tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57598442024-03-17T23:04:26.643-04:00NT BlogMark Goodacre's academic blog. Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University, in the Religious Studies Department. Visit my <a href="http://markgoodacre.org">homepage</a>, follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/goodacre">twitter</a>, or contact me by <a href="mailto:goodacre@duke.edu">email</a>.Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.comBlogger4020125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-46493782586074740152023-09-20T21:10:00.006-04:002023-09-20T21:26:29.246-04:00The Resurrection of the NT Pod<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio2BJgk4DX5I1WrZsul-mywm5npjecgpTncOQ1yC_YQo75HUjHnHNJZQd1W94PWsTwcE_tArTN8C3FEqe7azXPAlGvbXogyPSHl5tdI-0txZlqZ5tt_TpzFANpXWw-0wsfQBFFI1EqXUewlRwjuXPUPIKvkmHa-Iij4mXJkyxQsPeABh2izBa9Vg/s320/New%20NT%20Pod.png" width="320" /></a></div>After spending a lot of time in university administrative jobs (Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department Chair, and so on), I find myself back in the happy position this semester of being able to devote time to the things I love doing, like teaching, research -- and my too long neglected podcast! <p></p><p>I began podcasting back in 2009, and in the early years I was fairly prolific, but as life took over, I produced fewer and fewer episodes. There have been a few false dawns before, but I am happy to say that this one seems to be real!</p><p><br /></p><p>There are three new episodes so far, one for each of the last three weeks. These are the new episodes:</p><p><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2023/08/nt-pod-100-new-ways-through-maze.html"><b>NT Pod 100: New Ways Through the Maze</b></a></p><p><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2023/09/nt-pod-101-100-bible-films-in.html"><b>NT Pod 101: 100 Bible Films: In Conversation with Matthew Page</b></a></p><p><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2023/09/nt-pod-102-has-q-been-discovered.html"><b>NT Pod 102: Has Q Been Discovered?</b></a></p><p>Eps. 100 and 102 are both the traditional short episodes with me talking about something, but Ep. 101 is an extended episode featuring a conversation with the brilliant Matthew Page about his new BFI book on Bible Films. Episode 103 is currently in what they call "post production" (it's another extended episode), but it will be out by the end of the week. </p><p>To coincide with the NT Pod's resurrection, I've been finding ways of making it easier to find. It's now on <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d39e934b-2699-4501-b306-62e6801cdc7f">Amazon Music</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4S2SB9eIt9ESMo7rwd8IFk">Spotify</a>, and <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/NT%20Pod">Google Podcasts</a>, as well as <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nt-pod/id319974061">Apple Podcasts</a>, where it has always had a home (back when it was iTunes, and iTunes U). </p><p>And today, I finished the Herculean task of getting the entire archive uploaded to Youtube. You can find every episode now on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@podacre">my Youtube Channel, @podacre</a>. Please head over there to subscribe if you'd like to see some of the forthcoming video episodes of the NT Pod. </p><p>As well as the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NTPod">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/NTPod">Twitter</a> pages, there is now a new <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nt.pod/">Instagram</a> page. So if you'd like to stay bang up to date, please follow one of these. And huge thanks to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-aguilar-goodacre-26627a15a/">Lauren Aguilar </a>for her work on the NT Pod's social media profile in recent weeks. </p><p>I am hugely grateful too to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/violagoodacre/">Viola Goodacre</a> for the revised version of the NT Pod logo.</p><p><br /></p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-30754029672656144622023-06-22T09:29:00.005-04:002023-06-22T09:58:18.665-04:00Theodore J. (Ted) Weeden Obituary<p>Many thanks to Ken Olson for sending over the sad news of the death of Theodore J. Weeden. His obituary is here:</p><p><a href="https://www.crawfordfuneralhome.com/obituary/RevDrTheodoreTed-Weeden?fbclid=IwAR0ZDDaDnG6m1RwLZHMBjKDAhf0R2bKi0FZBEPal8EwdjbRVv4huuKp9tac"><b>Rev. Dr. Theodore (Ted) Weeden</b></a></p><p>Weeden's <i>Mark: Traditions in Conflict </i>was one of the first books of academic Biblical Studies I read as an undergraduate student in Oxford. I was doing the Mark's Gospel paper with Canon John Fenton at Christ Church, and I think it was the second essay (of eight) that asked us to explore Mark's portrait of the disciples, still a perennial question. </p><p>I hadn't heard anything of Theodore Weeden for many years until one day, on the old "Crosstalk" email list (dedicated to the study of the historical Jesus), a certain "Ted Weeden" began posting. One of us asked, "Are you, by any chance, related to Theodore J. Weeden, author of <i>Mark: Traditions in Conflict</i>?" "The very same!" he replied. </p><p>In the early 2000s, Weeden began attending the SBL Annual Meeting, and when I was organizing a panel on Richard Bauckham (et al)'s book about gospel communities, I invited Weeden to participate. I was delighted that he accepted, and I well remember the fondness with which he was greeted by the packed room, all of whom knew his classic book. </p><p>As the obituary above mentions, he was involved with the Jesus Seminar and the Westar Institute in his later years, and he became very interested in Historical Jesus research. One of the most interesting contributions was his critique of Kenneth Bailey's model of "informal controlled oral tradition", which built on observations made by Ken Olson. </p><p><br /></p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-89630308188234987132023-06-20T09:08:00.008-04:002023-06-20T09:09:36.008-04:00Dr Laura Robinson's Crocheted Dolls<p> Lots of readers will know Laura Robinson from the podcast she co-hosts with Ian Mills, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR8SeIgZf4x0-wUMWVvWchw">New Testament Review</a>. Others will know her from her hugely popular <a href="https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn">Twitter posts</a>. Perhaps fewer readers will know her as a master crocheter, and on the day of her recent PhD defense (congratulations, Laura!), she did an interview with Trinity Communications at Duke. Today's <i>Duke Daily</i> newsletter draws attention to this, and here is the feature:</p><a href="https://trinity.duke.edu/news/crocheted-dolls-class-2023-phd-highlight-women-christianity"><b>
Crocheted Dolls by Class of 2023 Ph.D. Highlight Women in Christianity</b></a><div>June 13, 2023</div><div>Shaun King, Trinity Communications</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's the video:</div><div><br /></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SQUIhRQvgh8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-75804937343616694692023-06-18T11:31:00.008-04:002023-06-18T11:39:34.547-04:00Is Mary, the Mother of Jesus at the cross and the tomb in Matthew?<p>It is sometimes pointed out that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, could be present at the cross, burial, and resurrection in Mark 15.40, 15.47, and 16.1. Although there are significant variants, the relevant character is generally read as<br /><br />Mark 15.40: Μαρία ἡ Ἰακώβου τοῦ μικροῦ καὶ Ἰωσῆτος μήτηρ (Mary mother of James the younger and of Joses)</p><p>Mark 15.47: Μαρία ἡ Ἰωσῆτος (Mary of Joses)</p><p>Mark 16.1: Μαρία ἡ τοῦ Ἰακώβου (Mary of James)</p><p>Most commentators assume that this second Mary in Mark's list is the same woman each time, though it's confusing that Mark varies the way he names her. Some have postulated that this is the same woman as Mary the mother of Jesus, given that Mark tells us that Jesus's brothers included a James and a Joses (Mark 6.3), and Joses was not a particularly common name. This would then align Mark interestingly with John who famously does have "his mother" at the cross (John 19.25).</p><p>I think the first time I saw this identification was in Kathleen Corley's work, though I know it has subsequently popped up elsewhere.</p><p>In general, Matthew receives much less comment when it comes to this question, but while writing about female disciples in Matthew recently, it occurred to me that Matthew is even more likely than Mark to be depicting the mother of Jesus at the cross, the burial, and the resurrection. </p><p>Matthew has parallels to all three of the Marcan passages above, though he has no Salome, and he has "the mother of the sons of Zebedee" in his parallel to Mark 15.40-41 in Matt. 27.55-56. But the other person in the lists he describes in the following ways:</p><p>Matt. 27.56: Μαρία ἡ τοῦ Ἰακώβου καὶ Ἰωσὴφ μήτηρ (Mary mother of James and Joseph)</p><p>Matt. 27.61: ἡ ἄλλη Μαρία (the other Mary)</p><p>Matt. 28.1: ἡ ἄλλη Μαρία (the other Mary)</p><p>Matt. 27.56 is pretty similar to Mark 15.40. James is no longer "the small", and "Joses" becomes "Joseph", as in Matt. 13.55, his parallel to Mark 6.3, so the same possibility obtains, that this could be Jesus's mother. With respect to Matt. 27.61 and 28.1, I have always thought that Matthew got a bit impatient with Mark's variations, and so went with the simple, "the other Mary", as if to say, "Whoever that might have been".</p><p>But it occurred to me recently that there are probably only two Marys in the whole of Matthew's gospel, Mary Magdalene (Matt. 27.56, 27.61, 28.1) and Mary the mother of Jesus (Matt. 1.16, 1.20, 1.24, 2.11, 13.55). So if we were thinking Matthew-wide of a "Mary Magdalene" and "the other Mary", the latter would clearly be the mother of Jesus. Leaving Matt. 27.56 to one side, she is the only "other Mary" in Matthew's gospel. </p><p>The thing that is so baffling about Mark, and it now seems Matthew too, is why they are so coy about naming Jesus's mother here, all the more as Luke (Acts 1.14) and John (19.25) have no qualms about placing her in Jerusalem either during (John) or after (Acts) the Passion. It could be part of that distancing from Jesus's family that we see especially in Mark (Mark 3.21, 3.31-35, 6.1-6) but also in Matthew (Matt. 12.46-50, 13.53-58). Or could it simply be that Jesus, at this point in the narrative, has died, and so his mother is not defined in relation to him?</p><div>I don't think I'd quite realized how potentially simple the Marcan and Matthean pictures are -- only two women named Mary, one named Mary Magdalene, and "the other" the mother of Jesus, James, Joseph / Joses, and the rest. I wonder whether Luke and John, with their additional Marys (Mary and Martha, Mary of Clopas) can cause us to miss this?</div>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-20996221901367756812023-06-16T07:05:00.011-04:002023-06-20T06:05:51.766-04:00Counting the Twelve (or so) Disciples<p>Michael Goulder once said that New Testament scholars often substitute counting for thinking, and I confess to enjoying some counting myself. I'm writing about the disciples in John's Gospel at the moment, and found myself writing that John (son of Zebedee) is the disciple mentioned most often in the Synoptics after Peter. So then I had to check to see if that is true, and it is.</p><p>It's likely that someone else has done a similar count, but if so, I couldn't find it, and Googling was useless. Anyway, here are the figures. These are numbers of appearances of each disciple (of the "twelve"; more to come on others), and not the number of times their names appear (thus passages in which disciples' names appear multiple times are counted once; "sons of Zebedee" = James and John; the Peter list includes "Simon" and "Simon Peter").</p><p><b>Simon Peter</b>: <b>40</b> (Matt: 12; Mark: 14; Luke: 14):</p><p>Matt. 4.18, 10.2, 14.28-33, 16.13-20, 16.21-23, 17.1-8, 17.24-27, 18.21-22, 19.27-30, 26.31-35, 26.36-46, 26.58 and 69-75.</p><p>Mark 1.16-20, 1.29-31, 1.36, 3.16, 5.37, 8.31-3, 9.2-8, 10.28-31, 11.20-24, 13.3, 14.26-31, 14.32-42, 14.54 and 14.66-72, 16.7.</p><p>Luke 4.38-39, 5.1-11, 6.14, 8.45R, 8.51, 9.18-20, 9.28-36, 12.41, 18.28-30, 22.7-13, 22.31-34, 22.54-62, 24.12, 24.34.</p><p><b>James</b>: <b>18</b> (Matt: 5; Mark: 8; Luke: 5):</p><p>Matt. 4.21, 10.2, 17.1-8, 20.20-28, 26.36-46 (plus one bonus appearance from mum in 27.56).</p><p>Mark 1.16-20, 1.29-31, 3.17, 5.37, 9.2-8, 10.35-45, 13.3, 14.32-42.</p><p>Luke 5.10, 6.14, 8.51, 9.28-36, 9.51-56.</p><p><b>John</b>: <b>21</b> (Matt: 5; Mark: 9; Luke: 7):</p><p>Matt. 4.21, 10.2, 17.1-8, 20.20-28, 26.36-46 (plus one bonus appearance from mum in 27.56).</p><p>Mark 1.16-20, 1.29-31, 3.17, 5.37, 9.2-8, 9.38-41, 10.35-45, 13.3, 14.32-42.</p><p>Luke 5.10, 6.14, 8.51, 9.28-36, 9.49-50, 9.51-56, 22.7-13. </p><p><b>Andrew</b>: <b>7</b> (Matt: 2; Mark: 4; Luke: 1):</p><p>Matt. 4.18, 10.2. </p><p>Mark 1.16-20, 1.29-31, 3.18, 13.3.</p><p>Luke 6.14. </p><p><b>Judas</b>: <b>13</b> (Matt: 5; Mark: 4; Luke: 4)</p><p>Matt. 10.4, 26.14-16, 26.20-25, 26.47-56, 27.3-10.</p><p>Mark 3.19, 14.10-11, 14.17-21, 14.43-52.</p><p>Luke 6.16, 22.3-6, 22.21-23, 22.47-53.</p><p><b>Matthew</b>: <b>4</b> (Matt: 9.9-10; Matt. 10.3 // Mark 3.18 // Luke 6.15)</p><p>Everyone else appears only in the disciple lists (Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus / Lebbaeus / Judas son of James, Simon the Cananaean / Zealot, Matt. 10.2-4 // Mark 3.13-19 // Luke 6.12-16). </p><p>It should be easy to arrange the data above synoptically too, and then to add figures for John and Acts. I'll do that soon. </p><p><br /></p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-32995818084043266012023-06-15T10:59:00.002-04:002023-06-15T10:59:34.612-04:00Turin Shroud on the Sunday Programme<p>While writing my previous post on <a href="https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/talking-about-jesus-films-on-sunday.html">Talking About Jesus Films on the Sunday Programme</a>, I ran a quick search on previous posts about Radio 4's <i>Sunday</i> Programme, and I didn't find one from when I was last a guest, talking about the Turin Shroud with Ed Stourton, a few years ago. I looked it up and found it, so for the sake of completeness, here is that episode:</p><p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b05zc8j0"><b>BBC Radio 4 Sunday, 21 June 2015</b></a></p><p>The interview with me about the Turin Shroud begins at 11:53. On this occasion, I was at the studio in Salford, and not on the phone. </p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-19331931797778170672023-06-15T05:57:00.002-04:002023-06-15T06:41:03.090-04:00Talking about Jesus Films on the Sunday Programme<p> I did a short interview with Emily Buchanan on BBC Radio 4's <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnbd">Sunday</a> programme last week. The topic was Jesus films, and we touch on the possibility of a new Martin Scorsese Jesus film, on <i>The Chosen</i>, and on several of the classics like <i>Jesus of Nazareth</i>, <i>Jesus Christ Superstar</i>, and <i>Life of Brian</i>. We also touch on the probably apocryphal story of John Wayne, in <i>The Greatest Story Ever Told</i>, "saying it with awe" (<a href="https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Say%20it%20with%20awe">see previous posts on this topic here</a>). </p><p>Here's a link to the BBC iPlayer episode, which you can also download as a podcast:</p><p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ml2b"><b>BBC Radio 4: Sunday, 4 June 2023</b></a></p><p>The interview with me begins at about 5:10. </p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-9072081568365530512022-06-28T21:46:00.000-04:002022-06-28T21:46:48.307-04:00Jesus' Activity in the Gospels: "only some three weeks"?<p>There is an idea attributed to B. H. Streeter (1874-1937) that attempts to articulate how much time Jesus' narrated ministry, in the canonical gospels, actually takes up. He is reported to have said that the action described in the gospels, with the exception of the Temptation story, would actually only occupy about three weeks. The point he is apparently making is a good if rather obvious one -- that what is narrated about Jesus' life in the Synoptics and John, even if it is were all historical, amounts to the tiniest fraction of Jesus' life. </p><p>But did Streeter actually say this, and if so, when and where? I have been searching for the origins of the idea, and the earliest reference I can find is the following:</p><p></p><blockquote>"They [the gospels] are extremely brief - B. H. Streeter once calculated that, apart from the forty days and nights in the wilderness (of which we are told virtually nothing) everything reported to have been said and done by Jesus in all four gospels would have occupied only some three weeks, which leaves the overwhelmingly greater part of his life and deeds unrecorded."</blockquote><p>This is from Dennis Nineham, "Epilogue", in John Hick (ed.), <i>The Myth of God Incarnate</i> (London: SCM, 1977), 186-204 (188-9). I can't find the idea that he attributes to Streeter in any of his written works, and Nineham himself does not reference it, so is Nineham reporting an oral tradition? As far as I can tell, Nineham himself did not learn directly from Streeter. Although Nineham did go to Oxford, he was too young to have met Streeter -- only 16 years old when Streeter died in a plane crash in 1937.</p><p>On <a href="https://twitter.com/mbrandonmassey/status/1541801098033483776?s=20&t=LAXCsUW2sUlUS0YxkaQ_1Q">twitter, Brandon Massey</a> speculated that Nineham might have picked it up from his teacher, R. H. Lightfoot, who perhaps reported this as a Streeter comment, which I think sounds quite plausible. </p><p>It is also possible that the "three weeks" comment is a mis-remembered or mis-applied distortion of something that Streeter actually said. What is making me wonder here is that Streeter does in fact talk about "three weeks" in a related context:</p>
<p></p><blockquote>Now of the last journey to Jerusalem, and the events of Passion Week, Mark presents a clear, detailed, and coherent account; and this, dealing with the events of, at the outside, three weeks, occupies about one-third of the whole Gospel. The rest of the Gospel is clearly a collection of detached stories as indeed tradition affirms it to be; and the total number of incidents recorded is so small that the gaps in the story must be the more considerable part of it. (B. H. Streeter, <i>The Four Gospels </i>(London: Macmillan, 1924), 424).</blockquote>And if Streeter thought that Mark's Passion Narrative occupied "three weeks", could he also have maintained that "everything reported to have been said and done by Jesus in all four gospels would have occupied only some three weeks"? So we are now at at least six weeks, and there is clearly a contradiction here, unless the oral tradition also forgets the "three weeks" of the Passion Narrative.<p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Chasing down oral traditions is notoriously difficult since they only survive, before and outside of oral / aural recordings, in the writings in which they are represented, but this case provides an interesting analogy to first century Jesus research. Nineham's comment in 1977 is at least forty years removed from when the historical Streeter may or may not have made these remarks, rather as Mark is at least forty years removed from what he reports about Jesus, whose actual lifetime contained a great deal more activity than is reported in (pseudo?)-Streeter's "three weeks". </p><p><br /></p><p></p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-32855233136111361712020-08-25T21:27:00.008-04:002020-08-25T21:30:39.397-04:00Interview with Ariel Sabar on the NT Pod<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BnJVEFhzSeQ/XzHrc23-REI/AAAAAAAARds/iGW8r0u0Qzkly1uc14MS46otojgVf1CzgCLcBGAsYHQ/s499/41sT--rw7%252BL._SX327_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Ariel Sabar, Veritas" border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="329" height="255" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BnJVEFhzSeQ/XzHrc23-REI/AAAAAAAARds/iGW8r0u0Qzkly1uc14MS46otojgVf1CzgCLcBGAsYHQ/w168-h255/41sT--rw7%252BL._SX327_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="168" /></a></div><div>Over on my podcast, I enjoyed a conversation earlier today with Ariel Sabar, author of <i>Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. </i>It is an hour and thirteen minutes long and you can find it here:</div>
<br />
<b><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/08/nt-pod-95-interview-with-ariel-sabar.html">NT Pod 95: Interview with Ariel Sabar, Author of Veritas</a> (mp3) </b><div><br /></div><div>Or go to that page to find links to Apple Podcasts, Duke's Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, etc. </div><div><br /></div><div>The book is: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385542585/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thenewtestamenga&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0385542585&linkId=0872ad689171e727a9bacd77305ddc56">Ariel Sabar, <i>Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife</i> (New York: Doubleday, 2020)</a><br />
<br />This is the sixth in a series of podcasts on the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. The links to the others are here:<div><br /></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-87-what-is-gospel-of-jesus-wife.html">NT Pod 87: What is the Gospel of Jesus's Wife?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-88-is-gospel-of-jesus-wife.html">NT Pod 88: Is the Gospel of Jesus's Wife a forgery?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-89-how-was-forgery-of-gospel-of.html">NT Pod 89: How was the forgery of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife proved?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-90-how-was-forgery-of-gospel-of.html">NT Pod 90: How was the forgery of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife confirmed?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/08/nt-pod-94-review-of-ariel-sabars-veritas.html">NT Pod 94: Review of Ariel Sabar's Veritas</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Previous NT blog posts on the Gospel of Jesus's wife (55 or so) are here (most recent first):</div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Gospel%20of%20Jesus%27%20Wife">NT Blog: Gospel of Jesus's Wife</a></div><div><br /></div>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-80723381885520638302020-08-24T10:06:00.001-04:002020-08-24T10:06:24.828-04:00"Tahime . . . She's true and not fake!"<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8Q-pzMtty_A/XzNOSs4AabI/AAAAAAAAReI/5qWvta0lFTAKmJqdzay2i29QQF9VaiCmgCLcBGAsYHQ/s785/Tahime.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="677" data-original-width="785" height="181" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8Q-pzMtty_A/XzNOSs4AabI/AAAAAAAAReI/5qWvta0lFTAKmJqdzay2i29QQF9VaiCmgCLcBGAsYHQ/w210-h181/Tahime.jpeg" width="210" /></a></div>Over the last eight years or so of <a href="https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Gospel%20of%20Jesus%27%20Wife">blogging about the Gospel of Jesus's Wife</a>, I have occasionally thought about posting a piece of fun speculation. Every time I think about it, I think "Shall I post this?" and then I think, "Nah; it's stupid. Move on." To be fair, I often think that about a lot of things. <p></p><p>I probably would have forgotten all about it if it were not for one of the journalists covering the Jesus's Wife story seriously wondering if there might be something in it when I told her about it for a laugh. Even so, they wisely did not publish on something so speculative. Andrew Bernhard and I have talked about this occasionally, and after chatting about it this morning, I have decided there is nothing to lose at this point in airing my fun speculation.</p><p>So I preface this with the comment: <i>this speculation is probably ridiculous! </i></p><p>But here's the thing. The <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/">Urban Dictionary</a> allows people to go in and create words and definitions of the kind of everyday slang that would never find its way into proper dictionaries. Back in September 2012, I was wondering how easy it would be for a forger to find the Coptic phrase <i>tahime</i> ("my wife") on the internet given that it would not have been possible for the forger to find it in Coptic Thomas. So I googled the transliterated <i>tahime</i> and found very little except this, in Urban Dictionary:</p><p><a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tahime"><b></b></a></p><blockquote><p><a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tahime"><b>Tahime</b></a></p><p>She is a girl that is very unique, cool ,calm, and a little bit loud. She has a temper. She is so pretty and very beautiful. She always has little self-confidence because she doesn't feel accepted or pretty. She thinks nobody likes her. That isnt [sic] true. She is loved by everyone! She is a sensitive girl and tries to make everyone happy. She doesn't bitch at people. SHE IS SOOO FUNNY!!! She is true and not fake. She will be your best friend till forever. She sometimes may act a little cocky and nerdy. She is so random at times but it will make you laugh. She loves friends.</p><p>"Hey that girl is so Tahime." "You mean she's unique?" "HELL YEAH BRO! "</p></blockquote><p>I wouldn't have given it a second look but for a couple of things. "She is true and not fake" made me wonder, and then there is the author / date stamp:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b> by <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=goo%20goo%20gaa%20gaa%20456">goo goo gaa gaa 456</a> December 07, 2011</b></p><div></div></blockquote><div>Karen King's article gave the date of the owner's visit to Harvard, to hand over the fragment, as "December 2011", the same month that this entry was added to Urban Dictionary by "goo goo gaa gaa 456". Sabar dates the visit to December 14, 2011, within a week of the entry appearing.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is no evidence that I can find anywhere that <i>Tahime</i> has any such meaning. Absolutely nobody uses it that way. And in so far as <i>Tahime</i> crops up, it is as a male name (e.g. the character "Tahime Sanders" in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_a_King">Life of a King</a>), and not a female slang term.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is, of course, highly likely to be a coincidence. This is just some random entry by who-knows-who? about who-knows-who? in what is probably an in-joke that will never be known to others.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet one of the things that made me dismiss the possibility of a link every time I considered it was that I couldn't imagine the forger of the fragment being so playful, and imitating, in a rather irritating way, how he imagines young people speak. I was working on the assumption that his motivation was financial given all the talk about selling the manuscripts in King's article. But now, having read Sabar's <i>Veritas</i>, I can't help wondering again if Fritz might just have done this in another attempt at humour. There are so many playful elements that Sabar reveals, including Fritz's love of Monty Python, and his use of "abdicate" in his interlinear, that I am now wondering if it is really quite as ridiculous as I had first thought that this too could be a playful addition by the forger himself.</div><div><br /></div><div>This blog post will self-destruct as soon as someone points out the flaw in the comments below!</div><div><br /></div><div>* "The current owner contacted Karen L. King via email requesting that she look at the fragment to determine its content. The owner then delivered the papyrus by hand to Harvard Divinity School in December, 2011, and generously gave permission to publish" (Karen King, "Jesus said to them . . . " draft, September 17 2012, p. 3).</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-30852563007063250692020-08-11T12:28:00.003-04:002020-08-11T12:28:56.622-04:00Ariel Sabar's Veritas, and the latest on the Gospel of Jesus's Wife<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EspJl2wRcOs/XzLHIPSg0hI/AAAAAAAARd4/ub0ArhDA9cIeFdzX2T8UkfCLCwyU2yeIgCLcBGAsYHQ/s499/41sT--rw7%252BL._SX327_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="329" height="399" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EspJl2wRcOs/XzLHIPSg0hI/AAAAAAAARd4/ub0ArhDA9cIeFdzX2T8UkfCLCwyU2yeIgCLcBGAsYHQ/w263-h399/41sT--rw7%252BL._SX327_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="263" /></a></div>Regular readers will know that I<a href="https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Gospel%20of%20Jesus%27%20Wife"> have posted many, many times over the years on the Gospel of Jesus's Wife</a>, whether breaking news, offering round-ups of the latest news, or hosting contributions from others like Andrew Bernhard and Francis Watson. I have just finished reading Ariel Sabar's remarkable new book about the affair, and I realized that it's time, once again, to return to this topic.<p></p><p>The new book is out today, and I strongly encourage you to read it. It's very, very good: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385542585/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thenewtestamenga&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0385542585&linkId=0872ad689171e727a9bacd77305ddc56">Ariel Sabar, <i>Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife</i> (New York: Doubleday, 2020)</a>. I have podcasted my thoughts here:</p>
<b><a href="http://markgoodacre.org/podcasts/NTPod94.mp3">NT Pod 94: Review of Ariel Sabar's Veritas</a> (mp3) </b><div><br /></div><div>In providing this update, I realized that I hadn't also drawn attention to earlier podcasts in the series, which I released as classes were all going online in March in the wake of the pandemic. (I was at the time teaching my Non-canonical Gospels class). Here are some links to those podcasts:<br /><div><div><br /></div><div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-87-what-is-gospel-of-jesus-wife.html">NT Pod 87: What is the Gospel of Jesus's Wife?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-88-is-gospel-of-jesus-wife.html">NT Pod 88: Is the Gospel of Jesus's Wife a forgery?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-89-how-was-forgery-of-gospel-of.html">NT Pod 89: How was the forgery of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife proved?</a></div><div><a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2020/03/nt-pod-90-how-was-forgery-of-gospel-of.html">NT Pod 90: How was the forgery of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife confirmed?</a></div></div></div></div><div><br /></div><div>I realize that podcasts are not to everyone's tastes, and the good news is that there is already some excellent academic commentary on the release of Sabar's book. I would draw special attention to the following:</div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/08/veritas-by-ariel-sabar.html?fbclid=IwAR0ifVY3Xgwrknu5xCf9wH7lJZmgmlLawHRXUcej5J0qpQS76Xh6aiW1F8o">Interview with Ariel Sabar about his new book, Veritas</a></b></div><div>James McGrath (ReligionProf Blog)</div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-catholic-porn-producer-scammed-harvard-professor-with-gospel-of-jesus-wife?ref=scroll&fbclid=IwAR1rYNYsgMH69LL_XfUBrssL1U3fW4kqeI0w-TGiDvmuaCjnZpMzHKqfYyk">How a Star Harvard Professor Got Suckered by Jesus' Wife</a></b></div><div>Candida Moss (<i>Daily Beast</i>; not her title!)</div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="https://brentnongbri.com/2020/08/10/ariel-sabars-veritas-some-first-reactions/">Ariel Sabar's Veritas: Some First Reactions</a></b></div><div>Brent Nongbri (Variant Readings Blog)</div><div><br /></div><div>More to come!</div><div><br /></div>Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-15060278133681063652020-07-24T20:44:00.000-04:002020-07-25T11:15:39.779-04:00Trump and Fatigue<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="tr_bq">
Over the last twenty years or so, I have occasionally drawn attention to "the phenomenon of fatigue", according to which one can see an author making characteristic changes to a source at the beginning of a passage, only to lapse into the wording of the source later on. I have argued that one can see this in Matthew's use of Mark, Luke's use of Mark, Luke's use of Matthew, the Protevangelium of James's use of Matthew and Luke, and Hypostasis of the Archons's use of Genesis (the latter forthcoming). [*Links at the bottom of this post.]</div>
<br />
When I am teaching, I of course like to use contemporary analogies for the phenomenon, and one of my favourites comes from the adaptation of one of Enid Blyton's <i>Noddy</i> books for television. But yesterday, I noticed a good example of the phenomenon in Trump's remarks on the coronavirus in his Press Briefing.<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DNDMytU3aBU" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
Trump likes to call coronavirus "the China virus". It is a typical (and profoundly problematic) trope of his, and although in the earlier briefings, he was beginning to drop the use of the term, it has come back in a major way in the renewed briefings this week.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-briefing-072320/">In yesterday's briefing</a>, Trump was clearly reading from a script that had been prepared for him, but he also appeared to be editing it on the hoof, substituting "China virus" every time that "coronavirus" appeared. Until, later in the speech, he lapses into the wording of the script, and he accidentally says "coronavirus". I quote here from the relevant sections of the speech, in order (<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-briefing-072320/">full transcript here</a>):<br />
<blockquote>
Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
We’ve had a tremendous week uniting the country in our fight against <b>the China virus</b>. I have reminded people of the importance of masks when you can’t socially distance, in particular. A strong message has been sent out to young people to stop going to crowded bars and other crowded places . . . . </blockquote>
<blockquote>
. . . .And I said, “There’s nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe, whether that’s from <b>the China virus </b>or the radical-left mob that you see in Portland” — where I want to thank Homeland Security and others in law enforcement for doing a fantastic job over the last few days . . . . </blockquote>
<blockquote>
. . . . Our goal is to protect our teachers and students from <b>the China virus</b> while ensuring that families with high-risk factors can continue to participate from home. Very important . . . . </blockquote>
<blockquote>
. . . . Fortunately, the data shows that children are lower risk from <b>the China virus</b>, very substantially. When children do contact the virus, they often have only very mild symptoms or none at all, and medical complications are exceedingly rare. Those that do face complications often have underlying medical conditions. Ninety-nine percent of all <b>China virus</b> hospitalizations are adults. And 99.96 percent of all fatalities are adults. That means that children are a tiny percentage — less than 1 percent, and even a small percentage of 1 percent. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
In a typical year, the flu results in more deaths of those under 18 in the United States than have been lost thus far to the <b>coronavirus. Many different names. Many, many different names</b> . . . . </blockquote>
<blockquote>
. . . . We’re asking Congress to provide $105 billion to schools as part of the next <b>coronavirus</b> relief bill. This funding will support mitigation measures, such as smaller class sizes, more teachers and teacher aides, repurposing spaces to practice social distancing, and crucially, mask-wearing. </blockquote>
Trump uses his idiosyncratic, problematic term "China virus" five times in the speech, and I think that each time he is editing "coronavirus" on the hoof, substituting the Trump term for the normal, accepted term. But then he lapses. He uses the correct, universally accepted term "coronavirus", and immediately realizes what he has done, and qualifies with "Many different names. Many, many different names", a standard Trump qualification for when he has veered away from his intended language. From here, he then uses "coronavirus" one more time, in the name of the "coronavirus relief bill", and "China virus" does not recur.<br />
<br />
* Links:<br />
<br />
Mark Goodacre, <a href="http://markgoodacre.org/fatigue.pdf">"Fatigue in the Synoptics", <i>New Testament Studies</i> 44 (1998): 45-58</a><br />
<a href="https://podacre.blogspot.com/2010/07/nt-pod-39-fatigue-in-synoptics.html">NT Pod 39: "Fatigue in the Synoptics</a><br />
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<br /></div>
Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-31523791783652270352020-06-21T12:36:00.000-04:002020-06-23T19:56:28.689-04:00Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Percival Gardner-Smith <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="tr_bq">
I was recently noodling around for some biographical information on <a href="http://www.peerage.org/genealogy/percival.htm">Percival Gardner-Smith</a> who is well known in the field of NT studies as the author of <i>St John and the Synoptic Gospels</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), and the subject of Ian Mills's and Laura Robinson's recent <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/33-percy-gardner-smith-saint-john-and-the-synoptic-gospels/id1377442882?i=1000477318831">NT Review Podcast</a>, on which I guested.</div>
<br />
I came across this lovely piece of correspondence sent to Percival Gardner-Smith by another scholar well known in our field, Edwin A. Abbott:<br />
<br />
<b><a href="https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:49199/">Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Percival Gardner-Smith</a></b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Percival Gardner-Smith dated Jan. 26, 1892. In the letter Abbott enclosed a circular on behalf of his sister, offering a home for young Indian children. Abbott also alludes to a "big book" he has in the press. He writes that the book will be too big to send and requests that Gardner-Smith get a copy from Mudie's.</blockquote>
The letter is reproduced in high quality at the above link, in <a href="https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/">Brown Digital Repository</a>. But the date given, 26 January 1892, is surely wrong. Gardner-Smith was born on 3 February 1888, so he was not even 4 years old at the time. The letter asks Gardner-Smith:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
". . . to pigeon-hole the enclosed circular which my sister has recently issued, in case any of your pupils' parents may want a home for young Indian children."</blockquote>
<div>
No doubt Gardner-Smith was a precocious child but he is unlikely to have had pupils, or to have been interested in "a big book in the press" that Abbott goes on to mention.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So what is going on here? The date of the letter certainly looks like 26 Jan. 92:</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bxQWbxYrH1o/Xu6aOzgiDqI/AAAAAAAARUI/2QlXEVBzRTUFDTkkWfVAFgINql4Yde4NwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-20%2Bat%2B7.21.41%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="1030" height="116" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bxQWbxYrH1o/Xu6aOzgiDqI/AAAAAAAARUI/2QlXEVBzRTUFDTkkWfVAFgINql4Yde4NwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-20%2Bat%2B7.21.41%2BPM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
The only sense I can make of it is that the date is in fact <i>26 Jan. </i><b style="font-style: italic;">12</b>, i.e. 1912, when Gardner-Smith would have been 23, and curate of St Mark's Milverton, Leamington. But could that digit be a "1"? The loop at the top is certainly odd, but this is the way that Abbott wrote the capital "I", as <a href="https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:49196/">in this letter</a>:<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pVfdDYMVMhA/Xu6cfzdO0uI/AAAAAAAARUU/DigONUV7p38KCgqub7Nl2z4IEltIRCxuACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-20%2Bat%2B7.31.01%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="1278" height="81" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pVfdDYMVMhA/Xu6cfzdO0uI/AAAAAAAARUU/DigONUV7p38KCgqub7Nl2z4IEltIRCxuACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-20%2Bat%2B7.31.01%2BPM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Or from <a href="https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:49204/">another letter</a>, see here:<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9-GBxGV43hY/Xu98jsueRqI/AAAAAAAARU8/P9y9uvH5zo4jZzY2-NAG66uJTYQj--iFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-21%2Bat%2B11.27.33%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="148" data-original-width="1282" height="36" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9-GBxGV43hY/Xu98jsueRqI/AAAAAAAARU8/P9y9uvH5zo4jZzY2-NAG66uJTYQj--iFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-21%2Bat%2B11.27.33%2BAM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
That "I" does look a bit like a "9".<br />
<br />
These are not perfect analogies, especially as the digit drops below the line, so I'm not sure if this is the solution. But certainly a date in 1912 would work, and it is surely preferable to the idea that Abbott was writing to a three year old.<br />
<br />
The letter features the following annotation in a different hand:<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XWr5ihByt58/Xu9-0oDER2I/AAAAAAAARVI/06FWckkB7HYYFZFjsieNn7G2ODIRz88jQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-21%2Bat%2B11.37.11%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="1264" height="102" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XWr5ihByt58/Xu9-0oDER2I/AAAAAAAARVI/06FWckkB7HYYFZFjsieNn7G2ODIRz88jQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-06-21%2Bat%2B11.37.11%2BAM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
This is presumably an inference that the mentioned "big book in the press" is <i>The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman</i> (1892), unlikely to be of interest to a three year old. But if the letter is 1912, the book would be <i>Light on the Gospel from an Ancient Poet</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), a book that would certainly have been of interest to the twenty-three year old Gardner-Smith.<br />
<br />
That's my suggestion. I wondered if it could perhaps be a different "Percival" but I can't find a friend of Abbott's other than Percival Gardner-Smith, and it may be Gardner-Smith himself who provided the letter to Thomas Banchoff, who has a lovely <a href="https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:48989/">picture of Gardner-Smith in his eighties</a>, also in the archive.<br />
<br />
<i>Update 1</i>: here is my attempt at a transcription of the letter (with thanks to Graham Gould for help with reading lines 2-3):<br />
<blockquote>
Braeside<br />
Willow Road<br />
Hampstead N.W. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
26 Jan. 92</blockquote>
<blockquote>
My dear Percival, </blockquote>
<blockquote>
After all good wishes, and deprecations [for "depredations"?] of influ-enza — this is to ask you to pigeon-hole the enclosed circular which my sister has recently issued, in case any of your pupils’ parents may want a home for young Indian children. My sister is ?bright or motherly, and my niece is fond of children — almost to excess: so I think the little people wd be happy with them. At the same time she does not limit herself to the very young children, nor to those of Indian parents. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I hope you will hear of me again soon in the literary sphere. I have a big book in the press, so big that I shall not be able to afford to send it to you: but you must get it from Mudie’s. I <u>think</u> it will be interesting; I hope it will not be <u>too</u> irritating. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Yours ever </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Edwin A. Abbott</blockquote>
<br />
<i>Update 2</i>: I am grateful to Graham Gould who points out that "other letters from Abbott in the Brown Digital Repository suggests that Abbott had moved from Braeside, Willow Road, Hampstead to Wellside, Well Walk, Hampstead, by 1895 and so would not have been living at Braeside in 1912." And having run through the archive now myself, I notice that Abbott was already living at Wellside by 1893, and was still there in 1913. So the letter above, sent from Braeside cannot be from 1912 unless he was using old notepaper! Graham also points out that there are letters where the "1" digit is written with a straight line, and not with the loop that he used in writing a capital "I".<br />
<br />
So the mystery is not solved!<br />
<br />
I wondered if the "big book in the press, so big that I shall not be able to afford to send it to you" could help us out some more. How big was <i>The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman</i>, the 1892 book, which is written in a note on the letter? It is indeed absolutely massive -- 440 pages in volume 1 and 500 pages in volume 2! So it really does seem likely that we are looking at 1892. The 1912 book that I was suggesting, <i>Light on the Gospel from an Ancient Poet </i>is also huge (600 pages), but it seems impossible to get the 1912 date to work given the address on the letter.<br />
<br />
Either Abbott is writing to a three year old about getting a book on Cardinal Henry Newman from Mudie's (an old lending library), or this is a different Percival.<br />
<br />
<i>Update 3</i>: This is a very enjoyable case of collaborative research. Many thanks to Graham Gould, Tony Bellows, and Deane Galbraith, for some really helpful contributions.<br />
<br />
It is beyond reasonable doubt that the letter was written in 1892, when Abbott was still living at Braeside, and that rules out my suggestion above about trying to relocate the letter to 1912. But the letter is not written to a three-year old Percival Gardner-Smith. That much is true. So could it be <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Percival_(bishop)?fbclid=IwAR1E4bLDIdRc4WQUaoboAVl8rX0CkYUUpXyXF8UB3feeAoA85xNkrpLQy8U">Bishop John Percival</a>, a known colleague and friend of Abbott's? He seems like the ideal candidate, but I had earlier balked at the suggestion (a) because I could not imagine someone addressing an esteemed colleague by his surname; and (b) because I assumed that Thomas Banchoff, whose collection this is in, had received the letter from Percival Gardner-Smith himself, with whom Banchoff had had conversations. John Percival certainly seems like a very strong candidate in that in 1892 he is still headmaster of Rugby School, and so the reference to "your pupils' parents" would make excellent sense.<br />
<br />
<i>Update 4 </i>(June 22 2020): Many thanks again to Graham Gould, Tony Bellows, and Deane Galbraith, and thanks now also to Michael Strickland: there is more! It is beyond reasonable doubt that this letter is in fact written to Bishop John Percival. It turns out that addressing people by their surname in this way, "My dear Percival" was indeed common in the era. Moreover, there are specific examples of "My dear Percival" in William Temple's <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Life_of_Bishop_Percival/XZpQAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&fbclid=IwAR1SnMT-gTiVprbg4XQqzKgdGLDpaWJBty3Y91N0__juN8ilqI-oNls0dSU">Life of Bishop Percival</a> (London: Macmillan, 1921), which one can read in toto on Google Books.<br />
<br />
Moreover, having enjoyed digging a little into this fascinating <i>Life of Bishop Percival</i>, another piece falls into place -- he would indeed have been interested in a book on Cardinal Newman. He was a fan (if that's the right way to put it), and had him to dinner at Trinity College, Oxford, where he was president, in 1880. Temple adds this note:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Cardinal stayed with Percival for a few days. From this time onwards Percival often wrote to him, and being in Rome in 1887 sent him a painting of his Church — San Pietro in Vellabro, — which Newman always kept in his room and caused to be hung at the foot of his bed when he was dying." (p. 78).</blockquote>
So of course Percival would have been interested in Abbott's massive book about Newman.<br />
<br />
This has been a lot of fun to unravel, and huge thanks to my collaborators.<br />
<br />
<i>Update 5 </i>(June 23 2020): Today I received a voicemail from Prof. Thomas Banchoff, the curator <a href="https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/collections/id_561/">Flatweb</a>, the wonderful collection of material located in Brown's Digital Repository, and he confirms what we had surmised, that the letter is indeed a letter to John Percival. I am hoping to speak to Prof. Banchoff later in the week. I will also get in touch with Brown Digital Repository about correcting the title and data for this letter in their records.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-78645639077137203922019-07-31T09:59:00.002-04:002019-07-31T10:39:52.647-04:00Sourceomania<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Samuel Sandmel's invocation of the problems of <a href="https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/presidentialaddresses/JBL81_1_1Sandmel1961.pdf">"parallelomania"</a> in 1961 has become legendary in the field, to the point of truism, misrepresentation and cliché. It even has its own <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelomania">Wikipedia page</a>.<br />
<br />
Much less well known is <i>sourceomania</i>. I heard it for the first time earlier this week. Nobody even quotes it. And up until I started tweeting about it this week, even Google did not seem to know the term (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=sourceomania">"Did you mean <i>source romania</i>?"</a>)!*<br />
<br />
The term "sourceomania" was coined by <b>Morton Scott Enslin</b> in a little known article published posthumously in 1985, “Luke and Matthew: Compilers or Authors?” <i>ANRW</i> II.25.3 (1985): 2357-88. The article reflects on the scholarly inclination to see the evangelists more as archivists than as authors, and to default to hypothetical sources to explain variation at every turn. Enslin uses the term twice. I quoted the first use in <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/morton-scott-enslin-american-austin.html">yesterday's post</a>. Here is the quotation in context:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In sum, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the only support for this hypothetical Q, which so mysteriously completely vanished and of which no slightest mention is to be found in any of the Fathers, is the assumption that neither Matthew nor Luke could have been satisfied to use the other, had he known it, so meagerly. What that really means is that we could not have so done. It is easy to forget that none of these writings, which we prize so highly today, was "Holy Scripture" or "canonical" to the other writers. Obviously, both Matthew and Luke found Mark of great use, but neither hesitated to alter, shorten, or correct to a degree that a modern critic might weIl hesitate to follow. I cannot avoid the conclusion that these hypothetical sources which no one has ever seen -- be they Q or L or proto-Luke or M -- are simply the consequence of the very modern notion that one holy evangelist could not deliberately have altered or violated the writings of another. Thus these deviations, as notably Luke's flat contradiction of Mark's account of the Passion, with the Galilee chapter deftly avoided and the disciples remaining in Jerusalem awaiting their reception of the Spirit, are commonly explained as due to the utilization of a different source. <b>Sourceomania, if I may so phrase it, is a disease from which many critics have suffered.</b> The point to be remembered is that each of the evangelists was apparently dissatisfied with the work of his predecessors and thought he could do a better job. Else he would not have written. They were not joining with respected colleagues in contributing chapters for a <i>Festschrift </i>(2364; emphasis added).</blockquote>
The second use of the term comes when Enslin is discussing Luke 9.51-6 (Samaritan Village):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To me the basic weakness in much source analysis is the assumption of the use of some different source every time one author alters or changes another. Luke corrects Matthew because he thinks Matthew incorrect, not because he chances to find a different version of the event in some source which he chances to have in his hand or in his memory. <b>One of the fatal symptoms of what I have styled "sourceomania" is the inability to recognize the evangelists as authors who had ideas and were ready to express them.</b> They did not conceive themselves as weighted down by the awesome responsibility of preserving unaltered a series of facts for future generations who would study them under the critical magnifying glass as contained in Holy Scripture (2374; emphasis added).</blockquote>
Although Enslin himself does not provide a definition of the term, it seems pretty clear that his problem relates to the instinctive appeal to imagined sources in lieu of even considering the possibility that a given feature might come from the author of the work one is reading. If I might attempt a definition, it would go something like this:<br />
<br />
<b>Sourceomania: the unnecessary and obsessional evocation of sources to explain elements in a work at the expense of considering authorial creativity.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Perhaps that definition can be improved upon, but I think the gist of what Enslin is saying is clear. As a minimum sources person, I am of course more sympathetic to the point than my maximum sources friends will be, but as a descriptor of a feature that I have seen time after time in the literature, asserted as if self evident rather than carefully argued, I think it's pretty great.<br />
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--<br />
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* When I composed this draft yesterday, "sourceomania" returned no proper hits at all on Google. Now, as well as this blog, it has found a lovely example from a book by Finn Damgaard, <i>Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels </i>(Copenhagen International Seminar; Abingdon: Routledge, 2016): 2:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The "sourceomania" (the word is taken from Enslin. . .) that has characterized New Testament scholarship for so long has paradoxically minimized the most obvious sources, namely the canonical gospels themselves, with the result that important insight into early Christianity has been neglected.</blockquote>
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-12756589684922493842019-07-30T12:42:00.000-04:002019-07-30T13:11:26.255-04:00Morton Scott Enslin: the American Austin Farrer?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When I was putting together my <a href="http://markgoodacre.org/Q/">website about Q</a>, over twenty years ago, when websites were the latest thing, and when they were still fun and exciting, and when we hand-coded everything, I was aware that what I was offering was an utterly fringe theory, which would be regarded as completely maverick, so one thing I wanted to do was to show that there had been other prominent Q sceptics. I was not alone!<br />
<br />
I pulled together a <a href="http://markgoodacre.org/Q/quotat.htm">Key Quotations</a> page and tried to show that there were several scholars who had been sceptical about Q while holding on to Marcan Priority, and I hoped that invoking names like E. P. Sanders, alongside lesser known dignitaries like John Drury, might at least lend a veneer of respectability to my strangely unorthodox site.<br />
<br />
One issue for a British Q sceptic like me was that Michael Goulder was pretty well known in UK scholarly circles, and his works respected and engaged even by those who disagreed with him. But in the USA, things were different. The Griesbach theory (Mark used Matthew and Luke) was regarded as the official opposition to the reigning Two-Source Theory, and if you told someone you were sceptical about Q, they automatically assumed you must be sceptical about Marcan Priority too.<br />
<br />
So I tried in my <a href="http://markgoodacre.org/Q/quotat.htm">Key Quotations</a> page to show that there was at least some kind of pedigree for the Farrer theory in the USA. Indeed, James Hardy Ropes and <a href="https://www.umass.edu/wsp/resources/worthies/enslin.html">Morton Scott Enslin</a> had already set out their opposition to the Q hypothesis in 1934 and 1938 respectively. Enslin's contribution came from a lovely little book, <i>Christian Beginnings</i>, which was reprinted in 1956.<br />
<br />
Up until yesterday, I thought that that was the only thing Enslin had written on the topic. But when re-reading a recent fine article by John Poirier, I spotted a footnote to a work I had never read:<br />
<br />
<b>Morton Scott Enslin, “Luke and Matthew: Compilers or Authors?” <i>ANRW</i> II.25.3 (1985): 2357-88</b><br />
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<i>ANRW</i> is famously glacial in its publication schedule; Enslin died in 1980, and this appeared five years later. Moreover, the article appears to have been written before 1976 since he talks about William Farmer's forthcoming <i>Synoptic Problem </i>revision, which came out that year.<br />
<br />
Enslin's article is delightful, and has something of the "devil may care" attitude one sometimes sees in scholars who are in the twilight of their careers. Enslin was born in 1897 and was almost eighty when he wrote this piece. His central concern is the way that so many scholars see the evangelists not as authors but as "compilers" of traditions. If I were putting together my "World Without Q" website today, I might be inclined to use this quotation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In sum, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the only support for this hypothetical Q, which so mysteriously completely vanished and of which no slightest mention is to be found in any of the Fathers, is the assumption that neither Matthew nor Luke could have been satisfied to use the other, had he known it, so meagerly. What that really means is that we could not have so done. It is easy to forget that none of these writings, which we prize so highly today, was "Holy Scripture" or "canonical" to the other writers. Obviously, both Matthew and Luke found Mark of great use, but neither hesitated to alter, shorten, or correct to a degree that a modern critic might weIl hesitate to follow. I cannot avoid the conclusion that these hypothetical sources which no one has ever seen -- be they Q or L or proto-Luke or M -- are simply the consequence of the very modern notion that one holy evangelist could not deliberately have altered or violated the writings of another. Thus these deviations, as notably Luke's flat contradiction of Mark's account of the Passion, with the Galilee chapter deftly avoided and the disciples remaining in Jerusalem awaiting their reception of the Spirit, are commonly explained as due to the utilization of a different source. Sourceomania, if I may so phrase it, is a disease from which many critics have suffered. The point to be remembered is that each of the evangelists was apparently dissatisfied with the work of his predecessors and thought he could do a better job. Else he would not have written. They were not joining with respected colleagues in contributing chapters for a <i>Festschrift</i>.</blockquote>
Enslin has a delightful turn of phrase, and I am reminded of Farrer's own "golden eloquence". I particularly like his coining of the term <i>Sourceomania</i>, and I am planning to post on this tomorrow. While he does appear to be aware of Austin Farrer's "On Dispensing with Q" (2365 n. 16, misspelt as "Farrar"), his views were developed long before Farrer's 1955 article, and if there is any influence, it is more likely to have gone in the other direction, from Enslin to Farrer.<br />
<br />
Over forty years earlier, in 1933, he was reflecting on Luke's sources in Acts, and analogizing from the Gospel in this way:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Even in the Third Gospel, in spite of the amazingly fortunate accident that a primary source Mark and a probable clue to a second source by virtue of a parallel Matthew are preserved, we quickly reach an impasse in source analysis, as is abundantly evidenced by the total disagreement of scholars, <i>vide </i>the happy proto-Luke, our inability to determine the size or nature of Q, which now waxes, now wanes, and finally the indications that we shall awake some morning to find that it has become orthodox again to believe that Luke actually used Matthew. And this is true simply because Luke was a skilled author, not an adept with scissors and paste pot. If this is the case for the Gospel -- and I do not feel the picture overdrawn -- how much more difficult is it in Acts which stands alone. ("A Notable Contribution to Acts", <i>JBL</i> 52/4 (1933): 230-8 [238]).</blockquote>
I rather like "scissors and paste <i>pot</i>". I don't think I've seen that variation before. The thinking does resemble Farrer's. He was endlessly frustrated by what he called "paragraph criticism" and obsession with sources, at the expense of appreciating the the gospels as wholes. Farrer repeatedly delved into the patterning and structure of Mark, and was fascinated with the attempt to understand his mind. Enslin thinks similarly, and says of Mark:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Few books of greater power have ever been penned. On every page the unfettered author is to be seen, not the docile reteller of his teacher's sermons. That it was the death or retirement of Peter which led Mark to this new step in Christian literary activity, while often suggested, appears to me most unlikely. Rather it appears far more probable that it was the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which convinced our author that the long expected fulfillment of Jesus' predictions of the momentary coming of the kingdom of God was now at hand ("Luke and Matthew", 2363).</blockquote>
Enslin's essay goes on to explicate several passages that he sees as troubling for the Q hypothesis, often anticipating arguments that Michael Goulder would use. On Matt. 4.1-11 // Luke 4.1-13 (the Temptation Story), for example, he writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The simplest and most natural explanation of the Matthean-Lukan form of the temptation story is that it is secondary to the Markan narrative and a deliberate recasting of it, not a parallel story from another source which Matthew and Luke independently preferred and substituted for the Markan. Attempts to see it as a more primitive story -- or at least as one preserved in a source earlier than Mark, and possibly known to him -- appear to me, as already remarked, too ridiculous to demand serious reply. And by all rules of the critical game, if a fancied Q is to be seen as providing the non-Markan parallels of Matthew and Luke, this ornate and scarcely primitive-sounding story must be seen as one of its incidents ("Luke and Matthew", 2375).</blockquote>
I can't help smiling at "too ridiculous to demand serious reply". Perhaps I will write like that when I am eighty.<br />
<br />
<i>Additional note: </i>Further investigation reveals that the <i>ANRW</i> article is in fact a massively expanded version of an article that originally appeared in 1967, "Luke and Matthew", <i>JQR</i> 57 (1967): 178-91.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-35336607524545535182019-05-21T09:13:00.000-04:002019-05-21T09:13:04.024-04:00How similar are the Synoptics, and how do we represent it?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I have enjoyed the feedback, especially on <a href="https://twitter.com/goodacre/with_replies">twitter</a>, from lots of people since I dusted down the blogging machine and reignited it earlier this week. I should blog more often! I had forgotten how much fun it is.<br />
<br />
Anyway, this is the third post in the current series; cf. <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-similar-is-luke-to-matthew.html">post one</a> and <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/larsens-challenge-to-studying-synoptic.html">post two</a>.<br />
<br />
Before continuing with critical reflections on Matthew Larsen's<i> Gospels Before the Book</i>, I'd like to pause to think a bit more about how we represent degrees of similarity between the Synoptic Gospels. This has been one of the most enjoyable take-aways from reflecting over the last couple of days. Larsen produced a proportional Venn diagram (p. 104) of the degree of similarity between Matthew and Mark in a bid to show just how similar these works are. He uses the pericope divisions in Aland's <i>Synopsis</i>. Here's my coloured version of his diagram, using <a href="http://markgoodacre.org/maze/synopses.htm">my Synoptic colouring scheme</a>: [2]:</div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kZFgpbhKNkA/XOHC5IVhZ2I/AAAAAAAAOo8/ml0UatJPbic-g1pHu2yAhg8iSJ68i9tLACLcBGAs/s1600/MarktoMatthew.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kZFgpbhKNkA/XOHC5IVhZ2I/AAAAAAAAOo8/ml0UatJPbic-g1pHu2yAhg8iSJ68i9tLACLcBGAs/s320/MarktoMatthew.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Key:</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: blue;"><span style="color: white;">Matthew's non-Marcan material (blue)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: red; color: white;">Mark's non-Matthean material (red)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: purple; color: white;">Material shared by Matthew and Mark (purple)</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<b>The numbers:</b><br />
<br />
Mark: 115 Aland pericopae<br />
Matthew: 178 Aland pericopae<br />
Overlapping: 107 Aland pericopae<br />
<br />
93% of Mark is paralleled in Matthew.<br />
60% of Matthew is paralleled in Mark.<br />
<br />
<br />
The diagram, though rough and ready, provides one metric for seeing how closely related Matthew is to Mark. The question then arises: what about Luke's relation to Mark? How close is it? Here's the proportional Venn diagram, again using my colouring scheme:<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZPbNJBGxm9Y/XONVKPegFaI/AAAAAAAAOpo/SRjRfJxs5qoUjUaYT2CeLMxfD8JM09AeQCLcBGAs/s1600/LuketoMark.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZPbNJBGxm9Y/XONVKPegFaI/AAAAAAAAOpo/SRjRfJxs5qoUjUaYT2CeLMxfD8JM09AeQCLcBGAs/s320/LuketoMark.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Key:</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="color: black;">Luke's non-Marcan material (yellow)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: red; color: white;">Mark's non-Lucan material (red)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: orange; color: black;">Material shared by Mark and Luke (orange)</span>
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<br />
<b>The numbers:</b><br />
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Mark: 115 Aland pericopae<br />
Luke: 185 Aland pericopae<br />
Overlapping: 101 Aland pericopae<br />
<br />
88% of Mark is paralleled in Luke.<br />
55% of Luke is paralleled in Mark.<br />
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These figures are surprisingly similar to the figures for Matthew, surprising as Matthew is often regarded as so much closer to Mark, a kind of "second edition" of Mark. To some extent, this is a result of using the Aland pericopae rather than the traditional verse parallels, but I look forward to running some more precise numbers in due course.<br />
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The thing that got me thinking afresh about this whole question was Larsen's comment that "there are no two works from the ancient world more similar to each other" than Matthew and Mark. <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-similar-is-luke-to-matthew.html">As I mentioned the other day</a>, I am not sure if this is right. Matthew and Luke are much more similar overall, but we tend to miss this because of classic Two-Source Theory thinking that minimizes their macro-similarities, and projects their close non-Marcan agreements onto a non-extant source, with a view to maintaining their independence from one another. Here's the proportional Venn diagram, again using my colouring scheme, and again using the Aland pericopae:<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cg_1s43eSAA/XONY0aR7deI/AAAAAAAAOp0/ceSkX8b561cS-i4T99alELYMfc2FshNIwCLcBGAs/s1600/MatthewtoLuke.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cg_1s43eSAA/XONY0aR7deI/AAAAAAAAOp0/ceSkX8b561cS-i4T99alELYMfc2FshNIwCLcBGAs/s320/MatthewtoLuke.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Key:</b><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: blue;"><span style="color: white;">Matthew's non-Lucan material (blue)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: yellow; color: black;">Luke's non-Matthean material (yellow)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: green; color: white;">Material shared by Matthew and Luke (green)</span><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The numbers:</b><br />
<br />
Matthew: 178 Aland pericopae<br />
Luke: 185 Aland pericopae<br />
Overlapping: 137 Aland pericopae<br />
<br />
74% of Matthew is paralleled in Luke.<br />
77% of Luke is paralleled in Matthew.<br />
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I am grateful to Joe Weaks on <a href="https://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/">The Macintosh Biblioblog</a> (this is all wonderfully nostalgic!) for raising the question about the utility of traditional Venn diagrams like this. His suggestion is to work instead with rectangles:<br />
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<b><a href="https://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/graphically-displaying-synoptic-data.html">Graphically Displaying Synoptic Data</a></b><br />
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This post shows how we can attempt to represent Matthew // Mark, Mark // Luke, and Matthew // Luke using coloured rectangles. I must admit that I really like Weaks's proposal, and not just because we use the same colour scheme. The only thing I'd say is that I <i>think</i> it would be harder to do the rectangle thing in black and white because it would be less clear that we are dealing with overlapping rectangles, whereas with circles, it is obvious even in black and white where one work ends and another begins.<br />
<br />
Weaks continues by asking the next major question: can one represent the overlaps between all three Synoptics using the coloured rectangle approach? Weaks shows that it is possible here:<br />
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<a href="https://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/graphically-displaying-three-synoptic.html"><b>Graphically Displaying Three Synoptic Gospel Data</b></a><br />
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This diagram is also excellent. My only qualm is that on first sight, it can look like the double tradition (green) is also part of the triple tradition (brown), which is of course not the case, and one simply has to discipline one's mind not to see it that way, though of course in a more complex version one could at least attempt to depict with shades of colour pericopae that are pure triple (with only a handful of minor agreements), pure double (with no Marcan agreements), and everything in between. But life is probably too short for that.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-22135972554870280532019-05-20T07:17:00.001-04:002019-05-20T21:16:41.626-04:00Larsen's Challenge to Studying Synoptic Relations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is a second post on <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/gospels-before-the-book-9780190848583?cc=us&lang=en&">Matthew Larsen, <i>Gospels Before the Book</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)</a> <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-similar-is-luke-to-matthew.html">[First post here]</a> in which I'd like to comment on Larsen's challenge to the study of Synoptic relations in Chapter 6.<br />
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Larsen's concern is that scholars of the Synoptic Problem tend to see the gospels as separate, discrete books, each with a unique author, [1] rather than seeing the gospels as different instantiations of the same fluid textual tradition. He illustrates the point by noting the way that various Synoptic theories are diagrammed. He is talking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories">diagrams like these</a>, and he gives his own versions of them (p. 102), and writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In all these graphic depictions, each constellation of textualized gospel tradition is represented as its own discrete unit, bounded by lines within a box or a circle or some other shape, with arrows indicating the direction of source relationship and redaction. All of this, however, as should be clear by now, serves to reinforce the third-century and subsequent gospel textuality and authorship discourse, reifying each gospel as an enclosed, separate text with its own unique author. How might we rethink the data? (p. 102).</blockquote>
It's actually not always the case that these diagrams are "bounded by lines within a box or a circle or some other shape"; my own preference has been to avoid the boundary lines, e.g. here in my book <i><a href="http://markgoodacre.org/maze/">The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze</a> </i>(p. 22):<br />
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In fact the irony of Larsen's concern about "clear black lines separating out discrete gospels from one another" (Larsen, p. 104) is that sometimes entities in these diagrams are placed in a box in order to show uncertainty about their existence or tangibility, as here in my diagram of the Two-Source Theory (<i>Way Through the Maze</i>, p. 20):<br />
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Nevertheless, Larsen's broader point is worth thinking about. Is it fair to say that diagrams like these tend to make us think too rigidly in terms of discrete, separate gospels, with different authors, and to ignore the overwhelming similarity between the Synoptics? Larsen's suggestion is to represent the "degree of overlap" between Matthew and Mark by means of a "Proportional Venn diagram of Overlap Between the Gospels of Mark and Matthew" (p. 104). So he counts the number of parallel "stories" in the index of Aland's Synopsis (see further yesterday's post):<br />
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Mark: 115 “stories”.<br />
Matthew: 178 “stories".<br />
Overlapping: 107 “stories”. <br />
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He then plugs these numbers into a Proportional Venn diagram, which I have adapted here in a coloured version (using <a href="http://markgoodacre.org/maze/synopses.htm">my Synoptic colouring scheme</a>) [2]:<br />
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Key:<br />
<span style="background-color: blue;"><span style="color: white;">Matthew's non-Marcan material (blue)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: red; color: white">Mark's non-Matthean material (red)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: purple; color: white;">Material shared by Matthew and Mark (purple)</span><br />
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It's a great idea to represent the data in this way, and I'm grateful to Larsen for thinking of it. There are precedents, e.g. the nice <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#/media/File:Relationship_between_synoptic_gospels-en.svg">Wikipedia coloured diagram</a>, but I don't recall having seen a proportional Venn diagram like this.<br />
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There is a point that needs making, though. The proportional Venn diagram is doing something completely different from the theory diagrams. The proportional Venn diagram is illustrating some of the data, while the other diagrams are illustrating theories of Gospel relationships. In other words, the Venn diagram is illustrating (an element in) the Synoptic Problem while the other diagrams are illustrating solutions to it.<br />
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It's a basic point, I know, but it is an important one. I have argued that one of the difficulties with the way that the Synoptic Problem is studied is that a theory is presented (usually Two-Source) and the data is then refracted through it. <a href="https://www.jasonstaples.com/education/teaching-the-synoptic-problem-after-the-synoptic-gospels/">As Jason Staples says</a>, it's "solution to plight" thinking.<br />
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In a sense, Larsen's preference for the proportional Venn diagram could be seen to forward this aim -- we might think of it as a way of encouraging people <i>first</i> to take the data seriously, and to get a sense of the problem before proceeding to solution. The difficulty, though, with the way that Larsen discusses the issue is that the Venn diagram is presented as an alternative to the theory diagrams, contrasting their bounded, discrete entities, with his overlapping materials. But both are necessary -- finding ways to represent the data as accurately and as clearly as possible as well as representing the theories as clearly as possible.<br />
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And with respect to those theory diagrams, everyone discussing the issue realizes that there are massive overlaps between Matthew and Mark. That's the beginning point of the discussion. If there were only differences, there would be no Synoptic Problem. Placing an arrow from Mark to Matthew (and to Luke) only expresses a model of textual relationships. One can still, like Burkitt and others, see Matthew as a "fresh edition of Mark" (<a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-similar-is-luke-to-matthew.html">see yesterday's post</a>), and use a classic diagram to show that relationship, the new edition being subsequent to and incorporating the previous edition. Or, to use Larsen's language, if we "think of the textual tradition we call the Gospel according to Matthew as continuing the same unfinished textual tradition of “the gospel” more broadly understood", there is nothing to stop us illustrating that in a theory diagram, a diagram that would be attempting a solution to the problem, which is a quite different thing from a diagram that attempts to depict the data.<br />
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[1] Larsen regularly uses the term "human" author, though I am not sure why the adjective is necessary given that no one is arguing for animal or alien authors.<br />
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[2] Generated using the <a href="http://barc.wi.mit.edu/tools/venn/">Venn Diagram Generator</a>.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-87741197659688204482019-05-19T10:30:00.000-04:002019-05-19T10:39:27.924-04:00How Similar is Luke to Matthew? Reflections Stimulated by Larsen<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have recently been enjoying reading Matthew Larsen's <i>Gospels Before the Book </i>(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and have been reflecting on elements in its thesis. In one sense, I was predisposed to find the book appealing since I have myself flirted with the idea of Mark as an "unfinished" gospel (<a href="https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/latest-nt-pod-on-ending-of-mark.html">NT Pod 71</a>), though I am less certain about some of Larsen's broader claims. In due course I hope to comment on his scepticism about our ability to do source- and redaction-criticism, but first, in this post, a couple of positive observations.<br />
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In Chapter 6 of <i>Gospels Before the Book, </i>Larsen reflects on how his thesis impacts on synoptic relations, which is a topic of interest to me. Larsen argues that we should not see Mark and Matthew as distinct "books", each with their own author. Each is an instantiation of a fluid textual tradition. To develop this point, he writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Viewed from within a different framework, we begin to see another picture. If one assumes the texts we now call the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark are not both part of the same fluid textual tradition, then to my knowledge there are no two works from the ancient world more similar to each other than the Gospel according to Mark and the Gospel according to Matthew, a fact often overlooked (101).</blockquote>
This perspective reminded me of the strong 20th century (mainly British) scholarly tradition of seeing Matthew as a kind of "second edition" of Mark. The tradition goes back, I think, to F. C. Burkitt in 1910, who described Matthew as "a fresh edition of Mark, revised, rearranged, and enriched with new material” (<i>The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus</i> (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910). Streeter echoed the judgement in his famous <i>Four Gospels</i>, and there's a fairly strong continuing tradition of seeing Matthew this way, e.g. by Graham Stanton, James D. G. Dunn, and more recently Francis Watson.<br />
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But a further thought on reading Larsen here occurred to me, and that thought was, "What about Luke?" Larsen is arguing that Mark is so similar to Matthew that there are no two works in the ancient world that are anything like as close as these two. But the point becomes stronger if one draws in Luke too. If Matthew and Mark are two of the most similar works from antiquity, surely Matthew and Luke are even more so.<br />
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The difficulty here is that decades of two-source thinking, with its insistence on Luke's independence from Matthew, have tended to immunize us against noticing the extent of the similarity between these two gospels. We allow Q to mediate their non-Marcan similarities, and then we stress their differences in attempting to underline their independence. But the similarities between Matthew and Luke are not limited to the two-hundred or so verses of double tradition. It is a question of their entire gospel projects.<br />
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I have been attempting press the point about the macro-similarities between the two works, in addition to the micro-similarities, for some years. If Matthew is effectively a kind of fresh edition of Mark, could Luke be seen still more as a fresh edition of Matthew? I don't know if I want to go that far, but I do think it worth pointing out once again just how similar these two works are. Unlike Mark, both begin with Infancy Narratives; both end with resurrection appearances & commission to "the eleven"; both feature a lot of additional identical sayings material, frequently with very close verbatim agreement.<br />
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It turns out that we can quantify the similarity between the two in a rough-and-ready way. Larsen does an interesting experiment in quantifying the degree of agreement between Matthew and Mark by using the index of Aland's <i>Synopsis</i>, and it's something we can extend to Matthew and Luke. Larsen's figures are as follows (pp. 103-4):<br />
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Mark: 115 “stories”.<br />
Matthew: 178 “stories".<br />
Overlapping: 107 “stories”. Thus, Larsen says:<br />
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93% of Mark is paralleled in Matthew.<br />
60% of Matthew is paralleled in Mark.<br />
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I checked Larsen's numbers and they came out the same way for me. I then did a count on the Lucan parallels, and they come out like this:<br />
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Luke: 185 "stories"<br />
Overlapping with Matthew: 137. Thus:<br />
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74% of Matthew is paralleled in Luke.<br />
77% of Luke is paralleled in Matthew.<br />
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It is of course a clunky and imprecise way of doing things, and my own preference would be to do it on the basis of sentences or verses rather than Aland units, but it is interesting nevertheless to see just how quantifiably "similar" Matthew and Luke are to one another, at least according to this metric.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-98114235402507652017-12-13T23:12:00.000-05:002017-12-13T23:12:47.012-05:00Favourite -- and least favourite -- Jesus Films<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Every couple of years, I teach a course on Jesus in Film at Duke. Last time I taught the course, I ran a fun poll at the end in which I asked students <b>"What is your favourite Jesus film?"</b> <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2017/08/favourite-jesus-film.html">I posted the results here</a>.<br />
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This year's results are now in! Amazingly enough, the academics' most hated film of all, <i>Passion of the Christ</i>, gets the most votes, albeit only a fifth of the class (6/30). As before, <i>Jesus Christ Superstar</i> gets a good showing, as does the wonderful BBC <i>Nativity</i>. Newcomers <i>Young Messiah</i> and <i>Risen </i>do surprisingly well:<br />
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(1) <i>Passion of the Christ</i> [6 votes]<br />
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(2)<i> Jesus Christ Superstar</i><br />
<i>The Nativity </i>(BBC, 2010)<br />
<i>Young Messiah</i> [4 votes each]<br />
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(5) <i>Jesus of Nazareth</i><br />
<i>Life of Brian</i><br />
<i>Last Temptation of Christ</i><br />
<i>Risen</i> [2 votes each]<br />
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One vote each:<br />
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<i>The Gospel According to St Matthew</i><br />
<i>The Miracle Maker</i><br />
<i>The Passion</i> (BBC / HBO, 2008)<br />
<i>The Bible / Son of God</i><br />
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This time I thought to ask them several additional questions, including <b>"What is your least favourite Jesus film?"</b> And here there is a clear winner!<br />
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(1) <i>Godspell</i> [17 votes]<br />
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(2) <i>Life of Brian</i> [3 votes]<br />
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(3) <i>Greatest Story Ever Told</i><br />
<i>The Bible / Son of God </i>[2 votes each]<br />
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One vote each:<br />
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<i>King of Kings</i><br />
<i>Gospel According to St Matthew</i><br />
<i>Last Temptation of Christ</i><br />
<i>Killing Jesus</i><br />
<i>The Star</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-54463632043201485432017-12-13T22:30:00.002-05:002017-12-13T22:38:11.202-05:00Further Response to Alan Garrow<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I am grateful to Alan Garrow for <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/back-again-did-matthew-use-luke-alan-garrows-reply-to-mark-goodacre/">responding to my post</a> on <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/garrows-flaw.html">Garrow's Flaw (details and links here)</a> over on <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/">Bart Ehrman's blog</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/garrows-flaw.html">I had pointed out</a> that Garrow's model diagnoses high verbatim double tradition passages as the result of Matthew's copying of Luke alone. "High DT [double tradition] passages," he says,"are best explained by Matthew’s copying of Luke without interference from any other entity.” Low verbatim passages are the result of Matthew conflating Luke and the Didache. The claim is foundational and explicit in Garrow's work:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"[W]hen Matthew copies Luke without distraction he produces High DT passages. When, however, Matthew knows differing versions of the same event he conflates them – resulting in a Low DT passage."</blockquote>
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In my response, I pointed out that Garrow's own list of "High DT passages" includes several cases of Matthew actually working not from "Luke alone" but from Luke and Mark. In other words, his claim that Matthew produces high verbatim passages when working from Luke alone is contradicted by his own model. </div>
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Garrow responds by arguing that Matthew's behaviour is "consistently plausible". I quote the paragraph in full:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A good solution to the Synoptic Problem is one that allows each Evangelist to behave in a consistently plausible manner. To rebut my thesis, therefore, Goodacre must show that, under my proposal, Matthew is required to do something that is essentially implausible. The unbelievable behavior he identifies is that Matthew (according to me) sometimes very closely conflates two or more related sources (e.g. The Sin against the Holy Spirit, where Matt. 31.31-32 conflates Mark 3.28-30, Luke 12.10 and Did. 11.7), sometimes switches between sources at intervals (e.g. the Beelzebul Controversy, where Matt. 12.22-30 alternates between Mark 3.22-27 and Luke 11.14-23), and sometimes decides to forego the labor of conflation where the rewards for doing so are limited (e.g. John’s messianic preaching and the sign of Jonah: Matt. 3.12 // Luke 3.17 and Matt. 12.38-42 // Luke 11.16, 29-32 respectively). I must leave you to judge whether this variation is so extraordinary as to justify Ehrman’s view that this is a ‘completely compelling’ reason to declare that Matthew could not have known Luke.</blockquote>
This does not respond to my point, which is not a question about degrees of plausibility, but a question about the consistency and coherence of Garrow's model. I do not have a difficulty with the issue of variation in degrees of verbatim agreement; indeed, as Garrow points out, I have myself written about this. The issue to which I am drawing attention is straightforward: Garrow claims that high verbatim agreement in double tradition is diagnostic that Matthew is working form Luke alone. I am pointing out that on his model, high verbatim agreement does not illustrate this.<br />
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Garrow adds some general criticisms of the Farrer theory, including the old chestnut about "unpicking", which dates back to F. Gerald Downing. I have little to add here to the excellent critiques by Ken Olson and Eric Eve on this issue, but I will say that no critic of the Farrer theory has yet successfully isolated a single occasion where an advocate of the Farrer theory uses the term that they consistently put in quotation marks. I generally try to avoid putting things in quotation marks that are not quotations, but I realize that practices vary. <br />
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Garrow concludes with his favourite quotation from me, "The theory that Matthew has read Luke … is rarely put forward by sensible scholars and will not be considered here" (<a href="https://archive.org/stream/synopticproblemw00good#page/108/mode/2up"><i>The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze</i>, 109</a>), where I was of course just describing the field at the time of writing, a description echoed by Garrow himself three years later, "“The possibility that Matthew directly depended on Luke’s Gospel has not been widely explored” (<i>The Gospel of Matthew's Dependence on the Didache</i>, 228 n. 10). I should perhaps let on that my engagement with Alan's work began long before Evan's wager; that just gave me the opportunity to share work in progress. What's been fun has been the demonstration that people really are interested in the Synoptic Problem.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-13507320878640815002017-12-13T00:05:00.000-05:002017-12-13T00:05:00.181-05:00Review of The Star by Emily Waples<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" gesture="media" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tVgQuZf5o1M" width="560"></iframe>
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It's fun to be teaching a course on Jesus in Film when a new Jesus film comes out! <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjT2bWnw4XYAhXok-AKHbELBIAQFghgMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thestarmovie.com%2Fsite%2F&usg=AOvVaw3sUP_8Xt9Q4aR4lcaXQw8M">The Star</a> (dir. Timothy Reckardt) was released in November in time for the pre-Christmas crowds. I gave my students the opportunity to write a review of the film for extra credit. One of them was so good that I asked her if I could reproduce it here:<br />
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<b>Review of <i>The Star</i></b><br />
Emily Waples<br />
<i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">The
Star </span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">(2017),
directed by Timothy Reckart, begins with a Pentatonix rendition of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Carol of the Bells.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> The Nativity story that unfolds is
as rethought and modernized as the opening a capella song. A subtitle appears on
screen, immediately tipping us off to the film</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s historical inaccuracy: </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">9 months BC.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> Then again, in an animated film
featuring talking animals, were we expecting much regard for historicity?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">The film begins with Mary in
Nazareth (faithful to Luke 1.26) and the angel</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s apparition to her. At its
onset, the angelic apparition is not unlike that in <i>Jesus of Nazareth</i>, if more fantastic: a bright light fills the
room, taking on a vaguely angelic form. The light crystallizes as stuff best
described as stardust. Later, the same stardust indicates the angel</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s apparition to Joseph, a scene
omitted from the film (perhaps to save time, perhaps to avoid more discussion than
necessary of Mary</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s
inexplicable pregnancy </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">–</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">
parents don</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">t want
questions about the birds and the bees. Mary</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s quick acceptance of the angel</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s words serves the same purpose).
The plot proceeds and, like in <i>Jesus of
Nazareth</i>, Mary goes to visit Elizabeth (Luke 1.39), a visit only detailed
by Mary</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s return
to Nazareth with her cousins (6 months later, the subtitle tells us), just in
time for her and Joseph</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s
wedding feast. Somehow a single shawl hides her pregnancy. When Joseph does
discover her pregnancy, he</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s
not angry, as in <i>The Nativity</i> (2010).
If he was, again with the unwanted questions. Joseph</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s character develops to be a
worried but good-hearted father-to-be, one who several times prays to God for a
sign. And that sign is Bo, the donkey.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">The film</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s few (and, for the most part,
secondary) human characters are worth examining with regards to their biblical
origins (or lack thereof). Following the Disney princess trope, Mary</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s morality is established through
her uncommon kindness towards animals. The primary recipient of her care and
the film</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s
central character is a donkey, whom she names Bo (voiced by Steven Yeun). Both
she and Joseph are depicted as Jewish. The part of the plot revolving around
Mary and Joseph reflects a more Lukan influence: Nazareth, Elizabeth and
Zechariah, census, manger, though it balances the Lukan emphasis on Mary with
the Matthean focus on Joseph so that the two share the spotlight. With regards
to the shepherds (Luke) and the Magi (Matthew), the latter play a more
substantial role, if only because the addition of three camels to the cast of
animal characters must have been irresistible to writers Simon Moore and Carlos
Kotkin. Still, the film does not neglect the shepherds: the apparition of the
heavenly host to them is included, relying heavily on Ruth, the sheep who
befriends Bo and Dave the dove (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) (Luke 2.8). For
his part, Herod is a classic baddie. The wise men (Matthew) visit him, and
while their conversation takes a backseat to the camels</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> antics, the film at least
alludes to the darker aspects of the Matthean nativity narrative: Herod sets
his helmeted hunter (he</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">s
dressed as a Roman soldier) and his two dogs (they provide a voice for the
silent assassin) after Mary, and, consulting a scribe, remarks, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">If you can</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">t kill this one child, I</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">ll kill them all.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> This is the closest the film
comes to the Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2.16), but it is an appropriate
choice given the intended audience.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Though I could not sympathize with the
complaints of famous actors serving as distractions in Jesus films like <i>The Greatest Story Ever Told</i>, in <i>The Star</i>, familiar voices frequently
take you out of the action: Gina Rodriguez (<i>Jane
the Virgin</i>) as Mary, Zachary Levi (Disney</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s <i>Tangled</i>) as Joseph, Aidy Bryant (<i>SNL</i>, <i>Girls</i>) as Ruth, the
peppy sheep, and Oprah Winfrey as Deborah, the strangely prescient camel whose
reverent remarks about the baby Jesus frequently set goofball fellow camels
Felix and Cyrus guffawing (Tracy Morgan, <i>SNL</i>,
and Tyler Perry, the <i>Madea </i>movies, respectively).
A host of popular singers join them: Gabriel Iglesias as Rufus, Kelly Clarkson
as Leah, Kristin Chenoweth as Abby, and Mariah Carey as Rebecca.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The film relies heavily on slapstick,
screwball and situational humor (chase scenes are frequent in the film). It is
at times quite self-conscious (or self-referential), taking advantage of popularized
Nativity elements to allude to the made-up plot revolving around Bo. For
example, the older donkey tells him, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">We
grind grain, we don</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">t
carry kings</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> and you
know Bo will prove him wrong and carry the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem (a
popularized image not biblically founded). Bo, turning away from his dream of
joining the so called </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">royal
caravan</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> comes
to help Mary and Joseph on their trip to Bethlehem (like <i>The Nativity </i>and<i> The Nativity
Story </i>(2006), <i>The Star</i> has a
significant road trip sequence).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Humor aside, <i>The Star</i> pushes broad Christian tropes: forgiveness (of Rufus and Thaddeus,
the soldier</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s dogs)
and the power of prayer (at times, the speed and way with which God seems to
answer Joseph</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s
requests makes you wonder if the film is pointing to coincidence, rather than
divine intervention; more likely, however, the film is remarking on the
unexpected way God is said to answer prayers: Joseph, who is not fond of Bo,
asks God for help and the donkey appears). Reckart includes a subtle commentary
on the meaning of Christmas: the royal caravan, which Bo seeks to join, is
represented by the unmistakable sound of jingle bells. You almost expect Santa
to show up. But what is the true meaning of Christmas? Bo gives a definitive
answer, turning his back on the caravan and the jingle bells, returning to help
Mary. The story has an evangelical bend, too, in the story of Ruth, who leaves
her flock to follow the star of Bethlehem (Matthew 2.2). The message is spelled
out for us: following God requires sacrifices. Mary and Joseph verbalize the
same idea: </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Just
because God has a plan doesn</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">t
mean it</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s going
to be easy.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
Christian platitudes? Yes. But they suit <i>The
Star</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The end credits contain a disclaimer
that </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">the filmmakers sought to create a playful, fun story while </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">striving to capture the </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">values and essence of the story</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
If I judge<i> The Star</i> by these criteria,
I</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">m inclined to declare the film a moderate
success. It</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s a children</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s
movie, far more so than any of the film</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s we</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">ve seen this semester. It outdoes <i>Godspell </i>(1973), in a good way, and
strikes a more humorous tone than <i>The
Miracle Maker </i>(2000). The worthwhile comparison with <i>The Young Messiah </i>(2016) is between that film</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s
Jesus and Bo, who both display a remarkable ignorance of the divinity of Jesus.
Only after everyone else has put two and two together does Bo realize that the
baby is king, just in time for him to bow down along with the Magi, shepherds
and host of animals (it</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">s a pretty nativity picture, though not as
impressive as that in <i>The Nativity Story</i>.
Perhaps because animation, far easier to manipulate, is not as impressive as a
live-action shot). Within its own genres </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">–</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> comedy, animated, children</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’s
–</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> <i>The Star </i>is a success.
But, revolving around a made-up story about animals, it does not fit well in a classic
canon of Jesus films. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-34657072566530621512017-12-12T17:04:00.001-05:002017-12-13T21:36:08.675-05:00Garrow's Flaw<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Over on <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/">Bart Ehrman's blog</a>, there has been some fun relating to the Synoptic Problem. <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/a-1000-challenge-to-me-did-the-author-of-matthew-use-luke/">A commenter promised $1,000</a> to Prof. Ehrman's blog's charities if he engaged with Alan Garrow's work on the Synoptic Problem. Since I have read and thought about Dr Garrow's work, I thought I'd offer to write a post on it, drawing attention to what I see as one of the flaws in the argument. Prof. Ehrman has posted those comments today, and I am cross-posting them here.<br />
<br />
I've enjoyed the social media reaction to this, with comments also on <a href="https://www.alangarrow.com/blog/barts-1000-gamble">Alan Garrow's blog</a>, <a href="https://academic.logos.com/ehrman-goodacre-and-the-1000-challenge-over-q/">The Logos Academic Blog</a>, and no doubt elsewhere.<br />
<br />
Please note that I do this to encourage people to visit and subscribe to my friend and colleague's blog, with the hope that others will support <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/philanthropy/">these great causes</a>, including one local to us, <a href="http://umdurham.org/">The Urban Ministries of Durham</a>.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
In a <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/and-then-there-was-q/">recent comment on Bart Ehrman's blog</a>, "Evan" suggested that Alan Garrow's arguments are so compelling that he effectively "proves beyond any doubt that Matthew used both Mark and Luke". He says that it is "virtually impossible to believe in the Q theory once you’ve seen this data". The same commenter goes on to offer $1,000 for the charities on the blog in return for an assessment of Garrow's case, asking in particular for "holes in his arguments." As a self-confessed synoptic nerd, and as one who has spent some time with Garrow's work, I thought I would offer this critique by way of response. Since "Evan" is particularly interested in holes in Garrow's case, I thought I would focus on one particular flaw that places a major question mark over this model.<br />
<br />
I should point out that while Bart and I are on different sides on the Synoptic Problem, he a staunch supporter of the Two-Source Theory and I an advocate of the Farrer Theory, we are both agreed that Matthew did not know Luke, which is what is under discussion here. I have enjoyed reading Bart's recent blog entries (and the multiple comments!) on these issues, and I hope to find a moment to respond, even if just to provide an excerpt from something I have written. But back to the immediately pressing issue.<br />
<br />
Alan Garrow has made his case in a series of videos on his blog, <a href="https://www.alangarrow.com/mch.html">Streeter's 'Other' Synoptic Solution: The Matthew Conflator Hypothesis</a> and <a href="https://www.alangarrow.com/extantq.html">An Extant Instance of Q</a>, and it is these videos that "Evan" is referring to. Garrow's more detailed, scholarly argument is laid out in two articles by the same names recently published in the premier journal in the field, <i>New Testament Studies</i>. The fact that one of Garrow's articles is entitled "An Extant Instance of Q" illustrates that it can hardly be the case that "Alan Garrow has compiled an extremely compelling argument that Q never existed" (so "Evan", on Bart's blog). Garrow is actually arguing that Matthew and Luke did use Q, and that we can see exactly how they used Q, because Q has not been lost. Q is, in fact, the Didache! The Didache is a fascinating early Christian work, first published in 1883, but Garrow is the first -- to my knowledge -- to identify it with the hypothetical Q.<br />
<br />
Garrow's synoptic model works with Marcan Priority (something shared by Bart and me) but he adds a couple of further elements: (1) Matthew and Luke both know and use Q, which is now unveiled as the Didache; and (2) Matthew also knows Luke's Gospel. In his videos and articles, he works with the analogy of a multiple vehicle car crash. All the data, he says, need to be explained. He then pays special attention to a key element in the car crash -- the variation in rates of verbatim (word for word) agreement between Matthew and Luke in the double tradition (i.e. in passages found only in Matthew and Luke). He points out, quite correctly, that sometimes Matthew and Luke have very high verbatim agreement with one another, and sometimes they have rather low verbatim agreement with one another. This variation in verbatim agreement, he says, demands an explanation.<br />
<br />
Garrow argues that his model provides a good explanation of both the high verbatim and the low verbatim passages. High verbatim passages are the result of Matthew directly copying from Luke. They are places where Matthew has just Luke in front of him. Here, Matthew is copying Luke "without distraction." Low verbatim passages are the result of Matthew conflating Luke with Q (=the Didache), i.e. places where Matthew does not agree as much with Luke because he is distracted by one of Luke's sources, Q (=the Didache). As he expresses it, "High DT [double tradition] passages are best explained by Matthew’s copying of Luke without interference from any other entity.”<br />
<br />
Garrow is right that the spectrum of agreement in Matthew's and Luke's double tradition requires an explanation. Anyone studying the Synoptic Problem should certainly make sure that they have a good account of why Matthew and Luke sometimes agree very closely and why they sometimes provide the same material in very different words. But is Garrow's diagnosis correct? I don't think so. The difficulty is that it is contradicted by his own model. Several of the passages with very high verbatim agreement in Matthew and Luke are passages where Matthew, on Garrow's own theory, is also copying from Mark, passages like John's messianic preaching (Matt. 3.12 // Luke 3.17), the Beelzebub Controversy (Matt. 12.22-30 // Luke 11.14-23), and the Sign of Jonah (Matt. 12.38-42 // Luke 11.16, 29-32). In passages like these, Matthew and Luke can be remarkably close in wording, and yet these are passages where there are also parallels in Mark.<br />
<br />
In other words, Garrow has constructed a model where Matthew is supposed to be agreeing very closely with Luke when there is no distraction, in places where only Luke has the passage in question. And he is supposed to agree with Luke much less when he is distracted by another source, the Didache (or Q). But this is sometimes manifestly not the case. We can test Garrow's thesis by asking how Matthew behaves when the evangelist is copying from both Luke and Mark. And since these passages (usually called "Mark Q Overlap passages") feature a lot of very high verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke, it is clear that "distraction" has nothing to do with it.<br />
<br />
Garrow summarizes his own argument by saying that, "[W]hen Matthew copies Luke without distraction he produces High DT passages. When, however, Matthew knows differing versions of the same event he conflates them – resulting in a Low DT passage." But on Garrow's own thesis, Matthew is quite capable of producing high verbatim agreement when he "knows differing versions of the same event." It may be worth adding that there are plenty of low verbatim passages in Matthew and Luke where there is no parallel in Mark or the Didache, i.e. Matthew is perfectly capable of producing a low verbatim passage on his own with just one source. Whatever we might make of the wisdom of comparing one's synoptic model to a car crash, it has to be said that high verbatim agreement is simply not diagnostic of an author working from only one source, just as low verbatim agreement is not diagnostic of an author working from more than one.<br />
--<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-88515254654430140822017-09-14T20:35:00.003-04:002017-09-14T20:36:55.823-04:00Early Christianity Position at Duke<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I am happy to be able to post the following announcement of a position in Early Christianity in our department at Duke:<br />
<br />
--<br />
<a href="http://religiousstudies.duke.edu/">The Department of Religious Studies</a> within Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University invites applications and nominations for a position in the study of Early Christianity, at the rank of (tenure-track) Assistant or (tenured) Associate Professor. Candidates with expertise in any aspect of Early Christianity in the late ancient world (ca. 3rd to 10th century) are encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will be familiar with critical methods in Religious Studies and will combine excellence in undergraduate instruction with teaching and mentoring in the Graduate Program in Religion. Collaboration with other programs and departments at Duke as well as with colleagues at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill is expected.<br />
<br />
Interested candidates should send a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, evidence of innovation and expertise in teaching (e.g. teaching evaluations, a teaching statement, a list of proposed courses), and the names and contact information (email, phone, and postal address) of three references to <a href="http://academicjobsonline.org/">http://academicjobsonline.org</a>. Initial review of applications will begin November 1, 2017. Informal queries should be addressed to Professor Marc Brettler, chair of the search committee, at <a href="mailto:MZB3@duke.edu">MZB3@duke.edu</a>. Consideration will continue until the position is filled. Start date is August 2018.<br />
<br />
Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, is an Equal Employment Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer committed to providing employment opportunity without regard to an individual's age, color, disability, genetic information, gender, gender identity, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-82247349094852902442017-09-12T15:04:00.000-04:002017-09-12T15:04:16.921-04:00Mark Mattison's Gospels.net<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I am grateful to Andrew Bernhard for sending over news of a change in his website <a href="http://gospels.net/">Gospels.net</a>. He posted the following message on Labor Day:<br />
<blockquote>
Thank you to all who have visited my site during the past twenty years. I am humbled by the attention it has received and grateful for the opportunities it has provided me to connect with interesting people around the world.
I am now pleased to pass <a href="http://gospels.net/">gospels.net</a> on to Mark Mattison. I have been impressed by his dedication, as an independent scholar, to preparing public domain translations of ancient gospels not included in the New Testament. I regard Mark's work in making these gospels available online and usable by all as invaluable.
I wish Mark only the best in continuing his work of making these texts easily accessible (without either sensationalizing or denigrating them). <a href="http://gospels.net/">Gospels.net</a> is his website now.</blockquote>
Andrew's website has been online since the early days, and I have happy memories of finding it, enthusing about it, and linking to it on the <a href="http://ntgateway.com/">NT Gateway</a>. I've just taken a look at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20000823105041/http://www.ntgateway.com:80/noncanon.htm">the NT Gateway from seventeen years ago</a>, and there it is on the Non-canonicals page, then titled "Jesus of Nazareth in Early Christian Gospels". I must admit that I do miss those simpler times when it was possible to be almost exhaustive in one's coverage of the area, and I miss the fun of hand-coding my web pages. <br />
<br />
Going back a little further, it's a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20001217032200/http://www.ntgateway.com:80/jul99.htm">"Featured Link" in July 1999</a>, with the comment "This fine web resource by Andrew Bernhard is the new version of the web site formerly known as The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This is a first class resource, featuring introductions, fresh translations, bibliography and links on canonical, non-canonical and hypothetical gospels. Its most notable new feature is The Greek Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, an on-line edition of the Oxyrhynchus fragments of Thomas with translation."<br />
<br />
But that is quite enough reminiscing. Andrew has now handed on his site to Mark Mattison, who is well known for his <a href="http://www.thepaulpage.com/">The Paul Page</a>. The new <a href="http://gospels.net/">gospels.net</a> includes Mark's translations of The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Judas, and other ancient gospels.<br />
<br />
When I asked Andrew why he decided to transfer gospels.net to Mark, he replied:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Over the last five years or so, there have been a lot of changes in my life. As a result, my interests have changed pretty drastically, and I just realized that I personally wasn’t going to be devoting much more time or energy to the study of ‘lost gospels.’ I actually retired the site back in January, but then I changed my mind and decided it would be better to pass it on to somebody else. Mark seemed like the perfect fit, and I have no doubt he’ll make great use of the site. He’ll probably make it better than I ever did! Regardless, as far as my own scholarship on early Christianity is concerned, I am done.”</blockquote>
So this post is in part to say a big thank you to Andrew for his fine website, and the work he has put into it over the last two decades, and in part to thank Mark Mattison for taking it on and taking it forward.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759844.post-89352433202467914542017-09-05T08:46:00.002-04:002017-09-05T08:47:27.856-04:00"Say it with awe!" The Apocryphal John Wayne <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Twelve years ago (<a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/say-it-with-awe.html">Say it with awe</a>; <a href="http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/say-it-with-awe-update.html">Say it with awe update</a>), I blogged about the legendary John Wayne story, in which the Duke, playing the role of the centurion at the cross in <a href="https://sites.duke.edu/jesusfilms/the-greatest-story-ever-told/">The Greatest Story Ever Told</a>, delivers the line "Truly, this was the Son of God," only to be told by director George Stevens, "Say it with awe, John!" He responds, "Awww, truly this was the son of God!".<br />
<br />
Here's the clip in context. Wayne comes on at the 2:30 mark:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zfHStJaidXU" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<br />
I noted at the time that the story certainly appears to be apocryphal, and I have been meaning to take a little more time to look into it ever since. I am currently teaching my Jesus in Film course at Duke, and this week we all watched <i>The Greatest Story Ever Told</i>, and it prompted me to revisit the story.<br />
<br />
It is always difficult to chase down the authenticity of stories like this. Demonstrating that something did not happen is tough. But after a little searching, I found a lovely confirmation that in fact it never happened, in an interview that fills in some background and context in <i>Greatest Story</i>.<br />
<br />
The source is Michael Munn, John Wayne: <i>The Man Behind the Myth </i>(New York: New American Library, 2003): 248-9. Munn begins by retelling the famous story:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is a famous but untrue story concerning Wayne’s only line of dialogue in the Crucifixion scene, and this is the time to put the record straight. According to legend, Wayne said his line “Truly this was the Son of God” three times, none of them to Stevens’s satisfaction. So Stevens said, “Can you give it a little more awe, Duke?” and Duke said, “Aw, this was truly the Son of God.” Very funny. But not true.</blockquote>
He goes on with an account of a 1977 interview he conducted with Roddy McDowall, who played Matthew in the film:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When I interviewed Roddy McDowall on the set of <i>The Thief of Baghdad</i> at Shepperton Studios in 1977, he talked about his work on The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he played the disciple Matthew, and about John Wayne’s brief appearance as the centurion. Said McDowall, “We shot the Crucifixion on a soundstage in the studio. It was a marvelous set. There was hardly any dialogue except between the actors playing the two thieves and Max as Jesus. I promise you, John Wayne as the centurion did not say a word. If you watch the film closely, when you hear his voice saying, ‘Truly this was the Son of God,’ you don’t see his lips move, and that’s because George Stevens had decided he wasn’t going to let the audience hear Wayne. In fact, he shot the scenes of Jesus carrying his cross and the Crucifixion in such a way that you hardly knew it was John Wayne. George was embarrassed that he’d been made to bring in so many stars as extras. After filming, George decided he needed the centurion to say the line after all, and he got Wayne into a sound studio, and he wasn’t in costume and he just had a microphone, and George asked him to deliver the line. Wayne told him, ‘I can’t do this.’ George said, ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you? That’s what you’ve been trying to prove all these years.’ And Wayne said, ‘I’ve got nothing to react to, so if I screw this up, don’t blame me.’ And he was right. He couldn’t give the line what it needed. You can’t blame Wayne, you can’t blame George; you can only blame the assholes who made the decision to use Wayne—and all the other actors who were in that scene just so the names would bring in the crowds—which they didn’t.”</blockquote>
Munn's account ends with this enjoyable comment:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Playing John the Baptist was Charlton Heston, Hollywood’s most prolific star of epics. He said, “There are actors who can do period parts and there are actors who can’t. God knows Duke Wayne couldn’t play a first-century Roman.”</blockquote>
McDowall, as reported by Munn, is right -- Wayne's lips are not moving in the scene.<br />
<br />
Although it never happened, it is, of course, a lovely story, and like all good myths, it tells the hearer something important about its subject matter. In this case, it names the director of the film, it tells you that Hollywood bigwigs played key cameos, and it tells you that the film erred by casting famous Hollywood stars at the expense of realism. And, of course, it makes you chuckle.<br />
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Mark Goodacrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05115370166754797529noreply@blogger.com5