The Passion of Christ: Two Films in One

Dennis Prager has seen a rough cut of The Passion of Christ and has written a useful article on it:

'The Passion of Christ': Two Films in One

Michael Palin

It enjoyed watching Michael Palin on tonight's Parkinson; it included a clip from Life of Brian (arms for an ex-leper) and an anecdote on how helpful it was to have nuns with "Ban The Life of Brian" placades outside cinemas; Palin commented that it was even better publicity than if they'd dressed up as nuns and done it themselves. I remember creeping in to see Life of Brian at the cinema aged 13 on what was at the time an "AA" certificate, i.e. 14 and over; I think the sense of naughtiness enhanced my enjoyment of the film. All these years later it is still funny. Palin mentioned a new book about Monty Python written by the five surviving Pythons which may be worth looking out.

Ray Frank Robbins

BP News has a tribute to Ray Frank Robbins, former professor of New Testament and Greek at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, who died on October 26 aged 87:

Ray Frank Robbins remembered for years of service at NOBTS

The Long View -- Hadrian's Wall

I mentioned the fascinating Vindolanda Tablets recently. They were discussed along with Hadrian's Wall in general on The Long View this week on Radio 4. If you missed it, you can listen again:

The Long View: War and Walls

Jim West's new blog

Jim West has started a new Biblical Studies Blog which replaces his previous Petros Baptist Church blog.

Online or Invisible

Stephen Carlson (Hypotyposeis blog entry) draws attention to a very interesting article:

Steve Lawrence, "Online or Invisible"

This is reproduced from Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001 and provides research from the area of computer science and related disciplines that "More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are substantially more likely to be freely available on the web". It's an effective plea to scholars to make their research available on-line. I'd add from my own experience that while it's generally not welcome to put your books on-line, publishers are more than happy to allow one to reproduce one's academic articles on-line. And by doing so there is no question that you get a far, far wider audience than if you only allow it to remain in the journal or collection in which it first appeared. So let me echo Stephen Carlson's exhortation to academics to make their work available on-line; it's not just the wider academic community but you yourselves who will benifit.

Articles on women in the NT by Kenneth Bailey

Thanks to Richard Anderson on Synoptic-L for drawing attention to two articles by Kenneth Bailey, linked by the theme of women in the NT, in a journal called Theology Matters (Vol. 6, no. 1, January / February 2000). The two articles are in a single PDF file, so I can't give you URLs for each separate one. So if you want the second, click on the link and scroll down.

Kenneth E. Bailey, "Women in the New Testament: A Middle Eastern Cultural View"

Kenneth E. Bailey, "The Women Prophets of Corinth: A Study of Aspects of 1 Cor. 11.2-16"

US TV set for "Jesus' wife" storm

Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this from BBC News Online:

US TV set for "Jesus' wife" storm
A leading US TV news reporter has said her network is taking a risk with a news special which asks whether Jesus Christ had a wife.

It's clearly crackpot stuff (e.g. "The programme is partly based on the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code"); it will be interesting to see if it does cause the "storm" predicted.

Jews and Christians Reading the Bible: A Forum

Robert Kraft on Ioudaios mentions the following:

Jews and Christians Reading the Bible: A Forum

It's at Bryn Mawr college next week, 6-7 November 2003. It's a nice looking web site, if a little over-elaborate. It is to feature a Webcast, which should be interesting. So I'll try and remember to post a reminder here when it starts.

Jim Davila blogged this on Tuesday; I'm a bit behind this week!

Dante's Inferno Test

Jim Davila takes Dante's Inferno Test and makes it to the second level of hell. Well, it looks like I've made it to purgatory! You can take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test by following that link.

Lawrence Wills's Ancient Jewish Novels

An issue of Forward out this week has a chatty review of Lawrence M. Wills (ed. and translator), Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003):

Something Old: A Collection of Ancient Novels Plumbs Antiquity and Proselytizes for Piety

Reviewer is Mark Jay Mirsky. He's clearly enjoyed reading Joseph and Aseneth in particular and comments

Joseph's eccentric romance with his Egyptian bride, who merits only a single line in the text of the Bible, echoes the Book of Ruth in its themes of conversion to Judaism and steadfast loyalty. "Joseph and Aseneth," however, is almost parody. The elements of exaggeration in Aseneth's conversion and Joseph's exalted status remove these characters from any realistic world and set them in a ritualized one of operatic melodrama — far from the austere riddles of the Book of Ruth, which continues to fascinate contemporary novelists, such as Cynthia Ozick. Does this in part explain why "Joseph and Aseneth" and several sister narratives were excluded by the redactors who established the rabbinic canon?

Answer: no, not even in part.

Update: previously blogged in Paleojudaica.

Margaret Mitchell's SBL Synoptics Section paper

As I've mentioned before (see here), we have a session planned for the Synoptics Section at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Atlanta in a few weeks time on The Gospels for All Christians thesis. Margaret Mitchell's paper for that session is now available to view in advance:

Margaret M. Mitchell, "Patristic Counter-Evidence to the Claim that 'the Gospels were written for all Christians'"

Or navigate from the NT Gateway Gospels and Acts or from the Synoptic Gospels Section web site where it will be available soon.

Latest JSNT

The latest Journal for the Study of the New Testament has appeared -- Volume 26, Number 1 (September 2003). The message below is the alert sent by ingenta who do the on-line version of the journal. Everyone can read abstracts by following the links below; those whose institutions subscribe to the journal should also be able to read the full-text of the journal.

Journal for the Study of the New Testament, a journal from Sheffield Academic Press is now available online via the Ingenta Select service, and contains the following articles:

Discussion Articles
Asceticism and Christian Identity in Antiquity: A Dialogue with Foucault
and Paul
Halvor Moxnes
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s1/p3

Sex Slaves of Christ: A Response to Halvor Moxnes
Jorunn Økland
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s2/p31

Asceticism and Christian Identity in Antiquity: A Response
John Riches
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s3/p35

Articles
'Leave the Dead to Bury their own Dead': Q 9.60 and the Redefinition of
the People of God
Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s4/p39

'Teaching You in Public and from House to House' (Acts 20.20): Unpacking
a Cultural Stereotype
Jerome H. Neyrey
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s5/p69

Ancient Oleiculture and Ethnic Differentiation: The Meaning of the
Olive-Tree Image in Romans 11
Philip F. Esler
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s6/p103

Booklist
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/s7/p125

To view this issue online, please go to:
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/sap/0142064x/v26n1/contp1-1.htm

PhD-positions at the University of Groningen

This posted on behalf of Dr George van Kooten of the University of Groningen:

Three PhD-positions at the University of Groningen
Jewish and Christian Traditions

The Faculty of Theology & Religious Studies of the University of Groningen announces a search to fill three Ph.D. positions.

The Faculty runs three research programmes, among which a programme in Jewish and Christian Traditions. Excellent and suitable candidates, who have finished a relevant MA, are encouraged to apply. The research group consists of Professor Ed Noort (OT, Archaeology & Biblical Theology), dr Jacques van Ruiten (OT & Early Judaism), Professor Florentino García Martínez (Early Judaism & Qumran), dr Eibert Tigchelaar (Early Judaism & Qumran), Professor Gerard Luttikhuizen (NT & Gnosticism), and dr George van Kooten (NT & Hellenism).

At this stage, candidates should only send their curriculum vitae, a title of proposed research, a brief research proposal including a presentation and definition of the principal questions and problems, a brief general outline of the prospective table of contents, and a specification of referents, altogether certainly not exceeding two pages. Please send your application to Professor Ed Noort, Email e.noort@theol.rug.nl, before November 10th, 2003. After initial screening, the most suitable candidates will be invited to submit a full-scale proposal. For further enquiries, contact Professor Noort, Telephone 0031-50-363 55 67 (office); 0031-598-35 07 54 (home), or Email e.noort@theol.rug.nl.

The PhD appointments entail a 4-year fixed term contract, pay award rising over the years from EURO 1,683 to 2,258 per month. After one year an assessment takes places.

The University of Groningen is a strong, interdisciplinary university in the Netherlands. There is a direct connection between London Stansted and Groningen Airport (Ryanair).

Review of Ehrman

An article in the Boston Globe by Scott Bernard Nelson speaks enthusiastically of Bart Ehrman's twin publications Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew and Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament. The review is by Scott Bernard Nelson:

Combing through lost articles of faith

!Hero worship

An enthusiastic article about the !Hero Rock Opera in the St Petersburg Times On-line:

'Hero' Worship
In !Hero, The Rock Opera, the Jesus of the Gospels is transformed into a dreadlock-wearing street preacher for the hip-hop generation.

I've blogged about this before [e.g. here]. I've now listened to the CD frequently and I'm a fan. If you like Jesus Christ Superstar, you'll probably like this. The article features some interesting quotations from Eddie DeGarmo who co-wrote the piece:

"They were a people that had come out of bondage," DeGarmo said of the Jews. "They were a people that were downtrodden in their own society, and I feel like the African-American folks have come through some of those things that parallel that. It's just like God to reach down and pick the person that would be the least likely to rise up . . . and I just thought it was very appropriate to depict Christ as an African-American in !Hero."

Michael Tait plays Jesus and in says,

"As a little boy growing up in the inner city of Washington, D.C., being the son of a pastor, at my dad's church and other churches around the city, I'd always see these pictures of this blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus," he said.

As he got older, Tait studied the Bible and realized that Jesus likely was not white, and he probably wasn't black, either.

"The truth is, he probably looked more like a terrorist, if you really break it down," Tait said. "I mean Jewish, Middle Eastern, dark, woolly hair. But the fact is, it's provocative."

Sounds like he might have seen Son of God (Jesus the Complete Story in the U.S.) -- a couple of people said to me at the time that that face looked a bit like something from Crimewatch.

The article also says that "Grammy winner Rebecca St. James is Maggie (Mary Magdalene)". I've not read the novels, but there are no signs that Maggie is Mary Magdalene from the CD; the only clear identification is with the woman from Samaria in John 4; that story has its own song called "Secrets of the Heart" -- only time I've heard a song based on this story. You can see a bootleg of this being performed on the Hero! web site here:

Secrets of the Heart (starts just under a minute into this clip)

Inevitably, Mel Gibson's film gets mentioned,

DeGarmo has stayed away from the controversy that surrounds Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of Christ. In !Hero, the savior's opponents are not depicted as people of a specific culture. They are pegged as government officials and "street urchins" who don't believe what Hero preaches and think he and his followers are a danger to life as they know it.

What the article doesn't point out, though, is that the one clearly identified Jewish character, the chief rabbi Kai (loosely based on Caiaphas, but also a composite of Gospel scribes and Pharisees), is a stereotype baddy.

New Horsley book

Richard Horsley has a new book out. How does he manage to write so much? Here's the press release (with the usual rider that other publishers are welcome to send me their press releases and so to get some free publicity if they want it!).

Horsley Explores the Intersection of Religions, Rhetoric, & Political Life

MINNEAPOLIS (October 27, 2003)—In Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit Richard Horsley brings his considerable skills to bear on the timely questions concerning religious rhetoric and empire-building. How do the teachings of Jesus impact our understanding of the uses of power? How can we understand the invocation of God in modern political rhetoric? These questions and more are explored in order to help readers develop a clearer sense of modern religious and political issues.

In this perceptive look at ways politics and religion entwine, Horsley examines patterns of relations between imperial power and religion, describing how ancient and modern empires subjugate peoples by co-opting their local religious practices and attitudes, and identifying similarities between resistance movements.

“The most important task before us may be to consider how religious practices are related to the imperial power relations that have determined people’s lives for centuries, but have gone unnoticed and unanalyzed.”
—from the Introduction

Key Features

- Discusses Jesus, modern Islamic movements, and U.S. foreign policy

- A major move forward in establishing the history and social role of the Pharisees

Richard Horsley is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author and co-author of numerous books, including Jesus and Empire and Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, both from Fortress Press.

Religion and Empire is the newest addition to the Facets series from Fortress Press.

The Facets Series, brief, brilliant treatments of vital aspects of faith and life, offers gems of religious writing from leaders who address today’s more important or pressing questions—biblical, theological, and moral. Other volumes recently released include: Walter Brueggemann, The Spirituality of the Psalms (0-8006-3450-0); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Visionary Women (0-8006-3448-9); John Kaltner, Islam: What Non-Muslims Should Know *0-8006-3583-3); Philip Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming (0-8006-3608-2); Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence (0-8006-3609-0); James M. Robinson, editor, The Sayings of Jesus: Q in English (0-8006-3451-9); Martin Luther King, Jr., The Measure of a Man (0-8006-3449-7); Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology: A Proposal (0-8006-3481-0); N. T. Wright, The Contemporary Quest for Jesus (0-8006-3492-9); John B. Cobb Jr., Christian Faith and Religious Diversity (0-8006-3483-7); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Who Is Christ for Us? (0-8006-3480-2); John R. Polkinghorne, Traffic in Truth (0-8006-3579-5); and Gösta W. Ahlströn, Ancient Palestine: A Historical Introduction (0-8006-3572-8). Each book, offered at an economical price, presents a special angle that uniquely illumines an area or issue.

###

Religion and Empire
Format: 96pp; 4.25 x 7";
ISBN: 0-8006-3631-1
Price: $6.00
Publication: November 2003

To order Religion and Empire please call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the web site at www.fortresspress.com. To request review copies or exam copies please visit the website at www.fortresspress.com or call 1-800-426-0115 ext. 234. For interviews, speaking engagements, and writing assignments please call 1-800-426-0115 ext. 234 or email toddb@augsburgfortress.org.

More catch-up blogging to come, but probably not until tomorrow morning.

Next blog on Wednesday

I'm away from computers for the next few days; look out for the next blog entry on Wednesday.

Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus

Another Fortress Press release (where are the other publishers?):

““This study is so masterful in its grasp of a vast array of evidence, so solid and innovative in its methodology, and so audacious in conception that it is bound to become a classic. The most important historical and sociological study ever written on Roman Christianity.”
—Robert Jewett, Interpretation

Fortress Press To Release Peter Lampe’s From Paul to Valentinus

MINNEAPOLIS (October 22, 2003)—In a path-breaking and widely hailed study, newly available in English, author Peter Lampe integrates history, archaeology, and social analysis to retrace rise and shape of the earliest Christian communities in Rome. “Brilliantly conceived and masterfully executed” (Prof. John H. Elliott), Lampe’s social history of Roman Christianity builds on archaeological, inscriptional, and juridical sources, to complement the reading of the great literary texts from Paul’s Letter to the Romans to the writings of Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Montanus, and Valentinus.

Meticulously and thoroughly reworked and updated for this English-language edition by the author from the second German edition of his Die staedtromischen Christen, From Paul to Valentinus is a groundbreaking work, broad in scope and closely detailed. Lampe reconstructs the social status of early Christians, the shape of their communities and leadership, the Christians’ relation to the Judeans living in Rome, and the gradual “fractionating” of the community there.

Among the scholarly plaudits for his work:

“This impressive work puts our study of early Roman Christianity on a new and more certain empirical basis and must now serve as the point of departure for all subsequent research. . . . Lampe has expanded our database and has provided the most extensive social profile of Roman Christianity currently available.”
— John H. Elliot, Catholic Biblical Quarterly

”Lampe shows that there are both archaeological and literary grounds for saying that the early Roman Christian community was at first indistinguishable from the Jewish one, form which it emerged as perhaps a less affluent underclass of God-fearers. Lampe’s book will impress all who read it as a well-informed attempt to synthesize a vast amount of data in a serious, informed, and scholarly way.”
— Alan F. Segal, Journal of Biblical Literature

“Peter Lampe’s extremely thorough study of the Roman Christians ... I would judge it the best work on an early Christian Church I have read in the last decade... Lampe exhibits such balance and care that I would find myself hard-pressed to write the usual review, agreeing with some points and disagreeing with others. His conclusions are likely to be the basis of most on-going discussion ... The interest of these (Lampe’s) theses for church history, as well as for New Testament, should be obvious.“
— Raymond E. Brown, em. Professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary, NY, in: The Heythrop Journal, July 1988, 359-60

“This is a learned and enjoyable study of the social history of the Christian community in Rome... It is not one of those social histories that wishes to substitute social factors for ideas and theologies, but a book which derives its strength from its perceptions of the intimate links between doctrine and life. Dr Lampe knows how to use epigraphic and juristic evidence... He equally knows his way round the catacombs and the archaeological evidence...And the freshness of his approach enables him to illuminate familiar texts from the Apostolic Fathers or the Apologists... Among the most interesting parts of a very good book are the pages on Justin Martyr.“
— Henry Chadwick, em. Professor of Divinity, Cambridge University, in: Journal of Theological Studies, April 1990, 228-9

“The author’s interesting and informative work is a notable landmark... The sociological approach to the evidence, successfully exploited by Wayne Meeks in his study of the Pauline churches, has found an able continuator in Lampe’s thorough and scholarly examination of the first two centuries of Roman Christianity.“
— W.H.C. Frend, em. Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Glasgow,
in: Journal of Ecclesiastical History 1990, 278-9

Peter Lampe is Professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is the author of the commentary on Philemon in Das Neue Testament Deutsch series (1998).

###

Format: jacketed hardcover, 528 pages
Item No: 0800627024
Publisher: Fortress Press
Release Date: November 10, 2003
Price: $42.00

To order From Paul to Valentinus please call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the web site at www.fortresspress.com. To request review copies or exam copies please visit the website at www.fortresspress.com or call 1-800-426-0115 ext. 234. For interviews, speaking engagements, and writing assignments please call 1-800-426-0115 ext. 234 or email toddb@augsburgfortress.org

Secret Mark

The latest entry on Hypotyposeis relates to Secret Mark, some reflections on Bart Erhman's recent Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Stephen Carlson includes references to a web site I've never seen before, Bryan Cox's Secret Mark, which has reproductions of the following:

The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question Of Evidence by Quentin Quesnell
(CBQ, January 1975, Volume 37:1, pp. 48-67)

On The Authenticity Of The Mar Saba Letter of Clement by Morton Smith
(CBQ, Vol. 38:2, Apr. 1976, pp. 196-199)

A Reply To Morton Smith by Quentin Quesnell
(CBQ, Vol. 38:2, Apr. 1976, pp. 200-203)