George Brooke on Qumran and the NT

This press release from Fortress:
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What Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Tell Us About Jesus and the New Testament?

Minneapolis (April 11, 2005)— In The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, preeminent scholar George J. Brooke illuminates the first-century world shared by the Qumran community and the writers of the New Testament.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have provided Old Testament scholars with an enormous wealth of data for textual criticism as well as theology. But, as Brooke skillfully demonstrates, New Testament scholars can use the Scrolls to learn more about the linguistic, historical, religious, and social contexts of Palestine in the first century.

A wide range of topics and themes is discussed, including Matthew's Beatitudes, the lost song of Miriam, Levi and the Levites, women's authority, and the use of scripture in the parable of the vineyard.

“Publishing a collection of George Brooke's essays on the scrolls and the New Testament is to be applauded. Brooke, basing himself on his extensive knowledge of and experience with both bodies of literature, sets forth intriguing cases for interrelations between them and does so with his accustomed care and thoroughness. An excellent volume!

—James VanderKam, John A. O'Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of numerous works, including The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (1994), An Introduction to Early Judaism (2001), The Book of Jubilees (2001), and The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (with Peter Flint, 2002).

“Professor Brooke's collection of studies constitutes the high water mark of research in this field. Readers will be treated to several interesting investigations of the light that the Dead Sea Scrolls shed on the New Testament and Christian origins. Brooke is widely recognized and respected as an authority on the Scrolls and their relevance for biblical interpretation. These stimulating studies are must reading for all who have interest in this important subject.”

—Craig A. Evans, Payzant Distinguished Professor, Acadia Divinity College, Wolfville, Nova Scotia

“This collection of essays brings together in one place the work of our most incisive observer of the relationship between the Dead Seas Scrolls and early Christianity and the New Testament. George Brooke eschews the sensationalism otherwise so characteristic of much work on this topic for a more sober, nuanced perspective. The result is a body of work that must be taken into account in any further attempts to reflect on the links between the Qumran community and early Christians, between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, between Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness.”

—Robert Kugler, Paul S. Wright Professor of Christina Studies, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon

George J. Brooke is Rylands Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Manchester, England. He is on the international editorial board for the Dead Sea Scrolls. A founding editor of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries, he has edited three volumes on the Scrolls.

Format: Jacketed hardcover 6” x 9”, 360 pp
Item No: 0800637232
Publisher: Fortress Press
Price: $54.00

Format: Paperback 6” x 9”, 360 pp

Item No: 0800637242
Publisher: Fortress Press
Price: $25.00

Rights: Canada and USA, English

To order The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament 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.
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N. T. Wright page latest

There are some useful updates on the N. T. Wright page, reproductions of several of Tom Wright's articles from the New Dictionary of Christian Theology. It's not a book I am familiar with, but the N. T. Wright page gives the bibliographical details as Eerdmans/IVP, 1988. (If anyone could provide me with a more detailed bibliographical citation, I'd be grateful).

Jesus
Paul
Justification
Righteousness

Update (16.10): thanks to David Mackinder for some additional bibliographic details (you see this is a biblioblog!) on this: the above articles are from Sinclair B. Ferguson and David F. Wright (eds), New Dictionary of Theology (Leicester: IVP, 1988) and not, apparently, from New Dictionary of Christian Theology, which is what was throwing me. The New Dictionary of Christian Theology is a different (SCM) publication. Specific page references for the above articles are Jesus (348-351); Paul (496-499); Justification (359-361) and Righteousness (590-592).

Gospel of Judas @ Hypotyposeis

Among the many delightful and fascinating posts in biblioblogdom over the last ten days, there is one that is well worth careful reading if you have not done so already:

Gospel of Judas in the News

This Hypotyposeis post has all the latest on the Gospel of Judas in the media and is something of a "live" post, with constant updates to new material from all over the web. Fascinating stuff.

Profile pic

I have decided that it's time to try not to be so anonymous and have added a profile picture to my template on the left.

John Paul II, the media and the internet

On my way back from Cornwall, I was asked by BBC Radio WM (West Midlands) if I would speak about the Pope's death and the process for electing his successor. I know very little about this, and made clear that I was not an expert, but they were keen to have my opinion anyway. Unfortunately, I was in a petrol station at the time and was unable to speak on the mobile and cut the phone-call short, asking them to get back in touch by email or voice-mail message to confirm. They did not get back in touch and I assumed that happily they had found someone else. To my horror the next day (Monday), it turned out that they had not found anyone else and were assuming that I would be taking the call to speak live on air on this topic on their breakfast programme; the truncated phone-call at the petrol station had apparently secured the deal as far as they were concerned. But with my phone switched off, they were unable to contact me and left several messages wondering where I was, attempting to reschedule and so on. An extraordinary business, and I asked our (U of B) press office to contact them to explain / complain about this, but I've heard nothing back. I'm afraid that it is one of the downsides of being generally helpful and friendly to the media that they can, on occasion, be quite unreasonably demanding. Sadly, it is one of the things that puts off some academics from being involved at all with the media.

On a different note, I was struck by this article in the Washington Post on John Paul II and the internet, noting how he spanned the beginnings of the "global village" in 1978, to the internet boom years later. And there's some NT stuff thrown in here:

John Paul II: The Message Matters Most
By Robert MacMillan

. . . . Several news sources made the observation that this use of e-mail and SMS marked a drastic shift from the centuries-old tradition of signaling the death of a pope by closing windows and shutters and closing a bronze door. But in reality, it was one more example of how this church has always used the best means of communication available.

Think back to the New Testament, much of which is composed of letters written by Paul to many of the nations of the Roman world. In epistles to the Galatians, the Colossians, the Corinthians and others, Paul spread the word of the Church across the Mediterranean.

When Paul lived, he was attempting to make his message resound among people who were not always eager to hear about salvation from what they considered an upstart religion with little credence. When Christians numbered but few, he crisscrossed the sea and traveled overland, as did his messages. They traveled slowly, but they reached eager ears. On the strength of this constant proselytizing, a powerful religion was born. This tradition continued, by means both fair and foul, through missionaries who recognized the same value in the delivery of the message.

John Paul II inherited a church in a vastly different stage of development. The Catholic church no longer has to prove its might and influence. It has reached to nearly every country in the world and can claim at least a few adherents almost everywhere you go . . . .

BWIII on the Soul

Beliefnet has a "round-up" of what various religious people think about the "soul" in the light of the Terri Schiavo case and it features Ben Witherington III's comments on the NT:

Multifaith Round-up: Views of the Soul
What do the world's religious and spiritual traditions believe about the soul, and what is its fate at the end of life?

I would prefer to talk about the human spirit rather than the soul. The New Testament doesn't offer a doctrine of the soul. If we want to talk about the non-material part of the person, we need to talk about the human spirit (see Jesus' word: "Father into thy hands I commend my spirit", Luke 23:46) . . . .

Home again

Torrey Seland asks "Didn't these people have easter vacation? In Norway we go to our cabins in the mountains for skiing at Easter times......, well, I know that means you got to have mountains, and snow, but... We have plenty of both..... :)" Well what we do is go to the seaside, never mind the cold. We are just back from Cornwall. And in fact we had some lovely weather for the time of year, and I even made it to swimming in the sea on one occasion, though I thought my muscles might all go into spasm afterwards. A great break, with lots of walks and good eating. Below are three of the kids on a walk to St Antony's Head:

I always used to say that I wouldn't be so self-indulgent as to put up family pics on the blog. But hey, everyone else does it so I'm just going with the flow. You can always move on to the next post, right?

Tony Burroughs on The Real Family of Jesus

The Real Family of Jesus airs on Discovery Channel today; here is a piece interviewing the presenter of the programme, Tony Burroughs, and featuring a couple of pictures too:

TV Genealogist Tony Burroughs Search for the Real Family of Jesus

Easter break

I'll be away from the blogging machine now for a good week or so, with Easter greetings to all. I look forward to seeing you next week.

Open Access Repositories

I have enjoyed the discussion in the various biblioblogs on Open Access and the need for a stable repository for articles. If you've not been following it, the best place to go is Hypotyposeis:

Open-Access Needs a Stable Repository

This keeps up to date with the links on the different biblioblogs so that you can thread the discussion. It's interesting in particular to hear that Deinde have some plans. I don't have any strong thoughts myself about the topic except to agree with Tim Bulkeley's tentative suggestion that SBL would be a good place for this, if we could persuade them to take this seriously.

My other comment would relate to the issue of hosting articles (repository proper) vs. linking to articles (Gateway). The word "repository" often goes with "open access" and not surprisingly so. But whose articles are going into the repository? Is it not effectively those least committed to open access? What I mean is that those scholars already committed to open access are those whose articles are already on the web, made available via their homepages. How are we going to persuade the others, who have not so far found it in them to publish to the web, to publish to the on-line repository? Is there a mismatch here? I hope not. I am strongly in favour of open access. I just wonder whether the ultimate model is the one already in procgress, the evolutionary one, in which scholars are steadily becoming convinced of the ideal and uploading to their own web space.

Passion Synopsis?

On Ricoblog, Rick Brannan asks:

As such, I'm curious to know if Marc [sic] Goodacre (NT Gateway Weblog) or Stephen Carlson (Hypotyposes [sic]) have recommendations for a presentation that aligns the accounts and provides readings for each day of the week through the resurrection. I don't have a modern synopsis in print at home. I do have an older copy of Huck (ninth edition) I picked up in a used bookstore awhile back that will suffice in a pinch.

If Dr. Goodacre, Dr. Carlson or anyone else can point to a reputable online source to use this week, it would be much appreciated.

Well, I am a bit late on this one, but on June 9 2004 I posted a note on this English Passion Synopsis:

The Passion and Resurrection Narratives from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

It's limited but might be useful. Meanwhile, my Texts and Synopses page looks like it's in need of an overhaul. I have a couple of excellent links I want to add there. Watch this space.

CiteULike

On The Macintosh Biblioblog, Joe Weaks has an interesting post called CiteULike for web-based bibliography citation. Here's the link:

CiteULike

I've played with it a bit and it works fine for me when added Amazon books to a bibliography, but I can't get it to work properly with Ingenta articles, though it is supposed to. Might need to play with it some more. It looks like it is fun and helpful if one could get on top of it.

Perspectives on the Passion Picture

I took my digital camera to the Sunday of the Perspectives on the Passion conference in Oxford last week (I forgot on the Saturday). This is the best of the pictures:



This is Timothy Gorringe reading his illustrated paper '“Moral machinery”: The Transformative Power of the Cross as Instantiated in Western Art'. My other pictures are not really good enough to publish; I need some more practice, especially in darkened rooms, or with academics standing in front of bright windows.

Vermes on Good Friday (with comments)

Geza Vermes has developed an uncanny ability to pop up at all the major moments of the Christian calendar, and at other times too, to comment on the Gospels and the Historical Jesus. He is in this week's Church Times commenting on the date of the first Good Friday and related matters:

Professor Vermes finds a date for Good Friday
By Bill Bowder

Arguing from his knowledge of Jewish laws and customs, he said last week that the Synoptic Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were wrong about many details of the Last Supper, Jesus's arrest, and his trial. The trial before the Sanhedrin never took place, he said. The religious authorities would not have tried Jesus for blasphemy, because he never used the sacred name of God.

"No Jewish law of any age suggests that the messianic claim amounted to the crime of blasphemy," he said. Furthermore, the Jewish authorities could not have tried Jesus on the Passover . . . .

. . . . . Professor Vermes said he knew exactly when Jesus died. "Of course Easter should be on a fixed day. There are not many things in the Gospels that you can be half as certain about." He has based his calculations of Jesus's death on the known dates of John the Baptist's ministry and of the spring equinox, and on the assumption that Jesus's ministry lasted only one year.

Jesus could not have died in the years 31 or 32 because the Passover did not fall on Saturday, although it could have fallen on a Saturday in 33. John's Gospel suggests a three-year ministry, but Jesus could not have survived that long, Professor Vermes argued. "I don't think that anybody of the type of John the Baptist or Jesus could have lasted three years in the Roman Empire. They would have been finished off," he said. The Romans were "completely ruthless if you crossed them".

I haven't had a chance to look at Vermes's new book yet, so these comments are, of course, provisional and may be addressed in the book itself. First, the blasphemy question. Vermes claims here, and has often claimed in the past, that claiming to be Messiah would not amount to blasphemy. That seems to be clearly correct. But some of the most persuasive current readings of the Marcan trial see the blasphemy charge not in Jesus' affirmative answer to the High Priest's question "Are you the Messiah, the Son of Blessed?" but in his elaboration, "You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14.62).

Second, the question of the length of Jesus' ministry. I don't know why one would assume that it lasted for only a year and in so far as one can judge from general impressions, mine would be that it was much longer, with time to travel, to build a reputation, to gather followers, perhaps to visit Jerusalem more than once. On the notion that John's Gospel gives us a three year ministry, I am not convinced. It seems to me to be two years, from Passover in Chapter 2 to Passover in Chapters 13 and following, with one Passover in between in Chapter 6. That is two years and a couple of days, not three years. On whether someone like that could have "survived that long", does that not lend plausibility to Jesus' having spent the majority of his career in Galilee away from Rome?

On pinpointing the date of the first Good Friday, I am not as confident as Vermes. That vital contradiction between the Synoptics and John demonstrates that our earliest sources are just not sure whether Jesus was crucified exactly on a Passover or not. What they appear to know is that Jesus was crucified somewhere around that time. That fits the historically probable notion that Jesus' death is likely to have been caught up with the Passover crowds that year, the presence of Pilate and so on, without our necessarily having to try to be as precise as are the Synoptic writers. It is my view, to be defended at great length in due course, that the dating of Jesus' crucifixion on 15 Nisan (Synoptics) and 14 Nisan (John) are bound up with the differing dates on which the respective communities celebrated Jesus' passion. The celebration of Jesus' Passion on 14 Nisan carried on well into the Second Century among the Quartodecimans ("14th-ers"), whose tradition, according the Eusebius (H. E. V, 23), spanned "the whole of Asia".

Bibliotheca Sacra and Lesson in Stature

Just over a week ago, AKMA had an interesting post headed Lesson in Stature all about the troubling phenomenon of his students citing articles from Bibliotheca Sacra disproportionately often when their more natural hunting grounds ought to be NTS, JSNT, JBL and the like. He put this down to Bibliotheca Sacra having a more marked on-line presence from early on, with free-for-all archived articles available:

Why do they turn so frequently to BibSac for exegetical guidance, when they dissent so firmly from the authors’ presuppositions? Because BibSac got to the digital party early.

Stephen Carlson, On the Importance of On-line and Open Access to Articles, has a thorough discussion with bags of useful links. Stephen comments:

However, it appears that BicSac [sic] has gone to a more restricted access model since the last time I visited, so I predict that they should slowly lose their head-start over the coming years.

If Stephen's and AKMA's diagnosis is correct, there is a really important lesson here for any journals wanting to make a real impact on the students of today -- get yourselves on-line for free as quickly as possible! I'd have guessed that this lesson would be particularly valuable for the smaller scale journals.

But is the diagnosis correct?

In an update to Stephen's original post, he writes the following:

AKMA himself graced Hypotyposeis with this comment (Mar. 15, 2005):

I thought that BibSac was freely available, and was flummoxed when I couldn’t turn up the repository — I ended up rewriting the post considerably.

The same thing happened to me! When did BibSac begin restricting access?

I can help out a little with this question by looking back through the NT Gateway archives. On 5 June 2001, the NT Gateway Journals page still featured the following entry:

Bibliotheca Sacra 1985-94
Full text reproductions of all articles from 1985-1994. [NB: to read the Hebrew and Greek characters, you will need to download Biblescript from Galaxie Software.]

But by 26 November 2001 that entry had dropped out because the link was dead, and only the main Bibliotheca Sacra link (itself now dead) remained.

But here's my question. If BibSac's 1985-94 repository went off line in 2001, that's surely too long for it to have any impact on current student preferences, is it not? There's a way of testing it. Are AKMA's students accessing BibSac articles in that 1985-94 time span?

I'm interested in this discussion because it's not a pattern I am seeing with my own undergraduate students, who do prefer electronic resources over print ones, but tend to be accessing articles listed on the NT Gateway, or which are linked on my reading lists and course materials. This includes things like scholars' homepage reproductions (e.g. Fredriksen, Kloppenborg), but also repositories of on-line articles on given topics like The Paul Page -- I see increasing numbers of students finding sites like the latter their hunting grounds of choice. In other words, their thinking is less journal-based than it is author- and site- based.

Here's another way of testing whether students are more likely to access free-for-all electronic journal articles than other, more restricted journal articles. Are students accessing Biblica more than other journals? This has had a free-for-all policy now since 1998 and a prominent web presence. For my own students, I would say that this has made relatively little impact and so a free-for-all journal policy is not greatly affecting student consultation rates.

Update (Good Friday, 10.28): Tim Bulkeley comments on Sansblogue and Rubén Gómez comments below to the effect that BibSac is available cheaply as part of a commercial package. My problem is that I am so internet focused.

Happy birthday Paleojudaica

I'd like to join the others who are wishing Jim Davila a welcome Happy Birthday to Paleojudaica, now two years old. I look forward to the forthcoming article in the SBL Forum that he mentions.

Review of Biblical Literature latest

Latest from the Review of Biblical Literature under the NT heading, including an enthusiastic review by E. P. Sanders of a new book on Colossians. And you don't get a book review by E. P. Sanders every day of the week, so it's worth paying attention! It's the kind of review that makes you order the book for the library with no further ado. Also of note to me, a review of my former supervisor John Muddiman's book on Ephesians, though not as enthusiastic as I'd have liked to have seen. And lot's more of interest:

Bridge, Steven L.
Getting the Gospels: Understanding the New Testament Accounts of Jesus' Life
Reviewed by Dwight Peterson

Leppä, Outi
The Making of Colossians: A Study in the Formation and Purpose of a Deutero-Pauline Letter
Reviewed by E. P. Sanders

Muddiman, John
The Epistle to the Ephesians
Reviewed by Timothy Gombis

Pilch, John J.
Visions and Healing in the Acts of the Apostles: How the Early Believers Experienced God
Reviewed by Ronald Clark

Pilch, John J.
Visions and Healing in the Acts of the Apostles: How the Early Believers Experienced God
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Pilch, John J.
Visions and Healing in the Acts of the Apostles: How the Early Believers Experienced God
Reviewed by Steve Walton

Racine, Jean-François
The Text of Matthew in the Writings of Basil of Caesarea
Reviewed by Robert Cousland

Racine, Jean-François
The Text of Matthew in the Writings of Basil of Caesarea
Reviewed by Dirk Jongkind

Reid, Daniel G., ed.
The IVP Dictionary of the New Testament: A One-Volume Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship
Reviewed by James Sweeney

David Wenham lectures in Texas

BP News has a report on a lecture series given in Fort Worth, Texas, by David Wenham of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford (which the report calls "a college of Oxford University", which I don't think is strictly accurate):

Oxford prof defends authority of "most famous sermon of all time"
Mar 18, 2005
By Marc Rogers

It's nice to see a some Q scepticism in here:

Wenham said he doubts the existence of "Q", the supposed mystery source of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, much speculated upon by biblical scholars. However, he said, there was a large amount of reliable "oral tradition" in the early church about the sayings of Jesus. He said that the Gospel writers, as well as the writers of the epistles like Peter and Paul, would have drawn on this shared tradition when they wrote.

Perspectives on the Passion Conference

Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this picture from the Perspectives on the Passion conference last weekend. Helenann has blogged her initial reflections and I hope to add mine in due course too, and some of my own photographs. The photograph above is from the question session after my short presentation entitled "Celluloid Crucifixion: How the Passion Plays in Film".

The conference was superb, educational, great fun, varied. It was brilliantly organised by Christine Joynes.

Robert Fowler to advise on Gospel of Mark film

In connection with my previous post on the Gospel of Mark film, I've looked around to see what else I can find, and here is one item of interest:

B-W Professor Selected for Advisory Committee for Upcoming Film

The B-W in question is Baldwin Wallace College and the person in question is Robert Fowler (whose CV also mentions this, right at the bottom). The remarks quoted in the article look spot on to me:

"Regarding the upcoming Mark film, I will have a lot of input on that. I don't know whether to be nervous about them not listening to me enough or about them listening to me too much! It's an awesome thing to consider that my ideas on certain aspects of Mark might end up on a movie screen for the whole world to see! And again, even though I am supposed to be the Mark 'expert' on the committee, I am only one voice, and it is a joint effort of the whole organization, from start to finish.

"Probably the biggest concern I have with the Mark film is that we absolutely must get across to our audiences that Mark's gospel is different from John's gospel. If we do our work right, people who have seen the John film should be mildly (or greatly!) shocked by the differences between John and Mark. They are utterly, utterly different stories with utterly, utterly different portrayals of Jesus. This has been missed by the casual reader of the gospels through the centuries, so we will be doing the world a great favor if we can carefully and persuasively communicate these radically different portrayals of Jesus of Nazareth."

I'd say that that extends to the choice of actor, narrator and probably director too, in relation to my previous comments.

The same article appears on Christianity Today dated over a year ago, on 2 March 2004, so it's clear that this is not fresh news. I'll keep on the look out for anything new. Can any of the advisory committee out there help us out?