NT Blog

Holger Szesnat has put together a very useful, massive list of internet resources on Biblical Hermeneutics, organised in bibliography-style:

Biblical Hermeneutics

I've placed this at the top of my page on Hermeneutics and at the same time have serviced the links on that page -- changed some URLs and deleted others.

---

The death of Wilhelm Wuellner on Sunday has been reported on rhetoric-l. Wilhelm Wuellner was a professor at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California and the author of several books and articles on the New Testament and rhetorical analysis. His first book was The Meaning of Fishers of Men (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967). Courtesy of Tom Olbricht, this is his entry in the Directory of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, Watson E. Mills, ed., 1988.
--------------------------------------
Born in Bochum, Germany 21 Feb. 27 of Wilhelm and Emma (Beckmann); married Flora May (Slosson), children: Christine, Virginia, Lucy. Edu. Goethe Oberrealschule (Bochum), Abitur, 1946; Evangelische Landeskirche Westfalen, First Theol. Exam, 1951; U. of Chicago, Ph.D. 1958. Pub. The Meaning of Fishers of Men (Westminster, 1967). Member SBL, CBA, SNTS, DIAC, ISHR. Mission House Theol Sem. vstg. asst prof., 1957-58; Grinnell College, Asst. prof., 1958-60; Hartford Sem Foundation, asst. prof., 1960-1965; Pacific School of Religion, assoc. prof, prof. 1965--.
-------------------------------------
Read more on rhetoric-l.

---

On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila asks the expert Helen Bond what she makes of Vermes's article about Caiaphas. It's an excellent response which provides some useful nuancing of several of Vermes's points. Also on Paleojudaica, Vermes then responds and clarifies a key point. Apparently he read my brief comments too but does not offer a response except to say that he preferred Helen Bond's comments. Goodness; I'll have to be careful what I write in future! Here was I thinking that only about seven people read my blog and certainly none of my former teachers! But perhaps Jim Davila drew his attention to it. I should say that I remain puzzled by the comment that "Jesus and his followers are not really presented as Jews" in the Gospels, but it may be that I am missing something obvious here.

---

As always, there's plenty of interest in the latest Explorator posted by David Meadows:

Explorator 6.42

---

Geza Vermes has a piece on Caiaphas in today's Telegraph:

Never mind what Mel Gibson says, Caiaphas was innocent

It's a useful and interesting article, as you would expect from Vermes, yet it features several extraordinary claims -- or is Vermes just being more sloppy in writing a newspaper article than he would when writing his books? Take this, for example:

Given this highly specific context [i.e. post-70], it is no surprise that Jesus and his followers are not really presented as Jews. By contrast, it is the Jews that the Gospels - especially Matthew - blame for the death of Jesus.

Jesus and his followers not presented as Jews? What? I can't make any sense of that at all. I found this also odd:

According to the Gospel writers, Caiaphas judged Jesus to be a blasphemer for calling himself the Messiah. Such an assertion did not amount to blasphemy in any Jewish law, Biblical or post-Biblical.

When the High Priest in Mark rents his garments, this is not only after Jesus has affirmed that he is Messiah but also when he has said "you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14.62).

Also in today's Telegraph a longish piece on reactions to The Passion of the Christ by Chris Hastings:

Passion and Prejudice

---

An interesting article in today's Observer lifts the lid on the phenomenon of authors using pseudonyms or anonymity to give their own books 5-star reviews on Amazon:

Amazon reviewers brought to book
David Smith

The art of self-reviewing - and coming up with a false identity to fool cyber-police - was last week exposed as one of the literary world's best-kept secrets. Amazon's Canadian site suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had posted anonymous reviews on the American site under signatures such as 'a reader from Alabama'. There were some prominent authors among them.

The gremlins that bedevilled Amazon all week laid bare how writers can exploit the web to praise their friends, rubbish their rivals and even champion themselves in the hope of shifting extra copies. The humiliation ended only after outed reviewers ordered Amazon to fix it.

Wish I'd thought of that. (Only joking). I wonder if there are any Biblical scholars out there giving themselves five-star reviews?

---

ABC News is to broadcast an interview with Mel Gibson about The Passion of the Christ tomorrow (Monday). This ABC News article gives several highlights from the interview:

‘Faith, Hope, Love and Forgiveness’
Mel Gibson Tackles Passion Controversy, and Despair That Spurred His Faith

Gibson insists on Primetime he is no anti-Semite, and that anti-Semitism is "un-Christian" and a sin that "goes against the tenets of my faith."

When asked who killed Jesus, Gibson says, "The big answer is, we all did. I'll be the first in the culpability stakes here." . . . . .

. . . . "Critics who have a problem with me don't really have a problem with me in this film," Gibson says. "They have a problem with the four Gospels. That's where their problem is." . . . . .

. . . . . "I wanted it to be shocking," Gibson says. "And I also wanted it to be extreme. I wanted it to push the viewer over the edge … so that they see the enormity — the enormity of that sacrifice — to see that someone could endure that and still come back with love and forgiveness, even through extreme pain and suffering and ridicule."

---

Christian History is still steadily pushing out its content on-line from the Fall 2003 issue. The latest on-line article is:

Three Wise Men from the East
The "Cappadocian Fathers" brought the best gift of all: a powerful scriptural defense of the Trinity and Christ's divinity against the Arian heretics.
by Edwin Woodruff Tait and Chris Armstrong

In other words, this article is a good introduction to Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa.

---

Jim Davila has been covering the story about a new Church of England prayerbook which apparently decides to refer to "magi" rather than "three wise men". See his blog entry on Magi, Wise Men, Wise Women? and a follow-up More on the Magi. One reflection -- I wonder whether some of these newspaper reports, and perhaps also the CofE's prayer book, witness to a kind of residual fundamentalism which insists that we can only allow ourselves to focus on what is clear from the Biblical text. The evolution of the tradition, the development of the legend -- these are all part of what is delightful about retelling the story. When I go annually to my children's nativity plays at church and school, I don't stand up and say "There are no 'kings' helpers' in my text of Matthew" or "Luke does not specify the number of shepherds" or "How do you know it was a stable?", let alone "There are no lobsters in the Biblical text". I would rightly be thought a fool to do so, the theologian's equivalent of the Lord of the Rings nerds who disapprove of every place where Peter Jackson departs from Tolkien.

When did the number three begin to get fixed, though? There's an interesting web page with some useful background here:

Concerning the Magi and their names

This is from a site called The Hymns and Carols of Christmas by Douglas D. Anderson. The page quotes a certain Otfried Lieberknecht who cites Metzger:

A good study to check in cases like this is Bruce M. Metzger, "Names for the Nameless in the New Testament: A Study in the Growth of Christian Tradition", in: Kyriakon. Festschrift Johannes Quasten, ed. Patrick Granfield & Josef A. Jungmann, vol. I, Münster: Aschendorff, 1970, p.79-99. Metzger has a whole chapter (p.78-85) on "The Names of the Wise Men", which includes a rich bibliography of earlier studies of this topic (p.79 n.3).

According to Metzger, the earliest source giving names to the magi are the anonymous _Excerpta Latina Barbari_, the Latin redaction of a Greek chronicle which seems to have originated in Alexandria during the first or second half of the 6th century: "In his diebus sub Augusto kalendas Ianuarias magi obtulerunt ei mundera et adoraverunt eum: magi autem vocabantur Bithisarea Melchior Gathaspa" (cit. p.80).

---

In ten minutes from now as I write, Radio 4 are broadcasting a half-hour programme about Monty Python's Life of Brian in their Reel Histories series. If you're in time, you can listen on-line here:

BBC Radio 4

If not, I'll check after the broadcast to see if it's archived. Here's the blurb:

Sat 14 Feb, 15:30 - 16:00 30 mins

Gerry Northam presents the series exploring the truth behind classic film versions of history.

2/4. Monty Python's Life of Brian

Reluctant messiah Brian Cohen outraged church leaders and the film was banned by local councils across the country. But was there any fact behind the farce? Historians reveal the real Judean Popular Front; classicists explore the fate of a second messianic Jesus, and director Terry Jones explains why the Virgin Mandy sounded like a parrot.

Update: it is archived here for a week:

Reel Histories: Monty Python's Life of Brian
(Fast forward 2 minutes to get to the beginning of the programme)

It's a good programme; Philip Davies from the University of Sheffield is one of the contributors most used; he reflects on the history behind the film, claiming that on the whole Python got it right, e.g. the uprisings that led to the Jewish war, "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity" as parodying NT scholarship on the Messianic secret, and more. There are some enjoyable contributions too from Terry Jones who thinks of the film as heretical but not blasphemous. One interesting insight he provides is that many of the extras used in the film were local Tunisians, many of whom had recently been extras in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.

Labels: Radio 4

---

The papers read at the Symposium on The Passion of the Christ held at the end of January are now available on the websites of both The Journal of Religion and Film and the Journal of Religion and Society, the co-sponsors of the event:

The Journal of Religion and Film: Volume 8: Special Issue No. 1 (February 2004)
Exploring Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ Symposium

Journal of Religion and Society: Volume 6 (2004)
Special Issue on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ

But use the first of these -- it has the full articles with footnotes and bibliography. I've not had chance to read the articles yet myself, except to glance at Reinhartz's which is as strong as one would expect it to be. But I mention it now so that you can begin to investigate this interesting symposium -- I wish I had been there.

---

I've taken a look at Kevin Bush's N. T. Wright page and also the related WrightSaid email list and a couple of updates are worth reporting:

(1) On Easter day, Channel 4 will be broadcasting a documentary about the resurrection of Jesus written and presented by Tom Wright.

(2) Since Bible Review have annoyingly dropped all their on-line articles, Kevin Bush has obtained permission to reproduce the Tom Wright ones for his site:

The Great Debate
Speaking of Good and Evil
The Shape of Justification
Farewell to the Rapture
The Resurrection of the Resurrection
Paul, Leader of a Jewish Revolution

---

Stephen Carlson and Rubén Gómez have been exchanging some interesting thoughts about the technology of producing academic articles on the web, and specifically on how to represent footnotes, developing out of Stephen Carlson's piece on In-line Glossary technique. As an element in the discussion, Stephen usefully provides two alternative versions of his article on "Clement of Alexandria on the 'Order' of the Gospels", one with hyperlinked endnotes and one with hyperlinked sidenotes. I agree with Rubén in preferring the sidenotes version -- it helps with the problem that the standard monitors are too wide for representing continuous text -- the reader simply does not find it helpful to read across the long lines that were typical of the early days of the web. But even in his endnotes version, Stephen has not fixed the width of the text, so one can reduce the window size in order to read at the most appropriate width, something I always like to do where possible. Sadly, more and more sites fix the width of the text so that it cannot be manipulated. That's a side issue (!), though, and this is just to say that I would like to see more sidenoted articles in the future.

Five further comments:

(1) If hyperlinked sidenotes are to become more common, the problems with printing out such a version will tend to make it necessary to produce alternative printer-friendly versions. This of course already happens in other contexts a good deal.

(2) The Biblical Archaeology Society used sidenotes to good effect in some of their on-line articles, though not hyperlinked if I remember correctly. Alas, most of these have now been removed (as previously commented) and those that remain don't appear to be using the side-noting system.

(3) The rise of PDF as a quick, convenient way of representing articles on-line may well be slowing killing off the art of producing good on-line articles or reproductions of articles using hyperlinked endnoting. Since hyperlinks can be incorporated into PDFs, it is possible that we will see PDFs with hyperlinked footnotes but I doubt it.

(4) Another option that appears to be getting less popular is the one used by the on-line Biblica which uses frames for endnotes so that one can preview on the screen the notes that also appear at the end of the article. I think that this is a neat solution, not leasts because it means one does not need to jump around in the document -- text and endnote can appear simultaneously -- but the decreasing popularity of frames make it unlikely to have a resurgence.

(5) One thing I would like to see with the hyperlinked endote technique is something that is rarely provided -- a [Back] hyperlink in the footnote that takes you back to the right point of the text. Too often, it is assumed that the individual simply uses the "back" button on the browser. I like to provide little arrow buttons to take the reader back to the text (see here for example); this is something I picked up from Mahlon Smith (e.g. here). Stephen Carlson uses another useful technique -- you can click on the endnote number and get back to the right point in the text. The only difficulty with that is that the reader might not know to do that.

---

I commented earlier on how little The Passion of the Christ has made it into the popular news in the UK; but then I don't read tabloids anyway so how would I know? Helenann Hartley, when visiting a theological college which subscribes to The Mirror, spotted this feature:

THE PASSION OF CHRIST IS GRIM NIGHTMARE
John Hiscock

NOTHING I have ever seen has been more difficult to watch than this.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most violent films ever made - two hours and six minutes of unremitting, relentlessly graphic brutality.

Mel Gibson's controversial story of the last hours of Jesus Christ is a sickening bloodbath and, in my opinion, suitable viewing only for sadists . . . .

This makes me want to see the film even less than I already do, especially after the comments Crossan reports about the lyrical beauty of the violence, which I find sickening. Curiosity will drive me to see it as soon as it is out in March; but I won't be looking forward to it.

---

I was asked by an American newspaper reporter today whether news about The Passion of the Christ had made any impact in the UK yet; my answer was that there has been very little in the popular media at all. There have been a few articles in The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, BBC news on-line and so on, but few people I have spoken to have heard about it here. But within a few hours of talking to him, BBC news had a feature on the film in its main news broadcast at 10 p.m. (big box office, anti-Semitism etc.). Also, there's now an official British site:

The Passion of the Christ: Official UK and Ireland Movie Website

Update (Friday): Helenann Hartley has sent over this link from BBC News

Religious battle over The Passion
David Willis

This is the text version of the report that appeared on the 10 p.m. news on the BBC last night.

---

Thanks to Charles Miller on Synoptic-L for drawing my attention to this:

Scholarly Smackdown
A liberal professor and a conservative professor debate the movie, the Bible, theology and more.
By John Dominic Crossan and Ben Witherington III

It seems that Crossan and Witherington have been asked by beliefnet to engage in a public email conversation in connection with the release of the film. The first exchange, dated 10-11 February, focuses on the question of the suffering and violence. Crossan's piece makes excellent reading -- he really is incapable of being dull. He focuses on the problematic link apparently made between suffering and sacrifice and draws attention to this issue in this way:

And the second question I would raise for our dialogue is: What is the appropriate separation between suffering and sadism? How do you depict and view actual torture without its sadism becoming pornographic? In the same EWTN interview, Mel Gibson admitted that “I don’t think it’s as brutal as it really was. I’ve stopped short of what I think probably really happened. However, it’s brutal, it is graphic.” Then comes this absolutely breath-taking and profoundly disturbing interchange. Raymond Arroyo: “There is a sense of beauty in the violence, and I don’t quite know if I’m expressing that correctly, do you sense that?” Mel Gibson: “Good, yes, I do, I mean that is a definite intent to do that. To make it lyrical, to make the violence lyrical. In a way, to find the beauty in it.” Despite those terrible formulations, the point is clear. Sacrifice equals suffering and so, to appreciate sacrifice, that suffering must be shown with exact and graphic violence.

Unfortunately Witherington has not yet seen the film so he is labouring at a disadvantage at the beginning of this exchange; I'd suggest beliefnet get a copy to him or an opportunity to attend a preview viewing asap.

Beliefnet also have a massive site on the film with lots of links and discussion; I'm adding a link to my page on The Passion of the Christ:

Beliefnet: The Passion of the Christ.

Additional note: one of the two big "fan sites" on The Passion of the Christ has disappeared over the last two days, so I've added a notice on that ahead of withdrawing the link.

---

Matti Myllikoski draws my attention to this:

Bibliothèque nationale de France

It has an excellent collection of texts printed in French including various old books that are very useful for the study of the history of Biblical scholarship including Pierre Bayle, Richard Simon, Jean le Clerc and Voltaire. The texts are produced in photographic reproduction in PDF files which one views a page at a time. The key part of the web site for the digital texts is:

Gallica: la bibliothèque numérique

From there go to "Recherche" and you can search on key texts.

---

David Meadows comments usefully on a Jerusalem Post article on The Passion and specifically its over-played It-was-only-the-sadistic-Pilate-who-was to-blame line:

Chatter: Passion Protest

Meadows draws attention to the passage about Jesus in Josephus' Antiquities 18 and the line "at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us . . ." One might add that many leading Historical Jesus scholars avoid the it-was-all-Pilate line including E. P. Sanders, who confesses his admiration for and understanding of Caiaphas alongside the claim that it is highly likely that the High Priest indeed played a key role in the execution of Jesus.

---

Torrey Seland commented on the loss of availability of an article from the on-line Harvard Theological Review at Look Smart's Find Articles. I pointed to the Wayback Machine as a means of getting round these lost articles following a lead from correspondent Darko Svenscak. Torrey subsequently comments that Joan Taylor's article on the Therapeutae does not show up there. I've had a look and can find it by adjusting the URL. So typing in http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2399/n1_v91/20512260/print.jhtml does not work but adjusting "print.jthml" to "p1/article.jhtml" does bring up the desired result: here. That's the good news. But the bad news is that it seems only two pages of the article are archived, so this is pretty useless. And it seems that the Wayback Machine is patchy generally. My example of the Adela Yarbro Collins article has pages 1-10 but nothing thereafter.

---

Latest reviews from SBL's Review of Biblical Literature have been posted today; here are those that come under the New Testament heading:

Danove, Paul
Linguistics and Exegesis in the Gospel of Mark: Applications of a Case Frame Analysis and Lexicon
Reviewed by Charles A Bobertz

Das, A. Andrew
Paul, the Law, and the Covenant
Reviewed by James P. Sweeney

Donfried, Karl Paul
Paul, Thessalonica, and Early Christianity
Reviewed by Lucas Bormann

Edgar, David Hutchinson
Has God Not Chosen the Poor?: The Social Setting of the Epistle of James
Reviewed by Goutzioudis Moschos

Hagner, Donald A.
Encountering the Book of Hebrews: An Exposition
Reviewed by Eric Mason

Kysar, Robert
Preaching John
Reviewed by C. Fritz Boger

Nicklas, Tobias
Ablösung und Verstrickung: «Juden» und Jüngergestalten als Charaktere der erzählten Welt des Johannesevangeliums und ihre Wirkung auf den impliziten Leser
Reviewed by Silke Petersen

North, Wendy E. Sproston
The Lazarus Story within the Johannine Tradition
Reviewed by Mary L. Coloe

Schreiner, Thomas R.
Paul, Apostle of God's Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology
Reviewed by James P. Sweeney

---

This item from WorldNetDaily reports the attempts of the ten Boom Holocaust Center in Haarlem, Holland to begin an internet campaign to persuade Mel Gibson to add a postscript to The Passion of the Christ:

Needed: 1 million Christians to write Mel Gibson
By Mike Evans

The extraordinary thing about this is that according to an earlier report in the same journal by the same author, Mike Evans, Mel Gibson had already agreed to do this very thing (see blog entry on and WorldNetDaily article on) at Evans's suggestion. So did Evans get the agreement from Gibson or not? If he did, why the need for the campaign? If he did not, why the original report?

Update: an article from the LA Times answers my puzzlement:

'Passion': Christians join the call
Tim Rutten

Evans said he decided last week to publish an account of the meeting with Gibson on the website WorldNetDaily.com, after reading accounts of Anti-Defamation League officials' dismay over a cut of the film they saw during a screening for Protestant clergymen in Orlando, Fla. When no response from Gibson or his representatives was forthcoming, Evans said he "became concerned. Mr. Gibson has never communicated to me that he had changed his mind."

Over the weekend, Evans and his group set up a website, www.melj.net, that invites like-minded Christians to "thank acclaimed actor-director Mel Gibson" for "working closely with leaders concerned about anti-Semitic tones in the movie 'The Passion of the Christ.' " Readers are then asked to read, sign and return a copy of a letter Evans and the Jerusalem Prayer Team plan to forward to the filmmaker.

---

The first British review of The Passion of the Christ is concerned that the film is too violent for viewers to stomach. Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this link from BBC News which quotes from the review by John Hiscock in the Daily Telegraph:

'Violent' review for Gibson film
A newspaper film critic has questioned whether adults will be able to stomach the violence in Mel Gibson's imminent movie The Passion of the Christ.

He wrote: "For, worthy and serious as Gibson's treatment may be, his blood-drenched depiction of the final hours of Jesus' life is harsh and brutal, dwelling almost entirely on pain, suffering and torment."

---

The remarkable resource that is Textkit has added several major new full-text, on-line books. As with everything on Textkit (I think?), these new resources are PDFs that can be downloaded for free. Resources are usually out-of-copyright old-fashioned stuff, but often really useful. These new resources have just been announced on the Greek part of the site. Descriptions below taken from the Textkit site:

Sidgwick's Greek Prose Composition Key, Arthur Sidgwick
Learn Greek with this classic Greek Prose Composition key by Arthur Sidwick. The key, in Classical Greek, can be used to check your work against the lessons presented in Sidgwick's Greek Prose Composition.

A First Greek Course, Sir William Smith
Download this free first year Greek book. Sir William Smith's A First Greek Course was popular throughout the United Kingdom from about 1867 through 1960

Pocket Lexicon of Greek New Testament, Alexander Souter
Download this free and very handy New Testament Greek Lexicon. At 297, the Greek to English lexicon presents key New Testament Greek words with English meanings.

The Gospel of St. Luke in Greek, H.R. Heatley
Download this free New Testament Greek reader of the Gospel of St. Luke. This reader provides the St. Luke's Gospel in Greek along with line notes and a helpul vocabulary to assist the Biblical Greek learner.

Labels: lexica

---

Thanks to Michael Strickland for this one from Yahoo news / Variety and by Carl DiOrio:

'Passion' poised for heavenly B.O.

. . . . "It's one of the most talked about films since the first 'Star Wars' prequel," said Exhibitor Relations prexy Paul Dergarabedian.

The anti-Semitism debate has probably helped the pic, he said.

"Controversy is a double-edged sword. It can either boost your chances or derail you," Dergarabedian added. With "Passion," "People are intrigued. I've never seen all these pieces of the puzzle come together before." . . . .

---

The cover story in this week's Newsweek is on The Passion of the Christ. The main article is the most detailed description of the film I have seen so far, with some intelligent analysis of its relationship to the Gospels and questions about anti-Semitism:

Who Killed Jesus?
Mel Gibson's powerful but troubling new movie, 'The Passion of the Christ,' is reviving one of the most explosive questions ever. What history tells us about Jesus' last hours, the world in which he lived, anti-Semitism, Scripture and the nature of faith itself
By Jon Meacham

Well worth a read; more anon.

---

In relation to my previous blog post, Darko Svenscak points out that the example I chose is not a good one because only the first page of that article is cached by Google; I hadn't thought to check the rest. But Darko offers another useful tip:

The Wayback Machine

I saw someone referring to this recently and forget who. It's not something I've visited before and it's great fun. Essentially it is attempting to archive everything on the web so that it can be accessed by future generations. Here's its results on the NT Gateway:

Wayback Machine: NT Gateway

It's quite nostalgic for me to see how it developed. That record begins in June 2000 because that's when I moved the site over to its own domain. One can go further back by typing in its old address. But this is to digress. How does the Wayback Machine help us with finding those Harvard Theological Review articles we are after? As long as one has the old URL, one is OK -- just type it into the Wayback machine box and here is the article we were looking for:

Wayback Machine archive of Adela Yarbro Collins, "Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Jews"

So this could turn out to be a very useful tool.

---

Correspondent Darko Svenscak makes the useful point to me that where Find Articles have deleted on-line articles (see blog entry on), they are still present in the Google cache. So if you are looking, for example, for Adela Yarbro Collins, "Mark and His Readers: The Son of God Among Jews", Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 393-408 (listed in Featured Links of July 2001), you now get a 404 Not found; but if you paste the title into Google and hit "cached", you can still retrieve it. However, these caches don't last for ever, so if there's something you want to have electronically from Harvard Theological Review, fetch it and save it while you still can.

---

The Winter 2003 edition of Biblical Theology Bulletin is now on-line (free to all) at Find Articles:

Piety and Politics: the Dynamics of Royal Authority in Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia - Book Review
by Robert Gnuse

Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide - Book Review
by Richard B. Cook

Judges - Book Review
by John F. Craghan

Seeing the Psalms: a Theology of Methaphor - Book Review
by John F. Craghan

Scripture and interpretive method: why read scripture as Canon?
by Kenneth G. Stenstrup

"Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers . . . - Revelation 22:15" - Critical Essay
by Rick Strelan

Who should be called father? Paul of Tarsus between the Jesus tradition and patria potestas
by S. Scott Bartchy

Of Eunuchs and predators: Matthew 19:1-12 in a cultural context - Critical Essay
by Carmen Bernabe

Gainful reappraisal - Presenting the Issue
by David Bossman

Labels: Biblical Theology Bulletin

---

I commented in December on the revamp of the Find Articles site, which included lots of material from the Harvard Theological Review (free to all). Torrey Seland points out that the on-line issues of HTR are now down to just 2001. I have several links to other issues so will have to remove these if there is no sign of their return. It's another reminder not to trust that anything on the web is going to be there forever.

---

Thanks to Helenann Hartley for sending over this link from Saturday's Guardian which I'd missed (no doubt because it is still lying folded up and unread):

Crucified by empire
The blood libel that 'the Jews' killed Jesus sent millions to their deaths
Giles Fraser (Vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford)

It's a well-written, informed piece that helps put the debate over The Passion of the Christ in context; an excerpt:

What is going on here is intra-Jewish sectarian polemic. Note: intra-Jewish not anti-Jewish. The attack on "the Jews" in the Gospels is a family argument, and is conducted with the ferocity typical of a family argument. The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures frequently denounced Israel for failing to live up to God's expectations. "These people draw near with their mouths and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me," insists Isaiah. Attacks upon "the Jews" in the Gospels are of a piece with this intra-Jewish prophetic invective. But once Christianity morphed from a small Jewish sect, wrestling to establish its identity against the prevailing religious establishment, to the official religion of the Roman empire, these denunciations became deadly. Torn from the context of an intra-Jewish row for the soul of Judaism, "the Jews" starts to be heard as "them" as opposed to "us". From this moment on, the Gospels are used as justification for the greatest crime in European history - the death of one Jew becoming the pretext for the murder of millions more. Christians have too often preferred an anti-semitic lie to a disturbingly relevant truth: Jesus was destroyed by the logic of empire.

---

On Synoptic-L, Wieland Willker asks "why this botch" (The Passion of the Christ) "gets so much attention in scholarly circles". While not knowing whether it is a "botch" or not -- I haven't seen it yet -- I think that there are several reasons:

(1) Some scholars are interested in the way in which the Gospels are adapted in film and fiction, partly because of the renewed interest in Wirkungsgeschichte and partly because the creative process of adaptation might shed light on the interpretative process. For investigations of Jesus (and other) films along such lines, I would recommend the books by Larry Kreitzer on the OT, the NT and Paul in fiction and film; and this book by Barnes Tatum:

W. Barnes Tatum, Jesus at the Movies (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1998)

I would also recommend these two articles by William Telford:

Telford, W. R., "The New Testament in Fiction and Film: A Biblical Scholar's Perspective" in J. G. Davies, G. Harvey and W. Watson (eds.), Words Remembered, Texts Renewed. Essays in Honour of J. F. A. Sawyer (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995): 360-94

Telford, W. R., "Jesus Christ Movie-Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema" in C. Marsh and G. Ortiz (eds.), Movies and Meaning. Explorations in Theology and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 115-39.

(2) Interest in this particular Jesus film is accentuated among some scholars because of their involvement with the question of the depiction of Jews in the Passion Narrative. Paula Fredriksen in particular is worth mentioning here since she was on the so-called "ad hoc committee" that strongly criticized an early script of the film for its alleged anti-Semitism (See blog entries here and here). So too is Amy-Jill Levine who was on the committee that composed that report (See blog entry on). Both Levine and Fredriksen have been involved with discussion about the film as a result of that early and robust encounter with the script. And whatever one thinks about the way that that debate has developed, there is no question that the issue of the depiction of Jews in the Passion Narrative has been a hot topic in Gospel studies over the last generation. What this film has done is to push that debate back into centre stage.

I would add, in relation to this point, that much of the controversy over the film could have been avoided if only Gibson had done what Garth Dabrinsky did on the recent Gospel of John (Visual Bible) film and employ a panel of expert consultants. Gibson claims that he has consulted hundreds of Biblical scholars, but what the film lacks is a panel of accountable, named historical consultants from a variety of scholarly and religious perspectives. The Gospel of John has managed to adapt that Gospel word-for-word without a whiff of controversy and I think that this is in no small part due to the likes of Peter Richardson, Adele Reinhartz, Alan Segal and co on its Advisory Committee.

(3) I suspect the film also excites attention among scholars because of its use of Latin and Aramaic. Of course Gibson had to use a scholar to do the translation -- William Fulco of Loyola Marymount University.

(4) If Biblical scholars had nothing to say about major cultural events like this, then that might be further evidence of a retreat into the ivory tower. Interest is generated much of the time simply because the media asks them for their opinion, and they rightly respond.

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

---

One of the great things about The Passion of the Christ for those like me who are fascinated by Jesus films is that it is generating a good deal of interest in the history of Jesus films. This article takes a look at what is undoubtedly my least favourite of the Jesus films, the 1979 outing starring Brian Deacon, called simply Jesus, based on the Gospel of Luke:

'The Passion's' Precedent: The Most-Watched Film Ever?

The article is from the New York Times and is by Franklin Foer. I enjoyed his description of the film, including this line:

In terms of special effects, the film offers poofs of smoke and gauzy halos to suggest miracles and angels; a hissing snake and a booming voiceover represent the devil. In the scene in which the Romans beat Jesus, their punches obviously don't connect.

He also quotes The New York Times's Tom Buckley's description of it as "painfully monotonous." It's interesting to see, though, that the Jesus Film Project are not at all afraid of the new film; indeed they are embracing it as an evangelistic opportunity and their web page currently headlines with Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ".

---

Don't forget to look at the latest Explorator:

Explorator 6.41

---

On the Gospel of Thomas e-list, Andrew Criddle draws attention to this piece:

Lasse Collmann, "Thomas 50 and its context"

This is a post-graduate seminary presentation at Helsinki directed by Ismo Dunderberg whom you may know from his publications on The Gospel of Thomas. The English is a little broken (but I am always lost in admiration for post-grads who write doctoral theses in a second language) and it is still in draft mode, but it's an interesting read for those interested in Thomas. Criddle characterises it this way, "This article draws parallels between the saying and other accounts of questioning of the soul by spiritual powers but emphasises that in some of the closest parallels such as the Jewish Hekhalot material the powers, although potentially dangerous are not intrinsically evil."

---

Loads more articles on The Passion of the Christ including this one from The Observer by Paul Harris:

Who killed Christ?
Mel Gibson's controversial film on the Crucifixion has been pilloried by Jewish leaders but is being hailed by US Catholics as the best recruiting tool for 2,000 years, reports Paul Harris in New York

One thing is certain though: the hype surrounding the film is going to ensure a box-office smash. Experts predict Gibson will recoup his $25m investment on the opening weekend alone.

And this one from The Scotsman by Rachel Zoll:

Faithful sell film with a passion

"When they attack him, they attack millions of people in America," said Jennifer Giroux, a Roman Catholic nurse from Cincinnati who created seethepassion.com "We have watched films concerning the Holocaust with compassion, concern and sorrow, and we just want to be able to watch this beautiful movie about our faith."

And this one from DallasNews.com by Jeffrey Weiss:

Passion or prejudice?
New movie about Jesus' death stirs anti-Semitism question

which features this great quotation from Dr. Leonard Swidler, professor of Catholic thought and interreligious dialogue at Temple University:

"What we know about Pilate otherwise is that the governor was a self-centered thug who would sell his mother on Sunday morning to get himself extra breakfast," he said. "He crucified scores of people at the drop of a turban."

This article by James Murrary is from The Australian is one of those nice review articles which goes through several Jesus films (with a predictable title):

Jesus Christ movie star

On past experience, Jesus films usually succeed, if only because there are enough believers to pack the cinemas. Experience also suggests that the reverential approach is preferred: Jesus the miraculous, the sentimental, the sensational, in an ancient landscape with Roman artefacts and gospel goodies and baddies.

The Passion of the Christ may prove too realistic for those who like their religion sugar-coated.

Finally, Jim West emails me to draw attention to a PAX TV one-hour special to air in the USA, "The making of 'The Passion of The Christ'" in advance of film's Feb. 25 premiere on Feb. 22 and Feb. 24 at 9 p.m. Eastern.

The behind-the-scenes look is meant to help viewers understand Gibson's vision for the film, and it will present never-before-seen footage of the actors and directors at work. The special also will feature on-set interviews of the cast and crew and stories of how the sets were created."

---

Rubén Gómez has a new web site and a related blog that is likely to be of interest:

Bible Software Review

Bible Software Review Weblog

This corner of cyberspace will be devoted to bringing you all kinds of information about the ever-growing Bible software scene. Our goal (my goal!) is to build a fairly comprehensive repository of tips, news, articles, and reviews of different Bible software products.

The site can only really be viewed effectively in 1024x768. At present it's still being built but most of the Links section is active. Note: it looks like the blog does not yet have an RSS feed.

---

The score for the The Passion of the Christ, composed by John Debney, will apparently be available from February 24. There are some excerpts available at one of the Passion of the Christ fan sites:

Passion of the Christ soundtrack excerpts

You can order from there, or click here for Amazon.

So whatever happened to the rumours that Lisa Gerrard was to score the film (Blogged on December 11 2003)? After this was apparently confirmed, it was then announced that John Debney was scoring the film and that Gerrard would be "co-scoring". But now Lisa Gerrard's name seems to have been removed altogether and the news item has been dropped from her web site. So what is the story here? Some interesting light is shed in the forum of Lisa Gerrard's site, in which Lisa's husband Jacek is a participant. He shows some real frustration with this project and states that "We have all worked VERY hard on the Passion", so much so that other projects have had to be sacrificed. He goes on, "I have VERY deep feeling about all this and is better I say nothing . . . . Not to mention that Patrick [co-writer Patrick Cassidy, MG] missed Christmas completely and his mother came to be with him from Eire . . . . we have worked TOOOOOO hard on this project!" He adds that "I just do not think any of LGs and PCs work will be in the final version of the film . . . ." Elsewhere in the forum, Jacek describes the film as a "masterpiece" and Mel Gibson as a "very good person" but the Debney score only as "good but not exceptional". He hints that the decision to go with Debney was not solely Gibson's choice and also that he "ran out of time to include the work that LG did".

---

Web guru Peter Kirby (author of sites like Early Christian Writings and Gospel of Thomas Commentary) has another new project:

Open Scrolls Project

Kirby describes it like this: "This project will make the Dead Sea Scrolls available anywhere with an internet connection, at no cost, and with electronic searching potentiality. It is released under a "copyleft" agreement that allows it to be published on other web sites or even in printed books, so long as the reference to OpenScrolls.org is maintained." In other words, this ambitious project aims to make a completely fresh translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls available on the net since the publishers of existing versions will not allow reproduction. Whether it will be possible to maintain the quality control remains to be seen. One suggestion if it is to succeed would be to appoint a committee with appropriate credentials.

---

I have followed Torrey Seland's example and added a "Comments" feature. So if you want to comment on a particular blog post, simply click on the "Comments" link that features at the end of each entry.

---

I mentioned on Wednesday the report that Gibson was to cut the Matt. 27.25, "His blood be on us and on our children", from the film and that we were going round in circles on this one. Now the inevitable pull back on this story -- Reuters report that "A spokesman for the Hollywood star . . . . declined to comment on the report"; the spokesman is the publicist Alan Nierob:

Mel Gibson stays mum on "Passion" scene

Summary: It's in, it's out, it's in again, it's out, no comment.

This article from the Seattle Times argues that there is a "symbiotic and mutually beneficial" relationship between Mel Gibson, director of The Passion of the Christ and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League):

Anti-Defamation League plays into Gibson's hands
By David Klinghoffer

. . . . . So what did ADL think its relentless criticism of "The Passion" would accomplish? Gibson is the last person in all of Hollywood to bow to hostile pressure to edit his work. A news story this week suggested that the filmmaker may have cut an inflammatory verse from Matthew's Gospel — but this was due to reactions of friendly screening audiences, not thanks to the ADL, which continues to attack the film.

As the Seattle-based interfaith activist Rabbi Daniel Lapin observes, Gibson is the guy who made "Braveheart" and identifies with its hero, William Wallace, a 13th-century Scottish warrior who gladly accepts disembowelment rather than submit to intimidation and tyranny.

The ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, genuinely cares about the Jewish people, but his group is inevitably affected by the pressures of funding a large, nonprofit organization. The imperative to convince donors that you fight an urgent fight is overwhelming. The ADL has a $40 million yearly budget to raise.

The perilous logic of the anti-defamation business demands that the ADL find "dangers" to denounce, even when those dangers, if left alone, would have been neutralized simply by their own nature — in this case, by the eccentricity of a Latin-Aramaic screenplay. Gibson's purposes positively required that he be denounced.

He played the ADL as William Wallace played the bagpipe. The relationship between anti-defamation watchdogs and alleged defamer is symbiotic and mutually beneficial. What dangers it has unleashed for the rest of us remain to be seen.

---

In a recent review of The Gospel of John, S. T. Karnick comments that in Cecil B. De Mille's The King of Kings (1927) one can actually see what Jesus writes in the ground in the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8. I asked whether anyone knew what Jesus wrote since I don't have a copy of the film. Correspondent Michael Stickland asked Sam Karnick, the author of the article, who responds

What happens in the DeMille film is that Jesus kneels down, and as each of the first few prominent persons approaches with a stone, he very casually writes in the sand a sin, such as "liar," "adulterer," "murderer," etc., and each Pharisee in turn drops the stone and leaves, as Jesus has exposed them as not being without sin and as hypocrites and deserving of being stoned themselves, by the [sic] own stated standards, the Law of Moses. (Of course, Jesus writes in Aramaic or Hebrew--I forget which--and intertitles translate for us.) It is a very powerful treatment, and for me a perfectly plausible understanding of the Biblical text."

I've now also had a look at Greatest Story Ever Told and Last Temptation of Christ but neither have Jesus writing in the ground.

---

Those stories on The Passion of the Christ just keep coming. This one is from the Miami Herald:

Co-star Defends Mel Gibson Film
ALISON MUTLER
Associated Press

Maria Morgenstern plays Mary in the film (the mother of Jesus, not Magdalene) and she is the daugther of a holocaust survivor (see older blog entry on); here is an excerpt:

"When people go and see the film, they will (primarily) see a work of art," she said. Muslims, atheists, Christians and Jews worked on the film but race and religion were never an issue, said Morgenstern, 42, who is Jewish.

Any political message the film offers is "about the responsibility and impact political and military leaders can have in manipulating the masses and interfering in people's conscience, particularly at a moment of crisis as it was then," said Morgenstern.

"The Roman occupation was terrible and people were very poor. Pontius Pilate was very afraid that there could be a real revolution," she said, referring to the Roman governor of Judea who caved in the face of crowd pressure and allowed Jesus to be crucified"

For a break from all the frowning and earnestness on all sides, and a good laugh, have a look at this piece from the Toronto Star by Slinger:

It's the real thing: Vision of Mel (Gibson, that is)

But back to the serious business of the question of anti-semitism, I recently mentioned the ADL (Anti-Defamation League's) Letter to Mel Gibson. It seems now that they have received a reply:

Mel Gibson's Letter to Abraham H. Foxman

And Foxman has replied:

ADL Response to Mel Gibson

Copies of these are on the ADL web site (to which the previous links point) or you can go to a news article that discusses the correspondence here in JTA News:

Gibson, Foxman trade letters, but fail to find a common ground
By Tom Tugend

That article also mentions Matt. 27.25, "His blood be on us and on our children", which is spoken by Caiaphas in The Passion of the Christ but by the crowd in Matthew. Some months ago, it was reported that this scene had been dropped from the film. But then in the recent preview screenings, it appeared still to be there. Now it is apparently to be deleted again. Sometimes this feels like it is going round in circles; here's the article from the New York Times

Gibson to Delete a Scene in 'Passion'
By SHARON WAXMAN

A scene in the film, in which the Jewish high priest Caiaphas calls down a kind of curse on the Jewish people by declaring of the Crucifixion, "His blood be on us and on our children," will not be in the movie's final version, said the Gibson associate, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The passage had been included in some versions of the film that were shown before select groups, mostly of priests and ministers.

"It didn't work in the focus screenings," the associate said. "Maybe it was thought to be too hurtful, or taken not in the way it was intended. It has been used terribly over the years."

---

As correspondent Helenann Hartley says, "Another day, another 'Passion of Christ' story!" This one is from BBC On-line and features some extracts from the forthcoming Readers Digest interview with Gibson:

'Faith' inspired Gibson's movie
Director Mel Gibson says a renewed interest in faith inspired his controversial film about Christ.

On the reawakening of his faith:

Part of my investigation was the reawakening of the faith I was raised in.

"So I began to explore in books, sermons and theologies. It's interesting that many of the critics think I just came out of a vacuum with this."

On his research:

"I have talked to literally thousands of learned and biblical scholars. I didn't make it up, you know."

This (happily) contrasts with earlier reports that had Gibson allegedly showing disdain for Biblical scholars. Nevertheless, note this rather stark comment to those who have problems with the film:

"They don't really have a problem with me if they have a problem with this film. They have a problem with the gospel, because it adheres pretty well to the gospel."

And on whether the pope did day "It is as it was", Mel Gibson's view seems pretty clear:

"Yes, Pope John Paul II saw it.

"His assistant related a comment that he made during the latter part of the film.

He said, 'It is as it was'. It sounds pretty Zen, doesn't it?"

---

The Stanford Report has an article about Elaine Pagels who has been lecturing there recently:

Gospel of John aims to discredit evangel Thomas, scholar says
BY THERESA JOHNSTON

The article drastically oversimplifies (so that Athanasius is the big baddie who suddenly arrives to exclude books like Thomas from the canon) but there are some interesting quotations from Pagels, summarising her book; ana couple of excerpts:

In her latest best-selling book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Pagels argues that whoever wrote the Gospel of John clearly was familiar with this Gospel of Thomas -- and thoroughly detested it. "What you're seeing when you read [John and Thomas] together is an intense, contentious ... I guess you could call it a conversation, but really it's more like an argument between different groups of the followers of Jesus," Pagels told her rapt Stanford listeners. "What they're arguing about is the question: Who is Jesus and what is the good news about him?" . . . .

. . . . . As if to underscore these differences, John alone among the evangelists paints Thomas as an ignorant, unauthorized, faithless disciple. Thomas is the only one of the original 12 (besides the betrayer Judas Iscariot) not present in the famous scene when Jesus reappears after his death, and because of this untimely absence, Jesus doesn't make Thomas an apostle like the others, Pagels said. "Furthermore, when the other disciples tell Thomas what happened, he stubbornly refuses to believe it."

It is not until Jesus appears in the locked room again eight days later and chastises Thomas for his lack of faith that the doubting man falls on his knees and proclaims Jesus as his Lord and God. "I think John wrote this scene with some satisfaction," Pagels added wryly, "to show that Thomas finally 'got it' and admitted he was wrong."

Labels: Elaine Pagels

---

I was sorry to read today of the death of Donald Verseput on Monday. I never met him but have read several of his articles. This is the announcement from the Pioneer Press:

Donald Verseput was Bethel Seminary professor
BY CYNTHIA BOYD
Pioneer Press

Donald J. Verseput, a nationally known biblical scholar and New Testament professor at Bethel Seminary in Arden Hills, died Monday of cancer.

Seminary colleague Leland Eliason said Verseput, who lived in North Oaks, had "established himself as a superior New Testament scholar" and was elected to membership in the prestigious Studiorum Novi Testament Societas.

He was as passionate about his research as he was about teaching the next generation of preachers in the church, said Eliason, who is executive director and provost at Bethel Seminary.

Verseput, 51, had come to Bethel in 1998, receiving the Faculty Excellence Award in 1999-2000. He wrote numerous essays and articles and his work appeared in publications including New Testament Studies, Novum Testamentum, Journal of Biblical Literature and Catholic Biblical Quarterly.

A graduate of Wheaton (Ill.) College and Dallas (Texas) Theological Seminary, he went on to Basel, Switzerland, to complete an advanced degree. He also taught theology in Germany, South Africa, Deerfield, Ill., and Pasadena, Calif.

Visitation is from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Holcomb-Henry-Boom Funeral Home at 515 W. Highway 96 in Shoreview. Funeral services will be held at 5:30 p.m. Friday at Benson Great Hall, on the Bethel College & Seminary Campus, with visitation before the service at 4 p.m.

He is survived by wife Laura, daughter Elisabeth, 18, and son, Timothy, 15.

Labels: Novum Testamentum

---

This site has been referenced in some recent articles on The Passion of the Christ (e.g. in USA Today) and it's a well done piece from the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations at Boston College:

Facts, Faith, and Film-Making: Jesus' Passion and Its Portrayal
A Study Guide for Viewers and Reviewers of Portrayals of Jesus' Passion

(Also available in PDF)

The site also has a page of Resources to help in Evaluating Portrayals of the Passion. Included there is a link to a useful short article on the Passion Narrative in the Gospels:

Ronald D. Witherup, "The Passion of Jesus" in Scripture from Scratch (St. Anthony Messenger Press, Feb. 2001)

---

Recently out from Polebridge Press is the following:

Robert J. Miller, Born Divine: The Births of Jesus and Other Sons of God

In this compelling study of the birth and infancy of Jesus, Robert Miller separates fact from fiction in the gospel narratives and relates them to stories about the miraculous births of Israelite heroes and of Greek and Roman sons of God. Born Divine analyzes the Christian claim that the birth and childhood of Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. The historical and theological dimensions of the virgin birth tradition are discussed with honesty and insight. This wide-ranging book also presents additional infancy gospels from the second century through the Middle Ages.

Polebridge Press Paperback, 360 pages 2002 ISBN 0-944344-95-X

The link above takes you to the Westar site which also features an excerpt:

Did Jesus Fulfill Prophecy? Probing Matthew's Gospel

This also features apparently in The Fourth R Volume 16, 2 (March/April 2003). Also available is the following:

Free on-line study guide

The latter is only any use if you have the book (which I have not yet), i.e. it's not free-standing. See also: Amazon link here.

---

I've added a link on the Historical Jesus: Books and Articles page to this fascinating article by John H. Elliott which challenges an emerging scholarly consensus:

John H. Elliott, “Jesus was not an egalitarian. A critique of an anachronistic and idealist theory”, Biblical Theology Bulletin 32/2 (2002): 75-91

I've also stripped out all the Bible Review and Biblical Archaeology Review articles on that page since it now seems clear that they are not going to return to the web. Shame.

Labels: Biblical Theology Bulletin

---

A day does not go by without more on The Passion of the Christ; Icon productions must be delighted by the publicity it continues to get. Some of the latest stories to break include this one from the BBC (with thanks to Helenann Hartley for sending over):

Campaign against Gibson's Passion
Jewish and Christian groups have announced a lecture campaign after fearing Mel Gibson's upcoming film on Jesus could incite anti-Semitism

The Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee saw The Passion of the Christ, due out shortly, last week.

"It undermines the progress that we've made in this country toward mutual respect and religious pluralism," said Rabbi David Elcott.

Lectures, interfaith talks and other programmes will be held . . . .

The story reminded me to take a look at the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) web site which usually has up-to-date press releases. See the following:

ADL Screens Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ" ; Says Film's Portrayal of Jews "Painful to Watch"

ADL Letter to Mel Gibson

The latter is actually pretty well written and on the whole avoids the temptation to use inflammatory language. It asks Gibson to add "a movie postscript with you coming on screen at the end to implore your viewers to not let the movie turn some toward a passion of hatred". The interesting thing is that it seems that Gibson has decided to add a postscript of a kind. Thanks to Jim West on Xtalk last Thursday for pointing this one out on WorldNetDaily:

Gibson adding pro-Jewish ending to 'Passion'?
Evangelical leader describes dramatic anti-Semitism discussion after screening

And see here, also in WorldNetDaily, which gives the full story from the horse's own mouth:

Mel Gibson agrees to change 'Passion' film to combat anti-Semitism
Mike Evans

I was recently invited to a special screening of "The Passion of the Christ" in Dallas to make recommendations regarding the film . . . . At the end of the screening, Mr. Gibson humbly asked if we felt the film could incite anti-Semitism and, if so, what could be done to avoid it.

I explained to Mr. Gibson that the Crucifixion story has been used by anti-Semites to feed and fuel Jew-hatred throughout history, and that anti-Semitism has risen throughout the world to levels not seen since the days of Hitler. I further stated that the film, in its present form, could incite violence against Jews in the former USSR, Muslim countries and Europe, and could even result in Jews being killed . . . .

. . . . . Mr. Gibson listened intently, hung his head, and was deeply moved. "What can I do," he asked? I responded, "When the last scene ends go to black, scroll these words across the screen: "During the Roman occupation, 250,000 Jews were crucified by the Romans, but only One rose from the dead."

"By doing this," I said, "instead of feeding Jew-hatred, you will be fighting it. You will be communicating the suffering of all Jews under Roman occupation. By simply inserting this statement, those who desire to use the film to incite hatred toward Jews will be deterred.

"Those who might use the movie to incite Jew-hatred would know that they would be doing just the opposite – challenging the evil myths (that Jews are cursed for crucifying Christ and are Christ-killers) taught throughout history, and still today. In addition, 'The Passion of the Christ' would be the first Jesus film produced to fight anti-Semitism by telling the true story of Jewish suffering during the time of Christ."

Mel Gibson became very excited, and said, "Perfect! I will do it. Yes, I will do it. I needed something for that spot anyway. This is it. I will do it. Thank you." . . . . .

I've not yet seen any comment on this very interesting development, official or otherwise, from the ADL or others.

Meanwhile, Paula Fredriksen, one of those who offered her opinion of an early script of the film last April in the incident that got the whole controversy underway, offers some fresh reflections though she has not yet seen the film. This is in the Christian Science Monitor but reproduced from The Responsive Community:

Controversial 'Passion' presents priceless opportunity for education
A toxic film delivers a dangerous, but teachable, moment
By Paula Fredriksen

And finally, IMDb now has a list of release dates for the film across the world:

Release Dates for The Passion of the Christ

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

---

Some new NT related reviews on the SBL's Review of Biblical Literature:

Hovenden, Gerald
Speaking in Tongues: The New Testament Evidence in Context
Reviewed by David Miller

Miguel García, Jose
La Catequesis Más Consoladora de San Pablo: Las luminosas oscuridades de 1 Cor 15
Reviewed by Lloyd W. Rogers

Hays, Richard B.
The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11
Reviewed by Arthur J. Dewey

Osborn, Grant
Revelation
Reviewed by Kevin W. Larson

---

Torrey Seland has updated his Resource Pages in Biblical Studies; you can go straight to the list of updates here:

Latest Updates February 2004

---

The Ancient / Classical History Blog draws attention to this page from one of the Passion of the Christ fan sites in Latin:

About The Passion in Latin
Passio est ecphrasis cinematograhica actuosa atque vivida, ostendens ultimas duodecim horas vitae Iesus Christus

---

The latest edition of Explorator has been posted:

Explorator 6.40

As usual, there is plenty of interest, including on Biblical topics. I think most of the Biblical related ones have been covered either here or in Paleojudaica, but you might have missed them. One worth drawing attention to that features in both places is Paul Flesher on the alleged tampering with the James Ossuary.

---

There's far too much around about The Passion of the Christ at the moment, especially for a film that hasn't been released yet, so it's nice to see a really glowing review of The Gospel of John on the National Review Online:

The Word, According to John
A Gospel on the silver screen.
By S. T. Karnick

The article has a useful run-through various Biblical epics and then talks about The Gospel of John which the author clearly loved:

Given the amount of talk involved, even for a three-hour film, one might expect The Gospel of John to come off as somewhat static and preachy, but it is not so at all. Saville uses a wide variety of cinematic techniques to keep things interesting. The camera moves about constantly, prowling through streets and passages, panning about, and shifting from one character to another, to give the viewer something interesting to look at while Plummer narrates. The visual tableaux are often quite beautiful, especially in the use of contrasts between light and shadow, but never in a way that distracts the audience from the story. In addition, the producers took great care to make the settings and costumes look as true to the time as possible, giving the film a new and interesting look. Even the soundtrack reflects this care, as the arranger included authentic recreations of instruments of the time.

In addition, Saville evoked an excellent performance from Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus Christ. Cusick presents the Christ as significantly more cheerful and self-assured than most such depictions have been. He smiles easily and often, and has a pleasant but strong demeanor and can be quite determined when that is appropriate. This makes his Christ rather less enigmatic than is usual for a screen depiction of Jesus, and it does not in any way decrease our reverence for him — the main point of John's Gospel, after all, is Christ's divinity. Given that emphasis, Cusick's and Saville's choice to show Jesus as a person who enjoys life and particularly enjoys serving God, his Father, in addition to being supernaturally wise, temperate, loving, and courageous, is exactly right . . . . .

. . . . . the film takes on the style of an A&E biographical documentary: A narrator tells the story, and actors clad in period costume reenact the events in settings as realistic as the producers can afford (which in this case, as mentioned earlier, are very persuasive indeed). The camera moves about the settings while Plummer articulates the Gospel text, just as the shot in a TV documentary pans across a still photo to create some sense of movement while the narrator describes the events it shows. Black-and-white flashbacks are also used to good effect here, tying the narrative strands together visually as Plummer recites the text.

Good analogy -- it does have that feel. I haven't finished watching yet, but at this stage I'm a little less enthusiastic about Christopher Plummer's narration which is surprisingly wooden and sometimes intrusive. I'd have liked to have seen more imaginative use sometimes of the ambiguities over narration / dialogue / monologue in the film, e.g. as soon as the narrative reaches John 3.16, Christopher Plummer's narration comes muscling in with "For God so loved the world . . ." And elsewhere Plummer gives us the crowd's thoughts rather than the words being put in the mouths of members of the crowd. But these are niggles; it's a joyous outing so far (I'm up to Chapter 8 now). I agree with Karnick about the flow of the narrative, the use of black-and-white flash backs and so on.

Karnick comments that in Cecil B. de Mille's The King of Kings (1927), one can actually see what Jesus writes in the ground in the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8. Since I don't have a copy of the film (I should get one), I don't know what he writes. Does anyone happen to know? Are there any other Jesus films where we can see what Jesus writes? I can't think of any. He doesn't write at all in this scene in Last Temptation. In The Gospel of John it's not easy to see what he is writing -- it looks like some kind of symbol.

Another review from a week ago from The Wichita Eagle:

'Gospel' brings the Bible to life
BY LAWRENCE TOPPMAN

Interesting conclusion -- something I'd been thinking about:

The film is fortunate in its casting, which borrows mostly from British television and theater. Daniel Kash is an impetuous Simon Peter, Stuart Bunce an observant John, Scott Handy a wild-eyed yet tender John the Baptist.

Yet this lily-white casting is also the main awkward element. Brown, black and olive-skinned extras abound, yet all Christ's close friends are Caucasians. In a movie that strives for fidelity to the story from which it springs, couldn't we have more honesty about the people who lived 2,000 years ago in the Middle East?

Labels: Visual Bible

---

There's a nice article in this week's Spectator about Sunday; Matthew Parris thinks he might have produced "the definitive analysis of the problem about Sundays":

The question that just won’t go away: is Sunday this week or next week?
Matthew Parris

So my editor was right. For the Creationist, Saturday being the Sabbath, the new week must start on Sunday. The Bible confirms this. Matthew xxviii 1: ‘In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.’ Dozens of New Testament references suggest the same convention. The early Palestinian Church followed it.

I'm not sure about "dozens"; nor am I sure about this:

So why did Christianity depart from the convention? Why did we not designate Saturday as our Day of Rest, and Friday and Saturday as our weekend?

As so often, St Paul seems to be the problem. In his arbitrary way, Paul started talking as though the Early Christian Holy Day had been switched from the Sabbath to the following day. He did not say why, but we can be pretty sure he was not relying on anything Christ said, or he would have cited Him. It is a fair assumption that Jesus, a good Jew, observed Saturday as His Holy Day. Paul was vague, however. The first text explicitly to mention Sunday worship is Justin’s First Apology, c. ad 150.

"As so often", Paul is cited as "the problem" without any corroborating evidence. Jesus is cited as "a good Jew" but Paul not. It's interesting just how easy it is in the journalistic world to blame Paul for everything. But then Parris also wants to "stop people with doctorates calling themselves doctors", so what would I know?

---

Another article has been placed on line by Christian History, who release their print articles incrementally over the weeks:

Opponents of Allegory
The scholars at Antioch rejected allegory in favor of history. But their interpretive method led some into heresy
by Steven Gertz

---

Roberta Allen has sent over a link to this on-line book of c. 100,000 words in PDF files on John's Gospel. The author received a First Class honours degree in Theology from Westminster College, Oxford. I have not had the chance to read the book yet and in linking to it here I am going on initial impressions that it is worth looking at. So by all means send me any feedback on this:

Interpreting the Interpreter: Intertextual Midrash in John's Gospel 1- 4
Roberta Allen

---

Jeff Peterson sent over this delightful piece from the Catholic World News

Post-It notes from the papal kitchen

It focuses on the pope's alleged opinion of some soup he had for dinner one night, in a series of emails beginning with "The boss said the soup was good. Nice work" through "Still hearing from all sides about your famous bouillabaise. You should chisel the word "Good!" on the plinth above your stove" to "The claim that he would have intended the word "good" in a positive sense is preposterous prima facie and does not merit credibility. A memorandum indicating the contrary that purports to have been issued from my office is a transparent forgery" and so on. Well worth a read.

This parodies the debate of a week or so ago of whether the pope did or did not say "It is as it was" about The Passion of the Christ. That story and the surrounding issues still have not gone away. One of the latest and most thorough pieces is here in yesterday's National Catholic Reporter which brings us up to date on the controversy:

Pope on Gibson movie: Was it as it was?
Sifting through spin and Vatican speak
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

It explains the situation from the beginning to now in the best way I've seen yet and it has the following conclusion which resonates with British readers in the week of Hutton:

Where does all this leave us?

No one can have ironclad certainty about what the pope said. Based on Navarro’s Jan. 22 statement, it is possible that the pope said something like “It is as it was,” but intended this as a private reaction. My original source continues to insist this is the case. On the other hand, there is no clear confirmation of the remark.

No one comes out of this mess looking good.

The makers of the film have been widely accused of either lying about the pope’s comment, or abusing John Paul’s confidence by publicizing a private remark. If either of those charges is true it would be reprehensible, but if not, their reputation has been done a serious injustice.

Reporters, myself certainly included, look like naifs who have been spun every which way, or worse yet, like willing partners in someone’s dishonesty. If nothing else, it’s a wake-up call about the dangers of reliance on anonymous sources, a fact of reporting life in the Vatican. Officials here rarely speak on the record, so those of us who cover the Vatican are constantly dealing with unnamed sources. This incident undoubtedly has raised the bar on caution for all of us.

---

I've scrapped the previous blog email address since it is getting so furiously spammed that there have been occasions when I have accidentally missed the odd authentic email. I'm trying something different, a bloglines email address that one can repeatedly change so as to run away from the spam. The only unfortunate thing is that it is unmemorable, so you'll have to go to "Click here to send email" which appears on the main page at the top, or in the header information if you are reading in an aggregator.

---

Since Blogger began to provide xml site feeds to enable their blogs to be read in an aggregator / blog reader, I have been looking for a good blog reader (see previous blog entry). Newsmonster I still cannot even persuade to install and Bottom Feeder has problems with the Blogger xml feeds and messes up any entry featuring links, especially adjacent links. My next attempt has been with Macromedia Central which features a nice looking Blog Reader. At first I thought that this was my solution. It looks good and it has no trouble representing the blogger xml site feeds neatly. But it seems that there are problems with this too. There's lots of other rubbish packaged in with it -- movie finders, weather finders etc., and all USA-based. It's very patchy in what it seems able to fetch from the blogs I want to read and it's "refresh" button doesn't appear to do anything. It's also not versatile enough. What I like about Bottom Feeder, if only it rendered the xml feeds intelligibly, is its versatility within given blogs and blog entries. My guess is that most of my readers simply read on the web since I've not had any feedback on this topic.

---

There's a fine article in today's New York Times on Jesus films, triggered of course by The Passion of the Christ:

Enraged Filmgoers: The Wages of Faith?
By A. O. SCOTT

The obvious thing to say about the skirmishes over "Passion," which will either subside or intensify once the movie opens nationally on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25, is that, since those earlier dust-ups, the sides have reversed. The conservative Christians who were so vocal in their condemnation of Mr. Godard, Mr. Smith and, especially, Mr. Scorsese, are now equally vocal in their defense of Mr. Gibson. An ugly undercurrent of anti-Semitism ran through some of the attacks on those supposedly sacrilegious movies, directed not at the filmmakers, none of whom were Jewish, but at the producers and studio heads who have periodically served as convenient targets for conspiracy-minded demagogues. Similar insinuations bubble beneath the surface of some of the defenses of Mr. Gibson's reportedly pious picture, which is itself accused of fomenting anti-Semitism by placing the blame for Jesus' death on the Jews.

This reversal is testimony both to the endlessness of the culture wars and to the changed landscape of battle. Those Catholics and evangelical Protestants who felt alienated from much of American commercial culture and who informed the earlier protests, have not only a powerful and glamorous Hollywood ally in Mr. Gibson but also a growing sense of cultural and political confidence. More and more it seems that religious expression — in the form of best-selling thrillers, pop music, movies and television programs — is entering the mainstream.

The article discusses Ben Hur, The Robe, King of Kings and how about this for a characterisation of The Greatest Story Ever Told?

In that film, Jesus, played by the young Max von Sydow, wanders through a Holy Land that resembles nothing so much as an endless showbiz talk show, populated by the likes of Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas and John Wayne, temporarily exchanging his cavalry badge for centurion's armor.

The article focuses specially on Last Temptation of Christ and Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, both of which the author obviously admires.

---

Rochelle Altman on Ioudaios points to a really scathing article on The Passion of the Christ in Salon.com:

Inside Mel Gibson's "Passion"
A clergyman infiltrates the grass-roots campaign for Gibson's new Gospel film to catch a screening and reports that Jews, Arabs -- and Christians -- should be worried.
By Cintra Wilson

The author has interviewed Rev. Mark Stanger, "canon precentor and associate pastor of San Francisco's premier mainstream Episcopalian church" who has seen the film and clearly hated everything about it. Much of the article is patently absurd, e.g. the claim that it is somehow anti-Arab on the grounds that Aramaic sounds a bit like Arabic:

Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim. Some of those words in Aramaic sound a little bit like Arabic -- Arabic is a Semitic language too. [In the film, it came off like] nasty foreigners were doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus. So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out.

I'm sure I don't need to point out the weaknesses in this! Much of the rest of the article is in the same vein and is pretty useless. But there were two elements of interest to me. One was a link to a site all about The Passion Outreach which features a short interview with James Caviezel (two and a half minutes). The other was the dismaying news that it seems Mel Gibson is still caricaturing Biblical scholarship:

Mel Gibson in his remarks after the film took a potshot at contemporary biblical scholarship -- he called scholars "revisionists" who think the gospel writers had agendas.

We need to add the rider that this is only a reported impression in an often silly article, but if it is accurate I think it a shame that this line is still being taken. The idea that opposition to this film comes from contemporary liberal Biblical scholars who do not want the Bible story retold is nonsense, especially in the light of The Gospel of John, which used several Biblical scholars of "liberal" leaning and otherwise, including Christians and Jews, and which is a literal word-for-word retelling of the Gospel of John, of all the Gospels the one most open to charges about anti-Judaism. It may well turn out that there is nothing to worry about over The Passion of the Christ, but if there is it will not be because it is somehow too close to the Passion Narratives of any or all of the canonical Gospels.

---

It turns out that not only were Foxman and Bretton-Granatoor present at the Global Pastors' Network preview screening of The Passion of the Christ last week, but so too was John Dominic Crossan. Crossan does not comment on the content of the film, but is critical of the secrecy surrounding it in this article on BeliefNet:

'Something Between Cover-up and Censorship'
A leading Bible scholar reacts to the secrecy surrounding an advance screening of 'The Passion'
John Dominic Crossan

Also included is a scan of the confidentiality agreement they had to sign.

---

David Meadows comments on the inter-blog discussion about megasites between Torrey Seland, Jim Davila, Stephen Carlson and me (what he calls the "biblioblogs"):

Maybe a Rant ... Megasites, Blogs, and Classics

There are some useful reflections here from the overlapping but different perspective in Classics. I haven't time to comment at the moment but will return to this later.

---

I mentioned recently that there is now a site feed available for this blog. Let me fill in a little more detail if you are unfamiliar with this. If you are in the habit of reading this blog and several others, you can access them from one place using an "aggregator" or "newsreader". Up until recently blogger, which powers this blog, did not provide the site feeds that are necessary to make reading in an aggregator possible. But that has now changed. Now blogger automatically generate a site feed in XML so that you can use the aggregators, newsreaders and so on and pick them up. The name given to this site feed is "Atom". Read more about atom here:

What is Atom?

I've only recently got into this game myself and so far with only mixed results. First, what newsreader or aggregator does one use? Newsmonster comes highly recommended but I can't get past first base on this -- I've downloaded the programme but it will not install. If anyone has any suggestions on that, I'd be grateful. Several of the others require one to part with money; one that doesn't is BottomFeeder. I found this straightforward to download, install and begin to use, but there's a problem with it -- the site feeds from blogger based sites don't represent properly in the content window (mine, Paleojudaica, Hypotyposeis, etc.). It seems especially not to like links. So while one can monitor the appearance of new posts in one's favourite blogs, one still has to open in one's browser. On the other hand, non-blogger based feeds seem to work fine, e.g. AKMA's. So if anyone has any bright ideas on how this could be fixed, I'd be interested to hear them.

---

If you've been following the news stories surrounding The Passion of the Christ, you will be familiar with the name Abraham Foxman, one of the critics of the early script of the film and at the centre of the anti-Semitic charge. Up until the weekend he had not been able to get to see the film and finally sneaked in to see it with a group of Christian pastors in Florida. There are lots of stories on the net about this, but this article in PalmBeachPost.com is written by Foxman (along with Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor) and gives their current thinking:

'Passion' relies on theme of anti-Semitism

---

This article by Steve Gertig in The Gateway (The University of Nebraska at Omaha's Student Newspaper) advertises an academic symposium on issues arising from The Passion of the Christ:

UNO, Creighton to host Mel Gibson's Passion symposium

UNO and Creighton University will host a symposium on the movie The Passion of the Christ, to discuss the movie's meaning Thursday . . . . Bill Blizek, a professor of philosophy at UNO and editor of the Journal of Religion and Film, is the organizer of the event. He said that UNO and Creighton felt the need to have the forum because it is a "powerful movie" and has a famous director. Blizek said "Mel Gibson felt moved to make the movie."

There is also news that "If you can't make it, UNO's Journal of Religion and Film and Creighton's Journal of Religion and Society will have transcripts on their respective Web sites. Indeed if you hop over to the Journal of Religion and Film, it has a full programme in PDF:

Exploring Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ'

There are some very interesting looking papers.

---

The EWTN site has now added an archived version of Raymond Arroyo's "new exclusive second interview regarding 'The Passion of the Christ'" which was first broadcast over the weekend:

The World Over

In the interview, Gibson breaks his silence, speaking for the first time about charges that his film, The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic. He talks about his bold vision for the project and his motivation for making the film. Gibson tells Arroyo, “It reflects my beliefs-I’ve never done that before.” He also candidly comments on the controversy surrounding the movie, his resistance to altering the film, and his personal commitment to press forward: “I don’t know if I will ever work again. I’ve said that this is a career killer and it could well be, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t care,” Gibson says in the interview. Based on biblical accounts, the movie, "The Passion of the Christ," depicts the last 12 hours of Christ’s life on earth and will be released in the U.S. on Ash Wednesday, February 25th. EWTNews Director, Raymond Arroyo was on set, in Italy during the filming of “The Passion of the Christ” last year, and is the only broadcast journalist to conduct an extended interview with Mel Gibson about the project.

Thanks also to Helenann Francis for this news item from the BBC:

Flak for Jesus film 'to worsen'

---

Interesting little Passion-related story on the Always On Network / Blog, Davo's Dispatch #2:

Speaking of events of Biblical proportion, one of my dearest Davos friends, musician and social activist Peter Gabriel, told me a story about "The Passion of the Christ." The controversial new film depicts the last 12 hours of Christ’s life on earth, and it turns out that the movie’s Website had incorporated some of Peter’s songs without permission. This fact set in motion a dialogue between Real World (Peter’s entertainment company) lawyers and those of the movie producer, Mel Gibson.

As Peter explained it, Mr. Gibson called him immediately to apologize and ended up making a donation to Peter’s non-profit organization, Witness, for his penance. He also agreed to send a tape of the movie to Peter for his private viewing. "I watched it and wept," Peter recounted. He says it is a very violent movie, but well directed with amazing cinematography.

And the controversy that the film is anti-Semetic [sic], painting Jews as "the killers of Jesus"? Peter points out, "Well, the Pharisees certainly didn’t look too good, but neither did the Romans."

I'm not quite sure where the "some of Peter's songs" is coming from; an earlier version of the teaser trailer used a Peter Gabriel track and that may have been on the official web site -- I can't recall. I do remember clearly that there were a bunch of samples of Peter Gabriel's songs on the site that describes itself as "the premier international fan site", which has been around for some time; and that site did remove the Peter Gabriel songs pretty quickly after they'd arrived.

Incidentally, the official site now does have John Debney listed as the one who has scored the film, with a little bio.

---

Stephen Carlson makes some useful comments on the discussion we've been having on the future of the "megasites" or "supersites". I particularly like his focus on the question of the role of the "editorial judgement of their [the sites'] builders". He also reflects on my comments on the way that specialized areas interact with the supersite model:

The way I see it, there are still plenty of opportunities to carve out a niche for yourself specializing in a segment you feel most passionate about (that passion will sustain your motivation during the tedious parts like keeping links up-to date). If could be anything, such as "Anything you wanted to know about Philemon but were afraid to ask" as long as you have the passage and the editorial work is good. If the specialized site is good enough, some of the burden undertaken by the megasite maintainers can be eased.

---

Latest additions to the Review of Biblical Literature on the NT side are:

Berger, Klaus
Translated by Charles Muenchow
Identity and Experience in the New Testament
Reviewed by Douglas Geyer

Das, A. Andrew
Paul, the Law, and the Covenant
Reviewed by Jerry L. Sumney

Dubis, Mark
Messianic Woes in First Peter: Suffering and Eschatology in 1 Peter 4:12-19
Reviewed by Eric J. Greaux

Jones, F. Stanley
Which Mary?: The Marys of Early Christian Tradition
Reviewed by Stephen W. Felder

Reiner, Andy M.
Miracle and Magic: A Study in the Acts of the Apostles and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana
Reviewed by Kimberley Stratton

---

My DVDs of the new Visual Bible Gospel of John film arrived today. Unfortunately I have too much marking, teaching preparation and admin. to do to find time to watch it all so I'm taking it in segments. I've enjoyed it very much so far. It's nice to have a Jesus film in which Jesus appears from pretty early on. As Christopher Plummer narrates the Prologue, there are nature scenes, sunsets etc., John the Baptist comes in and gradually you see Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus walking -- but his face only finally revealed at the end of the Prologue. Cusick has a warm smile and seems rather engaging.

The film does have that typical Bible-film look about it. John the Baptist looks like an actor with a false beard and lanky long hair. Nothing has ever quite got the blood and dirt in the way that The Last Temptation of Christ managed, though I suppose The Passion of the Christ looks like it is going to be far more graphic in its violence than anything we've seen before.

I was intrigued to see how they would depict John the Baptist's speech about the dove descending on Jesus -- would they make it a baptism scene, i.e. would they allow themselves to be influenced by the Synoptic context? In fact they don't show Jesus getting baptized by John but they do show him arising up out of the water -- in flashback -- as John tells the crowd about Jesus.

The Wedding at Cana has Jesus' mother dressed in traditional blue so that she is instantly recognisable. In some ways this is a bold decision given that so few Jesus films do dress her in icon blue. The words of the Good News Bible, "Madam . . .", along with Jesus' smile, tend to make his words to her less harsh than they might otherwise have been.

The Temple scene is pretty interesting -- Jesus is quite animated -- far more so than in the older films like The Greatest Story Ever Told (Max von Sydow as Jesus making a carefully choreographed token effort at causing a scene) but it does not compare to the Scorsese (Last Temptation of Christ) temple scene -- one of the finest moments in Jesus film history. The scene did remind me of the Scorsese temple scene, though; the way that the Jewish leaders come down the steps to see what is causing the commotion and find themselves confronting Jesus directly -- this was very similar to Last Temptation even if it looked like a rather pale reflection of it.

Though I'm only up to the end of John 2, it's already clear to me that the production values are a bit higher than they were with the previous Visual Bible outing, Matthew, but it is only a bit. It does have a very similar feel to it, Christopher Plummer's narration relentlessly marching on just as Richard Kiley's did in Matthew. A nice feature of that film is missing in the new one. In Matthew, we sometimes see the aged apostle dictating to his scribe and it created a feeling of distance between the text and the events being narrated. But in Gospel of John the narrator is unseen. One improvement with Gospel of John is that we don't have the Bible verse ticking away in the corner as we did with Matthew. More reflections as I watch my way through it.

Incidentally, getting hold of it is not easy if you are outside the U.S.A. or Canada. It's not been shown in any British cinemas to my knowledge and there is no video or DVD release here. You can't order it from the official site because it will not ship to the UK or elsewhere. But there is a way round it if, like me, you are desperate to see it -- new copies are appearing every day or two on ebay. And if you are lucky (I was), you can even get it just a touch cheaper than it is on the official site, though the price gets pushed right up to the limit and sometimes over it. Also, it's useless if you haven't got a multi-regional DVD player because the ones on sale in the U.S. are all Region 1.

Labels: Visual Bible

---

Carl Conrad announced on b-greek today that he has now has the following ready in PDF format:

Robert W. Funk, A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek² (Missoula, Montana: 1977) Volume I, pp. xxv-xxxii, 1-30

Conrad explains it like this: "an extract from Robert W. Funk's 3-volume textbook of Koine greek, first published in 1973 and long out of print. The materials here extracted set forth the rationale of Funk's method and sketch the linguistic framework on which the textbook and teaching program are organized. I have long thought that these are the principles that ought to govern the teaching and learning of ancient Greek at any level, whether Homeric, Classical Attic, or Koine."

Labels: b-greek

---

There is now an RSS feed available for this blog so that you can read it in an aggregator alongside your other favourite blogs. This is the link for the site feed:

Site feed

And it is in the column on the left (scroll down a bit). Some readers have asked about this but others may have no idea what I am talking about, so I'll explain a little more later.

---

Thanks to Jim West for this link:

European Association of Biblical Studies

This is a new society "created in order to promote biblical and related studies in Europe". The web site provides information about officers, the constitution, forthcoming conference, links and so on.

---

Jim Davila and Torrey Seland comment further on the megasite question. I like Jim's comment that "There's plenty of room for experimenting in cyberspace". One thing is clear to me and that is that I would not enjoy the role of a kind of general editor of a megasite; I'm not too keen on anything that would take the fun (for me) out of the work on the web.

---

The latest Explorator has been posted:

Explorator 6.39

It includes a link to an article on the James ossuary from the Toledo Blade. It is by David Yonke and is all about James Harrell's views:

Debate continues over authenticity
UT professor says Israeli study flawed

. . . . "What I think happened is that they threw this committee together very quickly. It's like a road accident: The first people on the scene are not always the best to help. That's exactly what happened. I think there will be another, better-qualified committee to study it and issue a new report."

Dr. Harrell said Dr. Shanks has asked him if he would consider organizing such a blue-ribbon panel.

"I sort of welcome the opportunity, and in a way I don't," Dr. Harrell said. "It's such a controversial issue. You can get caught up with it. Not everybody's going to be happy with what you do, no matter what your conclusion."

Also included is a link to this New York Times article explaining the bizarre events of this week surrounding the Vatican and The Passion of the Christ:

Mystery Drama, With the Pope Cast as a Movie Critic
FRANK BRUNI

It doesn't add much to what we already know, but it's clear and full.

---

William Fulco of Loyola Marymount University is the man who did the translating into Aramaic and Latin for The Passion of the Christ. Thanks to Jim West on Xtalk for the link to this article in the Naples Daily News by Terry Mattingly which features some comments from Fulco:

On Religion: 'Passion of Christ' has been passion of others

---

Wieland Willker comments on the discussion that has been going on between Torrey Seland, Jim Davila and me on the future of the megasites (see my most recent post with links; and Torrey Seland's most recent post with links). Wieland writes:

I think this cannot be done by one individual alone. I would therefore suggest that we should gather certain individuals for small sections. Every individual is responsible for one section under the head of the NT-Gateway. This way everything looks the same and is easily navigatable. This is already the case with the "Open Web Directory" where you can become an editor of a certain category (check http://dmoz.org). An editor should keep the links up-to-date, add new links, and have some comments now and then. The only problem I see at the moment is how to manage the access authorization for the editors.

I have wondered about something like this before and it might provide a useful way of getting the balance right between an evolutionary approach and some degree of prescription or organisation. However, at this stage, at least as far as the NT Gateway is concerned, I am a bit concerned about the idea because (a) it might take as much organisation and maintenance as the doing the site myself; (b) it would -- as Wieland mentions -- mean organising access authorization for the editors; (c) there is the risk of patchiness across the site, with some editors doing their sections well and others less well; and (d) I am not sure that the NT Gateway would be the right forum to do this -- there are other megasites and I don't particularly want to land myself with a kind of imperialistic role! But on the other hand I don't want to pour cold water on this; I am intrigued by the suggestion and there may be something in it. Let me think a little more.

One final comment on how something like this is actually evolving already. On many occasions I simply point to a place where you can go to get the best gateway on a given subject. I have a little section of Judaica, for example, which just points to some of the major places to go for extra information -- it would be madness even to try to be comprehensive there. Likewise the Gospel of Thomas. Even though that is one of my research interests, there is no point my trying to provide a comprehensive set of links because one already has Steve Davies's Gospel of Thomas homepage, so I point to that and one or two other leading resources. My guess is that this is the way that things will continue to develop, so unofficially bringing about something like what Wieland is suggesting but on a more organic, evolutionary model.

---

Yesterday I commented on the intrigue growing around whether the Pope did or did not say "It is as it was" about The Passion of the Christ. Some pretty serious charges were beginning to emerge. Now Peggy Noonan, who was one of the two first journalists to have reported the Pope's alleged comment, has set out the case from her perspective, in the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page (with thanks to Jim Davila for the link):

'Passion' and Intrigue
The story of the Vatican and Mel Gibson's film gets curiouser

If you've not been following it, the gist is this: the Vatican apparently reported the Pope as saying "It is as it was" and then a month or so later apparently denied it. Both Noonan (one of the journalists at the centre of this) and Steve McEveety (the producer of The Passion of the Christ) have emails from the pope's official spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, which seem to back up the quotation, unequivocally in the case of the McEveety one (sanctioning that the quotation is to be repeated "again and again and again"). Navarro-Valls apparently claims that the email to McEveety is not genuine but fabricated. Have a look at Noonan's full and patient examination of all this which concludes with a paragraph beginning, "Believe me, it is painful to be accused however implicitly of being the accessory to a lie" and with the promise of more to come.

One thing that is not yet clear to me is whether the emails to McEveety have been analyzed. The EWTN report yesterday said "Noonan and Dreher were able to establish that the email message to McEveety was sent from Navarro-Valls' email address, and relayed through a computer at the Vatican". Noonan's article, however, only confirms that the email to her was relayed through the Vatican and her email is nothing like as unequivocal as McEveety's.

---

Some more news has emerged on the soundtrack for The Passion of the Christ. It seems clear that John Debney has composed and recorded the score (see previous blog entries on this), that Mel Gibson himself sings on it and that the singing will be in Aramaic. No mention of Lisa Gerrard. This article from Music in the Movies:

Mel Gibson sings in 'Passion Of The Christ'

The score will be available on CD from Sony Classical on 24th February, one day before the film's world premiere. The music is written for orchestra and choir singing in Aramaic (the film's dialogue is also in Aramaic and Latin). According to a press release, director Mel Gibson lended "his own voice to the singing and chanting" in the score.

One of the most recent publicity trips has been to Florida and you can watch a short video about it at Wesh.com:

Gibson Visits Florida To Promote 'Passion'

---

There's a little more concrete information on this story on EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network):

Vatican Public-Relations Debacle on Gibson's "Passion"

. . . Meanwhile two prominent American columnists reported that, shortly after the Pope's comment was reported, Navarro-Valls had encouraged McEveety to use the quotation. In separate columns published on January 22 in response to the denial from Archbishop Dziwisz, Peggy Noonan and Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News reported that they had seen an email message from Navarro-Valls to McEveety, in which the papal spokesman told the film's producer that he should feel free to cite the Pope's comment "again and again and again."
Confronted with that email message, Navarro-Valls denied that it was authentic. But Noonan and Dreher were able to establish that the email message to McEveety was sent from Navarro-Valls' email address, and relayed through a computer at the Vatican. On January 22, Navarro-Valls issued a short, bland statement confirming only that the Pope had indeed seen the Passion. Without directly responding to reports that the Pope had issued a one-sentence comment, the Vatican spokesman concluded: "It is the Holy Father's custom not to express public judgments on artistic works-- judgments which are always open to diverse evaluations of an aesthetic nature."

EWTN are to broadcast an interview with Mel Gibson over the weekend, first showing 8 pm (USA) ET. I am not familiar with EWTN but it looks like you can watch live over the internet, so it might be worth tuning in. Full details here:

The World Over with Raymond Arroyo

---

There is a new Bible Review available for February 2004. Unfortunately, they seem to have discontinued their practice of making selected articles available on-line. Now it's just a teaser paragraph for each one:

Bible Review, February 2004

It also seems that they have scrapped all their older on-line full text content -- very disappointing. I'll give it a little to see if any of it returns but if not, I'll have to take off the links to individual articles on the NT Gateway.

---

The Society of Biblical Literature Mark Group now has its own web page with details about the group, how to propose papers and so on:

The Mark Group of the Society of Biblical Literature

---

Like everything to do with The Passion of the Christ, this story doesn't go away. And all the time the film is getting lots of free publicity. It is sometimes said that Scorsese used the controversy surrounding The Last Temptation of Christ as a means of generating and encouraging the necessary free publicity for a film that otherwise would not have done so well at the box office. Anyway, the latest is that CNN's Vatican analyst John Allen feels quite sure that the pope did say this and has sources who, he says, confirm it. This article from Newsmax.com:

CNN Vatican Analyst: Sources Confirm Pope's Mel Gibson Quote

---

There are some useful reflections on the article on the James Ossuary by Eric Meyers in both Paleojudaica, "I'm not going to put much stock in it until the anonymous archaeologist goes public and gives us a firsthand account I can evaluate for myself", and Hypotyposeis -- excerpt:

"Unfortunately, the anonymity of the witness is a serious cause for concern, and until the person is willing to come forward and be "cross-examined" to determine if that's what he really told Meyers or whether his recollection is solid, the charge has to be considered pure hearsay. It is also unfortunate in terms of being able to evaluate the charge that "the dealer's shop has recently closed and the one-time owner of the ossuary has since moved to Europe." All we're left with is the word of an anonymous source, a level of reporting that is usually considered to be insufficient in modern journalism."

---

Thanks to Loren Rosson on Corpus Paul for reference to this new book:

Bruce Winter, Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities

It is published by Eerdmans who provide this blurb:

In Roman law you were what you wore. This legal principle became highly significant because, beginning in the first century A.D., a “new” kind of woman emerged across the Roman empire — a woman whose provocative dress and sometimes promiscuous lifestyle contrasted starkly with the decorum of the traditional married woman. What a woman chose to wear came to identify her as either “new” or “modest.”

Augustus legislated against the “new” woman. Philosophical schools encouraged their followers to avoid embracing her way of life. And, as this fascinating book demonstrates for the first time, the presence of the “new” woman was also felt in the early church, where Christian wives and widows were exhorted to emulate neither her dress code nor her conduct.

Using his extensive knowledge both of the Graeco-Roman world and of the New Testament writings, Bruce Winter shows how changing social mores among women impacted the Pauline communities. This helps to explain the controversial texts on marriage veils in 1 Corinthians, instructions in 1 Timothy regarding dress code and the activities of young widows, and exhortations in Titus for older women to call new wives “back to their senses” regarding their marriage and family responsibilities.

Based on a close investigation of neglected literary and archaeological evidence, Roman Wives, Roman Widows makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of first-century women, including their participation in public life as lawyers, magistrates, and political figures, which in turn affected women’s ministry in the Pauline communities.

See also the companion web site at Tyndale House which features a Photo Gallery.

---

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS

A Conference to be held at Lincoln College, Oxford, 5-7 April 2004

Speakers include:

Bart D Ehrman
John Kloppenborg Verbin
Helmut Koester
William Petersen
Frances Young

A limited number of places is available (residential, £160; non-residential, £80)

Further information, including the full list of speakers and booking form, is available at the conference website:

www.theology.ox.ac.uk/news/tntataf.shtml

Announcement forwarded by Andrew Gregory.

---

I've been looking out for a UK release date for The Passion of the Christ and at last there seems to be one. BBC On-line, at the end of another article about the pope's (non)endorsement of the film, gives 26 March.

---

You may have seen this already, but it's worth mentioning again if not. This from Bible and Interpretation today:

Well-known Israeli Archeologist Casts More Doubt on Authenticity of James Ossuary
Ossuary spotted in dealer's shop lacking the “brother of Jesus” element of the inscription
Eric Meyers

---

You wait for a bus for an hour and two come at once. BSW are really pulling out the stops at the moment and now have added another volume, full text on-line:

Filología Neotestamentaria 9 (1996)

Artículos

Sebastian Schneider, «Glaubensmängel in Korinth. Eine neue Deutung der ,Schwachen, Kranken, Schlafenden' in 1 Kor 11,30», Vol. 9 (1996) 3-20

Dave Mathewson, «Verbal Aspect in Imperatival Constructions in Pauline Ethical Injunctions», Vol. 9 (1996) 21-36

J. K. Elliott, «The Greek Manuscript Heritage of the Book of Acts», Vol. 9 (1996) 37-50

Ramón Puig Massana, «Acerca de una reciente publicación de José O'Callaghan sobre los papiros de la cueva 7 de Qumrán ("Los primeros testimonios del Nuevo Testamento. Papirología Neotestamentaria", El Almendro, Córdoba, 1995)», Vol. 9 (1996) 51-60

Josep Rius-Camps, «Las variantes de la Recensión Occidental de los Hechos de los Apóstoles (VII) (Hch 3,1-26)» , Vol. 9 (1996) 61-76

Jenny Heimerdinger, «Word Order in Koine Greek. Using a Text-Critical Approach to Study Word Order Patterns in the Greek Text of Acts», Vol. 9 (1996) 139-180

Jeffrey T. Reed and Ruth A. Reese, «Verbal Aspect, Discourse Prominence, and the Letter of Jude» , Vol. 9 (1996) 181-200

Josep Rius-Camps, «Las variantes de la Recensión Occidental de los Hechos de los Apóstoles (VIII) (Hch 4,1-22)» , Vol. 9 (1996) 201-216

---

These arrived last week but I left the email on my work PC (and blogging is mainly done from home). The titles below are those specifically relating to the NT.

Review of Biblical Literature

Beavis, Mary Ann, ed.
The Lost Coin: Parables of Women, Work and Wisdom
Reviewed by Athalya Brenner

Hagner, Donald A.
Encountering the Book of Hebrews: An Exposition
Reviewed by Goutzioudis Moschos

Hays, Richard B.
The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Levine, Amy-Jill and Marianne Blickenstaff, eds.
A Feminist Companion to Luke
Reviewed by Esther Fuchs

Smith, Dennis E.
From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World
Reviewed by Peter-Ben Smit

Verhey, Allen
Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life
Reviewed byJennifer Wright Knust

Webb, Joseph M. and Robert Kysar
Greek for Preachers
Reviewed by Kerry Robichaux

---

Thanks to Jim West for this link from Newsmax.com:

Mel Gibson Rebuts Vatican Denial

Mel Gibson's spokesman issued a statement late Monday saying there is no reason to believe the Vatican's denial that the Pope commented favorably about the controversial film "The Passion of the Christ." . . . .

. . . . . "Based on all previous correspondence and conversations held directly between representatives of the film and the official spokesperson for the Pope, Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, there is no reason to believe that the Pope's support of the film 'isn't as it was'."

---

I commented on Saturday on Frank Rich's article, Chutzpah and Spiritual McCarthyism, which went investigating the pope's apparent endorsement of The Passion of the Christ. Well now it seems that the Vatican is denying that the pope ever said this. This story is already getting repeated everywhere, but its origin seems to be this article from the Catholic News Service:

Pope never commented on Gibson's 'Passion' film, says papal secretary
By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope John Paul II never said "It is as it was" after watching Mel Gibson's film on the passion of Jesus, said the pope's longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz.

"The Holy Father told no one his opinion of this film," the archbishop told Catholic News Service Jan. 18 . . .

. . . . . The co-producer of the film, Steve McEveety, was in Rome in early December to host private screenings of a rough cut of the film for Vatican and other Catholic officials.

After the pope and Archbishop Dziwisz watched the film, the archbishop met with McEveety and with Jan Michelini, an assistant director of the film.

According to published reports, McEveety and Michelini said Archbishop Dziwisz told them the pope reacted positively to the film and said, "It is as it was."

But, Archbishop Dziwisz told CNS, "That is not true."

"I said clearly to McEveety and Michelini that the Holy Father made no declaration," the archbishop said.

"I said the Holy Father saw the film privately in his apartment, but gave no declaration to anyone," he said. "He does not make judgments on art of this kind; he leaves that to others, to experts."

There is a little more in the New York Times in an article by Frank Bruni:

Vatican Raises Doubts About Pope's View of 'Passion' Film

Until Archbishop Dziwisz's interview with the Catholic News Service, a news agency for Catholic publications that is affiliated with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, no Vatican official had gone on the record to confirm or deny the pope's reported remark.

That Archbishop Dziwisz spoke out is extremely unusual. He is closer to the pope and spends more time with him than virtually anyone else at the Vatican. Partly because of that, he almost never gives formal interviews to reporters.

His decision to talk to Ms. Wooden suggests that either he, the pope or other Vatican officials close to the pope had become concerned about the degree to which the pope's imprimatur was being placed on "The Passion."

A telephone message left today at Icon Productions, which is responsible for the movie, was not immediately returned.

One prominent Roman Catholic official close to the Vatican said today, "I have reason to believe — and I think — that the pope probably said it."

"But I think there's some bad feeling at the Vatican that the comment was used the way it was," the official added. "It's all a little soap-operatic."

Curiouser and curiouser.

---

Two correspondents have recently asked me if there is an RSS feed so that they can view this blog using an aggregator. I'm afraid that at the moment the answer is no. Although I host this blog on the NT Gateway's server space, I use the blogger software to run it and at the moment blogger does not support RSS. They do have it available on their "blogger pro", but upgrades to blogger pro are currently suspended. But they promise that they should be introducing RSS feeds soon. I'll make an announcement when it is available.

---

Christian History magazine steadily makes more of its articles in a given issue available on the web. The latest to be added from Issue 80 (Fall 2003), with its special focus on The First Bible Teachers, is an article on Origen:

Origen: Friend or Foe?
He has been called the father of Christian biblical exegesis, the first systematic theologian … and a heretic. How should we assess his legacy today?
by John R. Franke

---

Thanks to AKMA for some interesting comments on Tom Wright on postmodernity:

Wright on [Postmodernism]?

---

I took the What Christian Theologian are you? quiz and discover that I am Erasmus. A bit of fun for an idle moment.

---

I've just been sent over this URL by Keith Simons. My guess is that it won't be of much interest to most readers of this blog because it is aimed at those who require a simple English resource, but I mention it anyway. It is developed by a group called Wycliffe Associates and is a site full of Bible commentaries and other materials written in what they call "EasyEnglish" (all one word):

EasyEnglish Info

---

I've added a link on Paul: Books, Articles and Reviews to the following article reproduced on David Trobisch's homepage:

David Trobisch, “The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 and Paul's Letter to the Galatians", Christopher Seitz and Kathryn Greene-McCreight (ed.), Theological Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) (PDF file)

---

I've mentioned the Hollywood Jesus web site before, and specifically on The Passion of the Christ. It has now added a lot of additional material including a review of the film by David Bruce:

The Passion of the Christ: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review

---

I've added a link to my page on the Pasolini film, The Gospel According to St Matthew:

Hollywood Jesus: The Gospel According to St Matthew

This is a useful breakdown of the film into segments with clips in Real Video alongside the corresponding portions of text from Matthew's Gospel.

---

Explorator 6.38 now available and, as usual, full of interesting bits and bobs.

---

Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) is reviewed pretty favourably in the latest Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

Review by Adam H. Becker, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.01.07

---

Stephen Carlson's excellent review of Paul Foster, "Is it Possible to Dispense with Q?", NovT 45 (2003): 313-337 continues on Hypotyposeis, now in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. I have commented on Parts 1 and 2. I'd now like to comment on Part 3. Carlson comments on Foster's attempt to bring Luke's Prologue into play against the Farrer Theory, and specifically Luke's mention of the πολλοί (many) predecessors. As Carlson points out, the Two-Source Theory is no better off than Farrer here (Mark and Q rather than Mark and Matthew) and he makes the useful point that the wording "a narrative (or account, διήγησιν) of the events that were fulfilled among us" could tell in Matthew's favour since that sounds more like a description of Matthew than of Q.

I would add that Foster is walking a difficult line here. On the one hand, in the context being discussed above, he is keen to criticise Farrer and Goulder for their minimal sources position, no Q, no M, no L, and to make this criticism in the light of Luke's Preface. On the other hand, later in the article, he wishes to criticise me for not adhering to a minimal sources position, arguing that my acceptance of the role of oral traditions places me in a "thin end of the wedge" situation, that if I accept the role of oral tradition, I may as well accept Q. There is one minor problem and one major problem here. The minor problem is that Foster is misrepresenting Austin Farrer's views. As Carlson points out here, and as I pointed out to Foster before the publication of the article, Farrer accepted the role of oral tradition alongside Matthew's use of Mark and Luke's use of both (particularly "Dispensing": 85). The major problem is that the acceptance of the role played by oral tradition in the development of the Gospels is, I think, a real strength and it cannot realistically be used against me. Two-Source theorists do not see the acceptance of the role of oral tradition as compromising their theory and nor should Farrer theorists either. The only reason that we have got into the kind of situation where people think it is a weakness is because of the way that Michael Goulder has attempted to set up the terms of the debate. He set up a kind of hard-line version of the Farrer theory in which there are only literary sources with no oral tradition. He has been rightly criticised for this by E. P. Sanders and M. Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels, Eric Franklin, Luke: Critic of Matthew, Interpreter of Paul and most extensively by me in Goulder and the Gospels, Part 2 and Case Against Q: 64-66 (etc.). All in all I think Foster needs to decide whether it is a weakness for the Farrer theory to embrace a role for oral tradition (Farrer, Sanders and Davies, Franklin, me), in which case it is necessary to explain why this is not a weakness for the Two-Source Theory, or whether it is a weakness to deny a role for oral tradition (Goulder), in which case there can be no objection to my endorsement of it. Otherwise we simply have a "heads I win, tails you lose" scenario.

On a related note, Farrer was ahead of his time in dispensing with M and L as Streeterian written sources that could be dated and located. I've read very little in recent times that endorses M and L as literary entities, one of the few being Kim Paffenroth's The Story of Jesus According to L (JSNTSup, 147; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), cf. my review.

---