NT Gateway Weblog

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."

---

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

---

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.

---

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."

---

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

---

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."

---

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]

---

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)."

---

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

---

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).

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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)

---

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.

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

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

---

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

---