Was'
Mel Gibson's "The Passion" gets a thumbs-up from the pope.

And ADL have issued a press release on the reported viewing -- this from the ADL web site:

ADL Reacts To Reports the Pope Has Screened Mel Gibson's Film 'The Passion'

New York, NY, December 17, 2003 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today reacted to media reports that Pope John Paul II recently previewed Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of Christ" and indicated through an intermediary his approval of its account of the events leading up to the Crucifixion of Jesus.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:

If in fact Pope John Paul II has screened Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" and if in fact his reaction to the film was positive, as has been reported, then we respect his statement. The Pope has a record and history of sensitivity to the Jewish community and has a clear moral voice and understanding when it comes to anti-Semitism.

However, we must reserve final judgment on "The Passion of Christ" until we have an opportunity to see the film. We hope that Mel Gibson has heard our concerns and those of Christian and Jewish scholars and religious leaders, who expressed unease about the earlier version of the film and its potential to fuel, rationalize and legitimize anti-Semitism.

If Mel Gibson has changed the film, which he has referred to all along as a "work-in-progress," then we would welcome that. We would like the opportunity to screen the final version for ourselves to see if the scenes of concern have been changed, and if so, publicly congratulate him.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

[End of press release]

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Stephen Goranson makes some useful comments on Xtalk concerning the recent articles on the Zechariah and Simeon inscriptions including some corrections, "The latter article [Jerusalem Post) includes many mistakes. E.g., Greek letters were first noticed by an art history student, not by viewing the monument directly, but in a particular photograph. And the article mixes up which inscription relates to Lk. 2:25. And it gives the wrong century for the opening of the Cairo Geniza (E. Puech in Rev. Biblique July 2003 gives that text)."

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I've refreshed the Scholars: E page -- new URLs for Hans-Joachim Eckstein, Bart Ehrman and Craig Evans.

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A couple more items of interest on Paleojudaica, articles from the Christian Science Monitor and the Jerusalem Post on the discovery of the Greek inscription ("This is the tomb of Zechariah, martyr, very pious priest, father of John") at the traditional site of Absalom's Tomb:

Grave Discovery

New find, old tomb, and peeks at early Christians

The second (Christian Science Monitor) is all about Joe Zias and has a picture of him alongside the cast made; the first (Jerusalem Post) focuses on Emile Puech and Shimon Gibson without even mentioning Zias. There's an odd contradiction here too. In the first article, Puech says "'They [Zechariah and the old man], were both priests and that might be why they were buried there,' says Puech, noting that the tomb lies directly on the path from the Old City to the Kidron burial area." (The "old man" referred to here is Simeon, whose name is also found here, apparently a reference to the man in Luke 2.25-35). In the second, we read "Foerster discounts that Zacharias was buried at the site, saying that during the 1st century those monuments belonged to the Jewish priestly families of Jerusalem, and Zacharias did not belong to such a family." Do we know that? If Zechariah is an historical figure, Luke may imply that he and Elizabeth lived in or near Jerusalem (Luke 1.5-25), though when Mary visits Elizabeth, she goes εἰς πόλιν ἰούδα (to a town / city of Judah).

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This article from the Washington Post reports on an alleged endorsement of The Passion of the Christ by the Pope ("It is as it was"):

For Mel Gibson's 'Passion,' Praise From a Tough Critic

Thanks to Jim Davila for the notice.

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In Our Time this morning focused on the origins of the alphabet; one of the contributors was Alan Millard whom I know from his Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus. The programme featured one of those great radio moments when one of the other contributors said that ancient scribal schools were about as big as "this room"; Melvyn Bragg then had to describe the room to listeners. You can listen on-line:

In Our Time

At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write, why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world?

The other contributors were Eleanor Robson and Rosalind Thomas.

And speaking of radio programmes, Stephen Carlson has posted comments on Fresh Air featuring Bart Ehrman.

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Today on Fresh Air is an interview with Bart Ehrman. If you are in the US, Fresh Air is distributed via satellite to public radio stations on Monday to Friday at noon, 3 and 7 p.m Eastern time. If not, archives of each programme are available on the site and you can listen on-line. I'll post a note here as soon as the archived version is availbale. Thanks to Nichael Cramer on Ioudaios and b-greek for this. Details:

Fresh Air

Theologian Bart D. Ehrman. He’s the Bowman and Gordon Gray professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His new book, Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, chronicles the second and third centuries before Christianity as we know it came to be. Ehrman has also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ called Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make it Into The New Testament.

Update (20.38): you can now listen on-line -- just click on "current show" or "archived show" from the main link.

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I've sometimes expressed my disappointment over the BSW: Biblical Studies on the Web site recently because a once fine site has been badly in need of an overhaul -- its links pages years out of date, the Multi-Library Search having disappeared and so on. I've also found it impossible to communicate with them -- emails simply bounce. (The one thing that has remained up-to-date has been their free on-line version of Biblica, a very useful contribution). But the good news is that there is some movement on the site. Some of you may, like me, have received a circular yesterday advertising their service to provide "a new means of sharing biblical links and allow you to insert your own contributions into our site Biblical Studies on the WEB". The idea is to build a directory by soliciting contributions:

WWW Biblical Theology Index

I've had a go with it myself and have submitted a handful of links (of my own, I'm afraid!) and it works well, instantly adding them to the site. It looks like I am one of the first people to do this -- there are only a few other links currently available.

It's a great idea and has the potential to be pretty useful. But at this stage my main concern would be that it is potentially open to abuse. Will the site simply fill up with dodgy submissions and self-promotions? The site maintainers are hoping to overcome this problem by checking the site on a weekly basis and weeding out anything that is inappropriate. But it will need some devoted and knowledgeable staff to do that if the number of submissions does rise. There is also the problem of the marginal cases -- the site could get filled with sites that are in that fuzzy area of are they / aren't they quality academic resources. But I don't want to be negative; I'm just mentioning some potential qualms; let's hope that these potential problems are easy to overcome. All strength to their arm for coming up with the innovative resource. I would want to encourage people to submit their quality links to the site, and ideally not just their own materials but those of others that they find useful.

Email contact to BSW does seem to be working again now, and I hear from Roger Boily that the site is in the process of moving hosts so that further fixes should be on the way.

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This just announced on the b-greek list. Carl Conrad, Associate Professor Emeritus at Washington University, has posted a very useful new pedagogical introduction to ancient Greek voice entitled, "Active, Middle, and Passive: Understanding Ancient Greek Voice." In his own words "it is an 8 pp. brief introduction intended (a) as an introduction to ancient Greek voice for students, (b) as a demonstration of how I would go about teaching voice to English-speaking students if I were still in the active teaching profession":

Understanding Ancient Greek Voice (PDF)

Labels: b-greek

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The call for papers for the SBL Annual Meeting 2004, San Antonio, Texas has gone on-line today:

SBL Annual Meeting 2004: Call for Papers

Closing date is March 1 2004.

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The SBL Forum has been updated with some fresh articles focusing on the topic of the moment, Mary Magdalene, with this blurb:

Well-known characters in the Bible are not always known well. This month the Forum explores the identity and representation of Mary Magdalene in early Christian literature. Who is Mary? and What are scholars discovering about her in canonical and noncanonical gospels?

Opposition as Index of Importance: The Case of Mary Magdalene
by John Dominic Crossan

Mary of Magdala: Christian Polemics and Demonic Influence
by Ann Graham Brock

Mary of Magdala in Early Christian Coptic Literature
by Karen L. King

Select Bibliography on Mary
by Ann Graham Brock

Mary Magdalene in Recent Literature
by Birger A. Pearson

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The two most recent Tyndale Tech emails from David Instone Brewer are now also on-line at:

Tyndale Tech (November 2003): Full text bibliography and journals on the web

Tyndale Tech (December 2003): Full text books on the web, free and subscription

What he has done is to combine details from the two separate emails originally sent to create the themes above. As I've often commented before, they are full of useful materials. If you don't already subscribe to these emails, I'd encourage you to do so -- they are always full of interesting and useful material. If I were to pick out one thing that I have found particularly new and helpful, I'd note the Tyndale Catalogue's facility to link to on-line versions of books at Amazon. David points out that books with this facility at Amazon actually outsell those without it, something that might give a second thought to those nervous about placing full texts of books on-line. I wonder, though, whether this may be due in large part to the fact that the books Amazon has full-text searches for are already the more popular books on their site, those marketed in a bigger way by their publishers, so the fact mentioned may not be particularly telling.

In the second of the two emails, David also lists with links a good number of books that are available for full-text searching at Amazon -- also very useful.

One thing now to add to the bibliographical resources listed (see also WWW links for finding books and articles) is BiBIL, on which I've been blogging recently. If I might be so bold, I would also be inclined to draw attention to the NT Gateway as a good resource of links to on-line books and articles and it has the added advantage of being categorised by topic. Further, the NT Gateway's page on Journals provides a fuller and better and more fully annotated list than those listed by David, especially the bsw one which is now very out of date.

Labels: Tyndale Tech

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As usual on Sundays (well it's now Monday here, but for some of my readers it is still Sunday), the latest Explorator from David Meadows is out:

Explorator 6.33

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Time Magazine this week has a feature on "Lost Gospels" with a nice cover story picture. You have to be a subscriber to read it all and I am not so have only read the first page of the main story, but it does mention Bart Ehrman's new book so there may be more discussion of that in what remains:

TIME Magazine: The Lost Gospels

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At the SBL Annual Meeting Synoptics Section a couple of weeks ago, Loveday Alexander responded to papers given by Richard Burridge, Mark Matson and Margaret Mitchell. In her response she commented that sometimes the exegete can gain some help in interpreting a given passage by looking at the Synoptic parallels. This had been a theme of Mark Matson’s paper on Matthew for readers who already knew Mark. Loveday went on to give an example of a place where, she claimed, none of the Synoptic Gospels made sense on their own. All are in their own way obscure and only become clear when one looks at them together. She attributed the observation to George Caird, I think only in oral material though I’d be interested if anyone happens to know of a place where he made these observations in print. The passage concerned is Mark 14.65 and synoptic parallels. Here is the passage in Synopsis:

Matt. 26.67-8	Mark 14.65	Luke 22.63-4
Τότε ἐνέπτυσαν εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐκολάφισαν αὐτόν, οἱ δὲ ἐράπισαν λέγοντες, Προφήτευσον ἡμῖν, Χριστέ, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε;	Καὶ ἤρξαντό τινες ἐμπτύειν αὐτῷ καὶ περικαλύπτειν αὐτοῦ τὸ πρόσωπον καὶ κολαφίζειν αὐτὸν καὶ λέγειν αὐτῷ, Προφήτευσον.	Καὶ οἱ ἄνδρες οἱ συνέχοντες αὐτὸν ἐνέπαιζον αὐτῷ δέροντες, καὶ περικαλύψαντες αὐτὸν ἐπηρώτων λέγοντες, Προφήτευσον, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε;

The passage is a notorious one for Synoptic students because it features such a blatant example of a Minor Agreement between Matthew and Luke against Mark, something that is straightforwardly explained on the theory that Luke knows Matthew as well as Mark but something that has always been a problem for the Two-Source Theory, so much so that some of the leading proponents of that theory have resorted to conjecturally emending Matthew’s text to remove the agreement with Luke, so that it would, like Mark, lack the clause τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε; (Who is it who smote you?). Michael Goulder has argued, rightly in my view, that it is not acceptable to emend the text conjecturally purely to save a particular Synoptic theory. I have written about this Minor Agreement myself, most recently in The Case Against Q, pp. 157-60. But I don’t want to focus any further on the difficulty this Minor Agreement poses for the Two-Source Theory, at least not directly; rather, I would like to challenge Loveday Alexander’s claim that none of the three texts make sense on their own. I think that each text does make good sense in context within the narrative of each of the Synoptic Gospels and I will attempt to explain why.

First, the most difficult of the three, Mark. The difficulty with Mark on first reading is that given our familiarity with Matthew and Luke, we are expecting to see that additional question, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε; (Who is it who smote you?). Clearly some scribes felt the same way and added the words in. However, recent narrative criticism has shed some useful light on the way the charge “Prophesy!” works here in Mark. In the end it is Mark’s account that is the richest and most rewarding of the three as a literary piece. To see this we need to look both at the immediate context and the broader context in Mark. In the immediate context, while Jesus is being tried by the Sanhedrin and subsequently mocked (Mark 14.55-65), Peter is in the vicinity (Mark 14.54 and 14.66-72). In this classic example of Marcan intercalation, Jesus is being mocked with the charge “Prophesy” while Peter is in the very act of fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy of a few hours earlier that on this very night he would deny Jesus three times (14.29-31). The dramatic irony here is clear, profound and typically Marcan. The readers have been given privileged information; they can see what those mocking Jesus cannot see.

The observation that this is what is going on here in Mark has been made in a number of commentaries, including those by Morna Hooker, A Commentary on the Gospel According to St Mark (London: A & C Black, 1991), p. 363, and Donald H. Juel, The Gospel of Mark (Interpreting Biblical Texts; Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), p. 27. But we might add two more elements here that are not commonly noticed. First, the people (τινες) who are mocking Jesus are themselves, while they taunt Jesus to prophesy, engaged in fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy that he will be mocked and beaten (Mark 10.34). Moreover, only a few lines earlier, Jesus has again been prophesying, that “you will see the Son of Man seated on the right hand of the power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14.62). No doubt Mark feels that his readers will see this fulfilled in their lifetimes, so further adding to the dramatic irony of the “Prophesy!” taunt.

In both Matthew and Luke, the addition of the “Who is it who smote you?” question diminishes the dramatic irony of the Marcan scene but it does not in any way make their scenes less coherent than Mark’s. Now the charge is explicitly one about second sight: "Prophesy! [Matthew adds "to us, Christ"] Who is it who smote you?" There is, however, one oddity in Matthew’s account, and it may be this that is in Loveday Alexander’s mind, and perhaps Caird’s before here, and it is the fact that in Matthew – unlike in Mark and Luke – Jesus’s face is not covered. What sense does it make to taunt Jesus to identify his assailant if he can see them all? There are a couple of ways of reading this text that make good sense of it. One possibility, suggested to me by my former doctoral supervisor John Muddiman, is that those mocking Jesus are taunting him to name the one who struck him and not to point a figure to the one who did it. A second possibility, defended in Michael Goulder’s recent article in Novum Testamentum, is to notice that it would be absurd to depict the mockers spitting into Jesus’ face if they have just covered it. For the spitting to be as nasty as the narrative requires it to be, they need to be spitting into Jesus’ face and not onto a piece of cloth that covers it. Goulder further suggests, following Jarmo Kiilunen, that they are hitting Jesus from behind while he is being spat upon from in front, so again Jesus would not know who has hit him. What seems clear is that there is little difficulty in making good narrative sense of the Matthean scene.

As far as Luke’s scene is concerned, commentators are united in finding his coherent so there is little need for further comment. It’s worth adding in relation to the above, though, that Luke retains Mark’s covering of Jesus’ face and drops the spitting, so that now there is a blindfold and a straight question asking Jesus to identify his assailant.

In short, all three accounts make good sense. In Matthew it is important to take his wording seriously and to use one’s imagination about the scene that is actually being narrated; in Mark it is important to pay attention to both the immediate and the broader narrative context.

Labels: Novum Testamentum

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It's the fourth programme in the series The Good Book tonight, 8 p.m. on BBC Radio 2, narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi. Listen live on the radio or the internet or listen on-line after the programme has aired:

The Good Book

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Oxford University Press has a new service to provide on-line full texts of certain books in its catalogue. If you are at a participating institution, you can read the full texts; but everyone has access to table of contents, abstracts and search facilities of the selected volumes. I'm lucky enough to have access via my university and it's a fine looking service -- much thought has gone into the aesthetics of the thing. Go to this link for the service home:

Oxford Scholarship Online

Or go here for the Religion titles:

Religion

Or go here for Biblical Studies:

Biblical Studies

Includes:

J. K. Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament
James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology
Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John - Reading Revelation in the Ruins
Tania Oldenhage, Parables for Our Time - Rereading New Testament Scholarship after the Holocaust
Marie Noonan Sabin, Reopening the Word - Reading Mark as Theology in the Context of Early Judaism
Anna Wierzbicka, What Did Jesus Mean? - Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts
Paul B. Duff, Who Rides the Beast? - Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of Crisis in the Churches of the Apocalypse

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Jim Davila blogs this interesting article in the Washington Post. It is by Bill Broadway and features Craig Evans, Jonathan Reed, Hershel Shanks and Paul Maier:

Digging Back Toward Jesus
Biblical Archaeology Uncovering Evidence About Places and People's Lives in Gospel Times

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In Our Time on Radio 4 yesterday morning had the Devil as its topic. Worth a listen if you didn't catch it:

In Our Time

In the Gospel according to John he is ‘a murderer from the beginning’, ‘a liar and the father of lies’, and Dante calls him ‘the ill Worm that pierces the world’s core’. But Milton’s description of him as a powerful rebel was so attractive that William Blake declared that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party, without knowing it’. To ordinary folk the Devil has often been regarded as a trickster, a tempter, sometimes even a figure of fun rather than of fear.

How did this contradictory character come into being? Why did it take so long for him to become an established figure in Christianity? And if the Devil did not exist, would we have had to invent him?

Contributors

Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture

Alison Rowlands, Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Essex

David Wootton, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London

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Torrey Seland yesterday updated his pages; the additions are all on the Philo page:

Resource Pages for Biblical Studies

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Some time ago the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism disappeared from the web. I removed all my links to it in June 2003. This was a new electronic journal based at the University of Surrey Roehampton and the original plan was to place articles on-line as they appeared and then to produce a print version at the end of the year. The print version was to be published by Sheffield Academic Press. One full volume appeared in the year 2000 but nothing subsequently appeared and then even that disappeared. But now it has apparently been resurrected over at McMaster Divinity College in Canada which is where Stanley Porter, the editor, is now based. There is just a paragraph's information about the journal, but happily the volume from 2000 is back on-line:

Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism

Update: link added to the NT Gateway: Journals page.

Labels: Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism, journals

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I reported that Lisa Gerrard is to score The Passion of the Christ; Wieland Willker tells me that I should not express my ignorance on who she is quite so blatantly. It's music for intellectuals, apparently, and that will be why I've not heard of her. So this ignoramus has now been to her web site, lisagerrard.com and read more about her. There is a paragraph on The Passion of the Christ, dated today (11 December):

Prayers answered is the only way to put it. The film depicts the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ's life. The film is in Aramaic the native language of Jesus Christ and is directed by Mel Gibson. For more information visit the official website.