NT Gateway Weblog

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?!

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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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