Theodore J. (Ted) Weeden Obituary

Many thanks to Ken Olson for sending over the sad news of the death of Theodore J. Weeden. His obituary is here:

Rev. Dr. Theodore (Ted) Weeden

Weeden's Mark: Traditions in Conflict 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. 

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 Mark: Traditions in Conflict?" "The very same!" he replied. 

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. 

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. 

I. Howard Marshall (1934-2015)

I was sorry to hear of the death of I. Howard Marshall over the weekend. He was 81. Marshall was a prolific scholar and he will be fondly remembered, especially the generations of evangelical students he trained at the University of Aberdeen.

I was lucky to get to know him a little after his retirement because he was a regular at the British New Testament Conference. He had been president of the society, and his name was on the bank account. He always showed great humour when I asked him to sign all our cheques. He said that he enjoyed spending other people's money.

Prof. Marshall was always encouraging and gracious to younger scholars. I remember in particular his kindness in providing feedback on a paper I gave on the first beatitude, which later became Chapter 7 of The Case Against Q. He was not at all convinced! Like most evangelicals of the day, including his teacher F. F. Bruce, he was wedded to Q. I have often consulted his commentary on Luke, which may be his finest and most important book.

I first saw Prof. Marshall on TV, when I was a teenager. He was interviewed for the Channel 4 programme Jesus: The Evidence, which also featured Geza Vermes, Helmut Koester, Werner Kümmel and Morton Smith. I have extracted the minute or so that features Howard Marshall and uploaded to Youtube here:





It was something of a cause célèbre at the time among evangelicals that Prof. Marshall only received a minute or so compared to the many minutes given to Geza Vermes, George Wells and others!

There is also a lecture on Youtube from Acadia University:





It is from 2002 (uploaded in 2012) and the topic is "The Interpretation of the Bible and Development of Theology." Over on Biblical Studies Online, Deane Galbraith has gathered together a series of Prof. Marshall's lectures from 1991, the Moore College Lectures on A Fresh Look at the Acts of the Apostles:

I. Howard Marshall on the Acts of the Apostles

There have been several tributes to Prof. Marshall online, including Ray Van Neste in Gospel Coalition, Darrell Bock, also on Gospel Coalition, Michael Bird on Euangelion, Stanley Porter on Domain Thirty-Three. There are comments also on Jim West's blog and James McGrath's blog. Please let me know in comments if I have missed anything.

Tribute to J. Louis Martyn by Joel Marcus

I am delighted to be able to share the following tribute to J. Louis Martyn by Prof. Joel Marcus, Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins in Duke Divinity School.
--

My former doctoral advisor, J. Louis Martyn, died on June 4 at the age of 89. A long, tall Texan from Dallas, he did not initially aim at an academic career. In fact, either before or after graduating from Texas A & M in 1946 with a degree in electrical engineering, he went into his father’s plumbing and air conditioning business for a while. Somehow I found out about this early on, and at a party at which the Martyns were present, remarked to Christopher Morse, then an Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, how glad I was to find out that it was possible for a plumber’s son to become a theologian.  (My father was a building contractor.)  Christopher responded, “Yes, a sort of nuts-and-bolts theologian.” Lou was standing by, and he had in his eye the famous twinkle that I was to see many times afterwards. I am sad that I won’t see it again.

Something happened to divert Lou Martyn from plumbing (though he remained a very good plumber, carpenter, and general fixer-upper to the end of his life). For this, of course, New Testament exegetes are grateful. The diversion seems to have had something to do with a faith awakening, something to do with the electrifying experience of actually seeing someone hold a Greek New Testament in his hand and exegete it, and something to do with Dorothy Watkins, who preceded him by a year in matriculating to Andover Newton Theological School, and whom he married in 1950. He graduated from Andover Newton with a B.D. in 1953 and then went on to do a Ph.D. at Yale under Paul Schubert, writing on Heilsgechichte (a word he hated) in the Gospel of John and graduating in 1957. Moody Smith, who was his junior colleague at Yale, has remarked that Lou’s famous metaphor of the Fourth Gospel as a two-level drama was already present in the dissertation, years before he heard (probably from W. D. Davies at Union) about Birkat Ha-Minim, the rabbinic curse against heretics, which he uses in History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel to anchor the two-level analysis. And this in turn reminds me of a New Testament Colloquium at Duke, which Lou attended after he and Dorothy retired to Carolina Meadows in Chapel Hill in the late 2000s. The presenter referred to “J. Louis Martyn’s theory about John as a two-level drama,” and Lou interjected, “That’s not a theory.”

Theoretical or not, History and Theology, which Lou published in the same year that he became Edward Robinson Professor of Biblical Theology at Union (1967; he had been teaching there since 1959), changed the face of Johannine studies, cementing a turn already in progress (Barrett, Brown) towards seeing first-century Judaism as the primary religionsgeschichtlich background for the Fourth Gospel, but making this background come alive in a new way through a graphic reconstruction of the situation of the Johannine community in confrontation with the fledgling rabbinic movement. Though some aspects of this book are controversial, especially the use of Birkat Ha-Minim, it is, I think, safe to say that no postwar monograph has done more to determine the direction of subsequent Johannine studies. This is partly a tribute to Lou’s sparkling prose, to the way in which he mobilizes le mot juste and le exemple juste, and to the way in which he moves seamlessly from imaginative but factually grounded historical reconstruction to engaged theological reflection. All of these features characterize Lou’s subsequent work, which centered on Paul’s letters, especially Galatians, and climaxed in the publication of his volume on that epistle in the Anchor Bible (1997) and the essays collected in the same year as Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul. Lou used to speak of the way in which Rudolf Bultmann’s thought ran in a synchronous, mutually reinforcing pattern with John’s, even though they were separated by two millennia; it often seemed to Lou’s students and readers that the same was true of him and Paul. A former student has told me that, when she first came to Union, someone told her that the man teaching the courses on Paul actually was Paul.

As a person, Lou was unique. I have never met anyone like him. He was a great storyteller, but he also listened. I think my daughter’s sketch above captures this listening quality. He was a spellbinding lecturer, giving important words an extra push not with increased loudness but with intensified enunciation. But he was even better as a seminar leader, and even better than that in one-on-one conversation, because he always conveyed the sense that, however stupid you thought yourself to be, he was learning something from you. And I believe that he was, that he saw things in his students and, more widely, in his friends, that they didn’t see in themselves. For me, that is the definition of grace.

Joel Marcus
Duke Divinity School

Tributes to J. Louis Martyn (1925-2015)

I was sorry to hear of the death of J. Louis Martyn last week. He is one of the greats of New Testament scholarship. Beverley Gaventa has a lovely tribute on the SBL site here:

J. Louis Martyn 

Among the bloggers, there are tributes from Sean Winter and Daniel Kirk, and the News and Observer has a tribute here:

J. Louis Martyn

This tribute includes a comment from my colleague Joel Marcus, who was one of Martyn's students:

According to Joel Marcus, Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke Divinity School, what distinguished Martyn’s approach to the writings of the New Testament was a passionate urge to hear them with the ears of their first hearers. He saw the Gospel of John as a “two-level drama” that simultaneously tells a story about the earthly Jesus in A.D. 32 and about a Christian community caught up in the vicissitudes of late first-century Jewish sectarian strife. In his work on Paul’s epistles, Martyn highlighted their apocalyptic nature, by which he meant that in the gospel God liberates and redeems a hostile world.

Plagiarism in the Telegraph's obituary of Marvin Meyer

I commented yesterday on the error-laden obituary of Marvin Meyer in The Telegraph.  It turns out that the errors are not the worst of it.  Chunks of the piece have been plagiarized.    I am grateful to Todd Brewer in comments for drawing attention to the following points, which I here develop and illustrate with underlining of the verbatim agreement so that there can be no mistake.

Wikipedia's article on The Gnostic Gospels begins as follows:

The Gnostic Gospels are a collection of about fifty-two texts supposedly based upon the ancient wisdom teachings of several prophets and spiritual leaders including Jesus, written from the 2nd to the 4th century AD.

The Telegraph obituary copies this as follows:

The Gnostic Gospels are a collection of about 52 texts supposedly based upon the teachings of prophets and spiritual leaders, including Jesus, written from the 2nd to the 4th century AD. 

It is practically verbatim. If the obituary writer is dependent on Wikipedia, it's not surprising that the piece is riddled with errors.

An article in last year's New York Post, The new New Testament, by Maureen Callahan, features the following statements:

These writings, 52 in all, date from between 150-300 AD and offer profoundly differing accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ . . . .

. . . . The Gospel of Philip ridicules the idea of a virgin birth and of Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead and anyone who would believe either. The Apocalypse of Paul also claims that Christ’s rise from the dead was spiritual, not physical. The Gospel of Mary suggests a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (which served as the basis for “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown’s loopy 2003 bestseller). 

This passage appears to be the basis for the Telegraph's problematic paragraph I mentioned yesterday:

These writings offer profoundly differing accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Philip, for example, ridicules the virgin birth and Christ’s bodily resurrection; The Apocalypse of Paul also claims that Christ’s rise from the dead was spiritual, not physical; The Gospel of Mary suggests a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

This is plagiarism pure and simple, and like many plagiarizing students, the author is copying from someone else because s/he does not understand the issues him/herself, carrying over the errors from the source piece.

I am grateful also to Todd Brewer in comments for noticing other elements in the article that appear to be plagiarized.  Take this paragraph from a New York Times article in 2003, The Heresy That Saved a Sceptic,

Early Christians were subject to unimaginable persecutions, and church fathers believed that for Christianity to survive, there had to be a unified belief system, Ms. Pagels said. Some time around A.D. 180, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons denounced all gospels but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as heretical, ''an abyss of madness and of blasphemy.''

About 50 years after Constantine's conversion early in the fourth century, the New Testament became Christianity's official text.

This is the basis for the first paragraph of the Telegraph obituary:

What we know as the New Testament – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation – was actually born of thousands of texts and gospels circulated among the early Christians. Members of the new faith were subject to persecution, and the Church fathers felt that for the faith to survive, there had to be a unified belief system. Some time around AD 180, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon denounced all gospels but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as heretical. Later, about 50 years after Constantine’s conversion early in the fourth century, the New Testament became Christianity’s official text.

Notice Elaine Pagels's characteristic use of "Bishop Irenaeus" finding its way into the plagiarized piece, though her name itself is, of course, removed in the copied text.  The copied version has several other typical signs of plagiarized texts, abbreviation by omission of colourful (and tell-tale) detail ("an abyss of madness and of blasphemy") and the substitution of metaphors ("the new faith . . the faith") that in due course revert, by fatigue, to the original wording ("Christianity").

In comments, Todd Brewer notes that there are probably other elements in the piece that are plagiarized too.  He is right.  One major source is the article by Thomas Bartlett, The Betrayal of Judas, in The Chronicle of Higher Education from May 2008, including here:

As he translated, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. This was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. This was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. This was a revelation.

This is rewritten in the Telegraph obituary as follows:

As Meyer began translating the text, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. Instead of the traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, he found Jesus’s best-loved disciple and friend, a man singled out to receive mystical knowledge and a hero who helps Jesus return to the realm of the divine and fulfil his destiny as Messiah.

Bartlett's article in The Chronicle continues as follows:

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world -- with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11. 

This paragraph is copied in The Telegraph obituary like this:

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world, The Guardian hailing the work as “a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history”. Meyer subsequently travelled to Egypt to film a documentary about the discovery, aired later on National Geographic’s cable channel, that attracted record audiences.

Once again, there is abbreviation.  Some is innocuous -- there is no need for a British paper to explain what The Guardian is so that note is dropped.  But the note that "Meyer subsequently travelled to Egypt" is a poor summary of the Chronicle's accurate order of events.  And "record audiences" is also a poor summary of the Chronicle's more nuanced statements on the TV ratings.

Immediately after the above paragraph in the Chronicle, is the following:

But almost immediately, other scholars began to take issue with the interpretation of Meyer and the rest of the National Geographic team. They didn't see a good Judas at all. In fact, this Judas seemed more evil than ever. 

This is taken over by the Telegraph obituary like this:

But almost immediately, other scholars began to take issue with the translation, disputing Meyer’s interpretations of key passages which converted Judas from arch villain to hero.

In the Chronicle article, Bartlett writes in detail about April DeConick's critique:

She started the next day on her own translation of the Coptic transcription, also posted on the National Geographic Web site. That's when she came across what she considered a major, almost unbelievable error. It had to do with the translation of the word "daimon," which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as "spirit," an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as "demon." In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning. "O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?" becomes "O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?" A gentle inquiry turns into a vicious rebuke.

The passage is is carried over more vaguely, and with substantial abbreviation, in the Telegraph piece:

In another passage Meyer’s translation has Jesus saying to Judas “O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?” An alternative translation is “O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?” turning a gentle inquiry into an angry rebuke.

The Telegraph piece, which is focusing on Meyer, omits mention of the rest of the National Geographic team and does not give DeConick's name.

The Telegraph obituary does, however, mention James Robinson, and it spends time detailing the controversy between the two men.  As Todd Brewer points out (comments), the material here appears to be gleaned from an article in the LA Times, "Was it virtue or betrayal", by Louis Sahagun, from January 2007.  But that article does not feature the detail that Meyer sported "a silver hoop in his left ear", which I suspect is carried over from the LA Times obituary, where the same phrase occurs.

I think that it is disgraceful that The Telegraph's obituary of Marvin Meyer is a patchwork of passages plagiarized from different electronic articles and I would like to suggest that they acknowledge what they have done, issuing a full apology, and replacing the plagiarized piece with something that appropriately honours Professor Meyer's memory.

Marvin Meyer - Telegraph Obituary

The Telegraph has just published its obituary of Marvin Meyer:

Marvin Meyer
Marvin Meyer, who has died aged 64, was an expert on Gnosticism whose translation of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas challenged the traditional portrayal of Judas Iscariot as the Apostle who betrayed Jesus.

I am delighted to see The Telegraph honouring Marvin Meyer's life and work by publishing an obituary, but unfortunately, there are some rather sweeping generalisations and questionable elements in the piece, including the following:

The Gnostic Gospels are a collection of about 52 texts supposedly based upon the teachings of prophets and spiritual leaders, including Jesus, written from the 2nd to the 4th century AD. 

The number "52" is the number of tractates found among the Nag Hammadi codices, not all of which are "Gnostic" and not all of which are "Gospels".  Moreover there are "Gnostic Gospels" not found among the Nag Hammadi codices.  The obituary goes on to mention Nag Hammadi but appears unclear about how these things line up.  The following is also not entirely accurate:

These writings offer profoundly differing accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Philip, for example, ridicules the virgin birth and Christ’s bodily resurrection; The Apocalypse of Paul also claims that Christ’s rise from the dead was spiritual, not physical; The Gospel of Mary suggests a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

The idea that the Gospel of Mary suggests a sexual relationship between Jesus  and Mary Magdalene is false.

Most of the piece is devoted to the controversy over the Gospel of Judas, with a couple of paragraphs of obituary proper at the end.  It is a shame that The Telegraph did not think to fact-check its obituary before publication.  The kind of confusion found in the piece does not honour the work of a fine scholar.

Update (Saturday 25th): It's worse.  The piece is in fact plagiarized.

Christopher Evans - Guardian Obituary

The Guardian last week published its obituary of Christopher Evans. I was not able to post it at the time because I was away:

The Rev Christopher Evans obituary

Inspiring teacher of theology and authority on the New Testament

Richard Eyre

The Rev Christopher Evans, who has died aged 102, was one of the foremost teachers, and an outstanding investigator, of the New Testament. His brilliant, alert and inquiring mind persisted into extreme old age, enabling him to act as a bridge between the leading scholars of the 1930s and 1940s and those of the early 21st century . . . .

Marvin Meyer - LA Times Obituary

I was very sorry to hear last week of the death of Marvin Meyer.  Today's LA Times has an obituary:

Marvin W. Meyer dies at 64; expert on Gnosticism
The specialist in early Christianity helped translate the Gospel of Judas, which he said portrayed the disciple as a hero, not a villain, for betraying Jesus and setting in motion the Crucifixion.

Marvin W. Meyer, an expert on Gnosticism and ancient texts about Jesus outside the New Testament who challenged the traditional portrayal of Judas Iscariot as the ultimate biblical villain, has died. He was 64.

Meyer, whose book "The Gospel of Judas" sold more than 1.2 million copies and prompted frequent guest appearances on television documentaries and other programs, died Aug. 16 of complications from melanoma, according to his wife, Bonnie.

The tanned, athletic man who wore rumpled khakis, oversized shirts and a silver hoop in his left ear "was our Indiana Jones," said James L. Doti, president of Chapman University in Orange, where Meyer held the Griset Chair in Bible and Christian Studies and was director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute . . . .

I have been away from the blogs recently so have not had the chance to catch up with tributes to Prof. Meyer on the net, but I look forward to doing so.

Christopher Evans - Telegraph Obituary

The Telegraph has published its obituary of Christopher Evans:


The Rev Professor Christopher Evans
The Reverend Professor Christopher Evans, who has died aged 102, was one of the most interesting New Testament scholars of his day.

Evans combined a sceptical attitude to the historicity of much of the New Testament with a deep personal faith. Thus he was cautious and tentative about the Empty Tomb while emphatic in his preaching of the truth of the Resurrection of Christ. His special gifts as a teacher allied to a very attractive personality enabled him to exercise considerable influence in Oxford, Durham and London over some 30 years . . . 

. . . . Christopher Francis Evans was born in Birmingham on November 7 1909 and went from King Edward’s School in that city to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, a New Testament scholar of international repute. Evans was eventually to move to a much more liberal position than that of his mentor, but while in Cambridge he learned a great deal from Hoskyns and took a First in Theology . . . .

 . . . But his magisterial commentary on St Luke’s Gospel, published in 1990, long after his retirement, was widely acclaimed and is likely to remain the standard work on its subject for many years . . .

I've excerpted some of my favourite pieces, but of course you should read it all.

Christopher Evans has died, aged 102

I was sorry to hear yesterday of the death of Prof. Christopher Evans, aged 102.  David Mealand, over on Xtalk, shared the following:

This announcement was issued recently by Corpus Christi College, Oxford
--------
We were saddened to learn today of the death of The Revd. Christopher Evans FBA, Emeritus Fellow, Chaplain and Divinity Lecturer at Corpus (1948-58) at the age of 102 on 30 July. His funeral will be held on Monday, 6th August at 12.15 at All Saints, Cuddesdon.
---------
Prof. Evans also later held the Lightfoot chair at the University of Durham, and then a chair in New Testament in the University of London, King's College.

There was also an announcement in The Times.  I am sorry that I did not see this in time to post it before the funeral yesterday.  I will link to any online obituaries here as soon as they are published.

Christopher Evans was a brilliant New Testament scholar.  His commentary on Luke (1990) is probably the best scholarly commentary on Luke available in the English language and came as the crowning achievement of a fine career.  Professor Evans was a kind and gracious man, who even in his eighties was able to find time to encourage a young post-graduate student in Oxford.  I named my doctoral thesis, subsequently my first book, after an article he published in Theology in 1979, "Goulder and the Gospels".  I saw him last in Birmingham at the SNTS in 1997 when he came along to the Synoptic Problem chaired by the late David Dungan.  On that occasion too, Christopher Evans was a model of grace and wisdom.

Walter Wink (1935-2012)

Further to my brief post last week, there is now confirmation of the sad news of Walter Wink's death on 10 May.  Richard Deats, on the Fellowship of Reconciliation website, writes:

Walter Wink, 76, one of the most creative and influential scholars of our day, died peacefully at his home in Sandisfield in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts on May 10, 2012. 

The website goes on with a fine tribute.  Comments also on The Biblical World and The Quaternion and a tribute at The Holy Irritant.  As further tributes appear, please let me know (in the comments below, if you like), and I'll update this post with them.

Update: more tributes collected here on Anoigmatic.

Death of Wilfred Lambert, Obituary and Reflections

Jim West reports on the sad news of the death of Prof. Wilfred Lambert and links to a nice, detailed obituary in the Birmingham Post:

Birmingham-born historian and archaeologist Wilfred Lambert dies

I got to know Professor Lambert while I was at the University of Birmingham between 1995 and 2005.  He was unfailingly gracious and kind-spirited though I must admit to thinking him, at times, a little eccentric.  He was a regular in the coffee room in the Arts Building and I remember many interesting conversations with him there.  He would always try to get to our Biblical Studies colloquium and on one occasion presented a paper.  I used to have to make a special effort to tell him about the colloquium because he never embraced email; everything was done the old-fashioned way.

I knew about his Christadelphian affiliations and remember his disdain for a lot of modern medicine, and especially modern drugs.  I had not realized until reading the obituary, though, that he was so thoroughly Brummy, born in Erdington, at King Edward's High School in Edgbaston (where many a great classicist studied) and so on.  Nor did I know that he was a conscientious objector during the war.

The obituary has a little (but important) mistake:

His knowledge of ancient eastern history could not be bettered and in January 2010 Prof Lambert and colleague Dr Irving Finkel identified pieces from a cuneiform tablet that was inscribed with the same text as the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay artefact dating from 6 BC praising the rule of Babylon monarch King Cyrus The Great.

It should, of course, be the 6th Century BC.  Details about that discovery are found in a press release at the British Museum (scroll down to 23 January 2010).

C. K. Barrett Obituaries

The Guardian published its obituary of C. K. Barrett last week. It is written by Robert Morgan who describes him, alongside C. H. Dodd, as "the greatest British New Testament scholar of the twentieth century":

The Rev CK Barrett obituary
Biblical scholar known for his acute analysis of the New Testament


Thanks to Alan Bandy, Sean Winter, Mike Bird and others for the notice.

The Telegraph obituary was published a month ago, but I did not get the chance to mention it because it fell during my sabbatical from blogging:

The Reverend C K Barrett
The Reverend CK Barrett, who died on August 26 aged 94, was one of the foremost New Testament theologians of the 20th century


Both obituaries mention his habit of doing his NT research from 10pm to 2am each day.

Robert Markus Obituary

I was catching up with the obituaries in The Independent earlier today and noticed this one on Robert Markus:

Robert Markus: Medieval historian noted for his writings on the early Church

Robert Markus was a distinguished medieval and ecclesiastical historian known principally for his writings on St Augustine and the history of the early Church. While he wrote as a committed Christian, he always insisted that ecclesiastical history must be written with the same scientific objectivity as secular history, and that ecclesiastical developments could only be understood in relation to wider changes in society.

Ehud Netzer Obituary

Today's Independent has an obituary of Ehud Netzer who died in October (see Paleojudaica, Jim West, Bible Places and elsewhere for more):

Ehud Netzer: Israeli archaeologist best known for excavating King Herod's winter palace

Death of Franklin Young

I am sorry to hear from Richard Hays the sad news of the death of Franklin W. Young, the Amos Ragan Kearns Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Patristic Studies at Duke Divinity School. He passed away on 25 September at the Carolina Meadows community, where he had been in residence in recent years. Our local paper, the News and Observer, has an obituary:

Franklin Woodrow Young: Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of New Testament and Patristic Studies

Noted biblical and patristic scholar Franklin Woodrow Young died Saturday, September 25 at his home at Carolina Meadows. Young was Amos Ragans Kearns Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Patristic Studies at the Duke Divinity School, having retired in 1985 after a total of 23 years on the faculty there . . .

. . . . Young was educated at Dartmouth College and earned the bachelor of divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary. He then undertook doctoral studies at Duke University on a University Fellowship, and was an instructor in the Divinity school from 1944-1946. After receiving the Ph.D. in 1946, he was made assistant professor and dean of students. He held this position until 1950, when he joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School as assistant professor. In 1954, Young became professor of New Testament and patristic at Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, and in 1959 he moved back east to serve on the faculty at Princeton; he was director of graduate studies in religion and then chair of department of religion. In 1968, Young returned to Duke Divinity School where his career had begun. He was professor of, New Testament and patristic studies until 1970, when he was awarded the Amos Ragan Kearns endowed professorship. Young served as director of graduate studies in religion at Duke for six years.

Young was known for courses on the Greek gospels and patristic texts, and for exegesis courses in English and Greek. He was the author of several books, among them “Understanding the New Testament” and “The Living World of the New Testament,” both with Howard C. Kee. He also contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals, bible dictionaries, and encyclopedias . . . .

I bet I am not the only one for whom The Living World of the New Testament was one of the first textbooks I read on the New Testament, back in my Sixth Form 'A' Level RE.

The obituary also features the remarkable note that Professor Young is survived by his "wife of almost seventy years", Jean Steiner Young .

Frank Kermode: The Independent Obituary

Tomorrow's Independent has its obituary of Frank Kermode:

Sir Frank Kermode: Academic and pre-eminent literary critic who reached out to a non-specialist audience
By Paul Levy

Frank Kermode Obituary

The Daily Telegraph has its obituary of Sir Frank Kermode, who died yesterday:

Sir Frank Kermode
Sir Frank Kermode, who died on August 17 aged 90, was the most eminent critic of English literature since FR Leavis; his teaching career culminated in the senior English professorship at Cambridge University, a post he surrendered in 1982 in the aftermath of a widely reported doctrinal rift within the faculty.

The Guardian also has also just published its obituary:

Sir Frank Kermode obituary
Pre-eminent critic who with easy erudition explored how ideas work in literature

The Times Obituaries go behind their pay-wall

I am disappointed to see that The Times is now putting its obituaries section behind their pay-wall.  Regular readers may remember that I like to peruse the obituaries section of The Times and often add links here when a Biblical Scholar or a classicist or someone of note has their obituary there.  In fact, I once wrote a Times obituary myself.  The only consolation about the new policy is that they have kept an open archive available of older obituaries, though without pictures and comments, so links to Times obituaries here will still work.  But in future, there will be no more links to Times obituaries in this blog.

Anthony Flew Obituary

Tomorrow's Times has its obituary of Anthony Flew, who died last week:

Professor Anthony Flew: philosopher

Anthony Flew was one of the best-known atheists of his generation but he finally repudiated the label. As an academic philosopher he subjected the question of God’s existence to careful, non-polemical analysis. When he declared himself a theist in his old age he annoyed many of his admirers — which might have been the intention . . .

Update (15.28): The Telegraph also has its obituary of Anthony Flew tomorrow.