Jesus at the Movies in Cornwall

If you are in Cornwall in the south west of England on Saturday, I'm giving a day school on Jesus at the Movies. I'm going to turn this into a working holiday since it's too good an opportunity to miss, the sun, the sand, the sea, the seafood, the walks, the swimming, the picnics, the pasties and the relaxation. I can't wait. And I've promised my family that the "holiday" bit of "working holiday" means that I'll be leaving the blogging machine behind, along with all my academic books. (Might just sneak a pocket sized Greek NT in). I look forward to seeing you all when I'm back.

Worth Mentioning

I have so many blog clippings at the moment that I'd like to comment on. Since I'm about to take a week's break from blogging, that is not going to happen, so instead here is a round-up of a few recent things I thought at least worth mentioning.

I was pleased that on Sansblogue Tim Bulkeley drew our attention to something I'd otherwise have missed, Andrew Jones on TallSkinnyKiwi.com:

If the Bible was blogged

I have also been meaning to draw attention to the latest on the Gospel of Judas on Hypotyposeis:

Detering on the Gospel of Judas

The same Detering has radical views on the dating of the Gospels, and Michael Turton discusses his dating of Mark on The Sword:

Was Detering Right about the Date of Mark?

Meanwhile on Gypsy Scholar, Jeffery Hodges notes that I'll be pleased that he's blogged on something NT related:

A Gnostic Turn for the Worse

And there are a couple of things that need adding to the NT Gateway but have not been yet. First, on Biblical Theology, Jim West mentions this site:

Computer Assisted Language Learning: Koine Greek

Second, on Biblaridion Bryan Cox notes the need of indexing the image of P²⁶, something I'll definitely be doing:

Manuscript P26 . . . Found!

Sorting out JSNT

I've been struggling to follow the JSNT updates recently, especially as the new booklist comes up on their electronic updates as if another volume of the journal. Michael Pahl has got it all sorted out, though, on Stuff of Earth and I'll repeat his links here:

March 1 2005, Volume 27, No. 3

June 1 2005, Volume 27, No. 4

June 1 2005, Volume 27, No. 5 (Booklist)

BibleDudes go Redaction Critical

Courtesy of the BibleDudes blog, the latest page to be added to BibleDudes covers redaction criticism:

Redaction Criticism

In addition to the usual talking animals, we have Charlton Heston and Martin Noth.

Philip Harland's new blog

I'm certainly following the many others (Paleojudaica, Biblical Theology, RogueClassicism, Hypotyposeis, Philo of Alexandria, Stuff of Earth) in welcoming Philip Harland's assimilation to the blogosphere:

Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean
Posts on religious life among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman empire and on the social history of Christianity.

It's added to my blogroll. Whether or not Michael Turton will be able to shows us a picture of Harland's assimilation (cf. Bryan Cox Assmilated!) remains to be seen.

As Stephen Carlson mentions, "Phil also has an exquisite homepage for his scholarship, www.philipharland.com, which I hope will be a model to other scholars". Indeed.

Thank you!

I'd like to say a massive thank you to so many who have sent their congratulations and good wishes and encouragement on my forthcoming move to Duke. It is really appreciated and I'm really touched. I'll answer all the emails in due course, though I am going to be away from the blogging machine for a week from Friday morning onwards. But thanks for the blog comments, currently a record for me at fourteen, the comments in the blogs (Hypotyposeis, Paleojudaica, Ralph -- but someone will need to explain the Krzyewski reference --, Stuff of Earth, Helenann Hartley, The Anglo-File and of course Biblical Theology -- typically Jim was there first!). Thanks too for the comments on Xtalk, especially Ken Olson's ditty and cf. Michael Pahl's commiserating. To be honest, it is all really overwhelming. Thanks everyone for your kind thoughts, friends, acquaintances and new friends and well-wishers.

Briefly in answer to queries: (1) the NT Gateway should carry on unhindered and from the same address. I enjoy doing the NT Gateway and don't foresee a time when I won't enjoy it. (2) More specifically, this blog will continue unhindered, I hope, and there will be moments when it will morph, temporarily, into a travel diary on the transition from living in the UK to living in the US. I have toyed with the idea of opening a separate blog but have scrapped that -- all is going to be here, I am afraid. (3) Yes, I suspect I will lose some of my media work, especially with the BBC, though I hope that I can minimise that. There is already a project coming up in the autumn that I may struggle to be involved with in spite of earlier plans to be closely involved.

The most important thing to me in this context is my scholarship, and one of the appeals of Duke is that it is clear that it will give me more time to devote to research and writing, in a context in which there will be the strongest kind of intellectual exchange. That is something I am looking forward to very much, even if in the interim there is going to be a huge amount of upheaval in moving from here.

Update (12.06): thanks also to Torrey Seland and congratulations to Torrey on his move to the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger as a professor in New Testament studies.

Thanks too to Steven Weiss on Canonist.

Move to Duke

I'm going to America! At some point in the not too distant future, I am hoping to move to Durham, North Carolina. Official news came yesterday afternoon -- the Appointments, Promotions and Tenure Committee at Duke University have approved my appointment to a faculty position in the Department of Religion, as Associate Professor with tenure, in the area of New Testament and Early Christianity. Although I will miss Birmingham, where I have been very happy and have had great colleagues and good friends, I am naturally very excited about the move and really looking forward to the future. I'm sure it goes without saying too that I feel really honoured to be invited to join such a prestigious department and university. I hope that I can live up to their faith in me. Timing is not yet clear. My offer letter gives a start date of September 1 but I have a good number of hurdles to clear yet, and that may not be possible. More when I have it.

Amaztype

If you find your standard Amazon search a bit dull, here's a way to spice it up for a bit of fun:

Amaztype

So, for example, here's your Amaztype on a few contemporary writers on the NT:

John Dominic Crossan

Bart Ehrman

Larry Hurtado

N. T. Wright

If you are patient enough, it'll spell out the author's name with their books, so don't click on the book covers straight away. Or to get back to the original display, just click on an area of white.

And if you really want to have fun, try some themes:

Synoptic Problem

Historical Jesus

Apostle Paul

The only problem is that the term can't be too long, so post-colonial hermeneutics won't do.

N. T. Wright page latest

Latest additions to the N. T Wright page:

The Servant and Jesus, The Relevance of the Colloquy for the Current Quest for Jesus
Originally published in William H. Bellinger, Jr. and William R. Farmer (eds.), Jesus and the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 and Christian Origins (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998): 281–297

The Lord’s Prayer as a Paradigm of Christian Prayer
Originally published in R.L. Longenecker (ed.), Into God’s Presence: Prayer in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001): 132-54

Biblaridion

Following the mention in Hypotyposeis, I have added this new blog to my blogroll:

Biblaridion
Bryan Cox

Paul Ricoeur dies

Thanks to Holger Szesnat for this alert:

French thinker Paul Ricoeur dies
French philosopher and teacher Paul Ricoeur, whose interests ranged from phenomenology to biblical exegesis, has died, aged 92.

The story is from BBC News. This short obituary is from the LA Times:

Paul Ricoeur, 92; French Theorist Studied Types of Interpretation
Associated Press

From Swissinfo:

Leaders pay tribute to French philosopher Ricoeur

The rest of the stories are variations of the same Associated Press story.

Update (20.06): AKMA comments.

Tyndale Tech Latest -- Unicode

The latest Tyndale Tech email arrived today from David Instone Brewer (not yet on the web) and it returns to the theme of Biblical language fonts and unicode. David has now dispensed with some of his previous qualms about the adoption of unicode, especially for those working with Macs (see April 2004: Greek and Hebrew Fonts: Unicode and Older and my blog comment Unicode: Tyndale Tech and some thoughts on Greek) and he has developed several of his own new utilities, including the following, in the tradition of his previous Tyndale Font Kits:

Tyndale Unicode Font Kit for PCs
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Download/TyndaleUnicodePC.exe
Save this installer on your desktop, double-click on it to install the files, and follow the simple instructions to activate it. Then you can delete it.

Tyndale Unicode Font Kit for Macs
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Download/TyndaleUnicodeMac.zip
Download this, open the folder, and open the "Instructions" file

I have not had chance to try these out for myself yet, but clearly it is likely to be another excellent and helpful tool.

One minor comment: David suggests that "Unicode fonts are loved by publishers". That has not been my own experience yet, though I think it is beginning to change. One of the biggest Theology and Religion / Biblical Studies publishers, T and T Clark International / Continuum, still go with SPIonic, something I'd like to see them change. I have found that other publishers are amenable to shifting to unicode when the aesthetics of font choice are pointed out, e.g. Palatino Linotype's Greek looks a whole league division more attractive than SPIonic.

To subscribe to the Tyndale Tech updates, if you are not already receiving them, go to Tyndale Tech and scroll to the bottom.

For more web helps on working with unicode, and especially Greek, see The Greek New Testament Gateway: Fonts.

BiblicalStudies.org.uk articles

I have previously listed a bunch of articles hosted by Robert Bradshaw on BiblicalStudies.org.uk. Robert has been in touch to note that he has added a large number since I made that list. There are so many available that I will not try to list them here but will refer you to the website in question. They are articles from a conservative evangelical perspective on academic Biblical Studies on a variety of topics and by a variety of authors:

BiblicalStudies.org.uk: Hosted Articles, Monographs and Books

Gay Jesus Film Hoax?

On the always interesting FilmChat, Peter Chattaway has a post on the fascinating topic of Him, a film allegedly made by a certain Ed D. Louie in 1974, the topic of which is Jesus' sexuality:

The Gay Jesus Movie -- Hoax or Fact?

It seems that there is a very good chance that no such film was ever made and that the idea that there is such a film in existence goes back to a spoof entry in Harry Medved and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards, a book that actually announces that one of the entries in the book is a hoax. However, Peter points out that a recent website, The Weird World of 70s Cinema: Lost Movies, lists the film as genuine and even reproduces the movie poster (also copied in Peter's blog entry). I must admit that the alleged poster looks distinctly bogus to me, but it may simply be that this is a weird and poor film with a weird and poor poster.

One of my favourite websites, Snopes, has some reference to a related urban legend under the heading Gay Jesus Film.

It will be interesting to see if Peter's enquiries or blog post bring us any closer to a solution to this odd business. I am reminded of an unpublished article I have on Urban Legends, called "The Tale of Theresa Banyan" and since it is now pretty unlikely that I will get it published anywhere, I'll upload to the web once I've dug it out. It concerns the fascinating ways in which urban legends proliferate on the internet, with multiple variations based around a couple of basic versions.

On the Gay Jesus film, it's interesting that the date given is 1974, just a year after the publication of Morton Smith's two books on Secret Mark.

I have tried some of my own googling, along the lines that uncovered some of the detail for my earlier article on Theresa Banyan, and like Peter, I can't find anything at all extra on Him. And Ed D. Louie is nowhere to be found, not even in variant spellings, as far as I can see.

Update (Sunday, 22.25): more in comments from Thomas Anderson, Arts and Faith forum.

Update (Sunday 23.55): Steven I. Weiss comments on The Canonist and is also on the watch.

Update (Monday, 16.59): On FilmChat, Peter Chattaway is trying a promising new tack: Tracking down the Golden Turkey Hoax. By going through the Golden Turkeys one by one and cross-referring to the IMDb, he has isolated the possible hoax to two films, Him and Dog of Norway (1948).

The interesting thing is that others on the net seem to think that the hoax film is, in fact, Dog of Norway. Here's the relevant quotation, on a Snopes forum of March 21 2001:

The fake film was "Dog Of Norway" featuring Muki the wonder hound.

The dog shown illustrating the film (page 129 in my edition) is the Medved's own dog.

The clincher is that the dog appears with the Medveds on the "meet the authors" page (page 6 in my edition).

Sounds pretty persuasive, in which case Him really does exist. See also a comment on another board on non-existing movies and other bits and bobs claiming that this is the case, e.g. mhvf.net's Cult and Exploitation Cinema Discussion has four reasons for suspecting Dog of Norway including, "The Medved brothers dedicated one of their books ("The Hollywood Hall Of Shame", I believe") to their dog Muki - the same name as the dog in DOG OF NORWAY" (Keith Bailey, 12/07/2003).

TWU and Greek NT Manuscripts

Newswise has this report:

Access-Limited Primary Biblical Research Now Available to Canadians

. . . . After 50 years of collating biblical manuscripts, New Testament scholar Reuben Swanson, Ph.D., professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, is passing on his massive collection of primary research to TWU’s Kent Clarke, Ph.D., professor of religious studies. Clarke, who recently began working with Swanson on editing the collection, inherited over 100 different ancient manuscripts on microfilm, containing all of the books of the New Testament and some Old Testament books.

According to Clarke, not only is this microfilm as close to the exemplar manuscripts as possible, this collection is by far the biggest of its nature in Canada. It’s Clarke’s goal to make the primary biblical texts available for students and the community alike.

“It’s pretty hard for any of us to fly to the Vatican library to evaluate ancient manuscripts—though some of us do that—so textual critics have pretty much relied on microfilm,” explains Clarke. “Throughout Swanson’s 50 years of research, he spent significant time and money slowly gathering this collection. There is nothing comparable to this in Canada—and now it’s right here in Langley.” . . . .

Rick Brannan comments in Ricoblog. I particularly like his characterization of a "Jim Davila inspired moment". I think that's right -- one of the things that Jim has set the standard on -- holding the news media to account.

ABC Resurrection Programme

On The Stuff of Earth, Michael Pahl points to a documentary to air in the USA (and Canada?) on The Resurrection of Jesus. Beliefnet has one of its associated websites on the programme:

The Meaning of the Resurrection

As Michael points out, there's no John Dominic Crossan or Tom Wright on the ABC Special, and they are absent from the Beliefnet site too, which has a kind of second team line up, no disrespect intended to those included. There are the usual articles arguing the different sides of the case, BWIII, Spong and so on, but it's not as major an offering as on previous such occasions. And no "Scholarly Smackdown". Boo!

BMCR on Burridge

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2005.05.31 (alert courtesy of RogueClassicism) has a review of the second edition of Burridge's book on Gospel genre:

Richard A. Burridge, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography
Reviewed by James V. Morrison

There's an interesting first line, "It is possible to receive a Ph.D. in Classics today without ever having read the New Testament in Greek." I had to read that twice because I thought at first it was saying that it is possible to receive a PhD in New Testament today without having read the NT in Greek. I sincerely hope that that is not the case! But Morrison returns to the point in an interesting conclusion to a very positive review:

For much of the twentieth century the study of Classics concerned particular authors (Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Vergil, Cicero, and Tacitus) while the study of the Bible and early Christianity "belonged" to other academic departments (or seminaries) associated with Oriental studies and religion. First- or second-year Greek courses might consist of reading Xenophon, Plato, or Homer, but not the gospel of Mark or Revelation. I will only mention my own success in offering selections from the gospels, the book of Acts, and Revelation during the final eight weeks of first-year Greek (we read significant continuous passages before the summer and leave the optative to the second year). But the larger point is whether the academic distinction between biblical and classical makes sense. In the past few decades, not only have Roman historians made extensive use of the Church Fathers, but graduate programs have now been redesigned to embrace "Ancient Mediterranean Studies," "Classical and Near Eastern Studies," and "Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Society." One of our recent APA presidents asked the question: What is the future of Classics? The inevitable answer, in my view, is that we will move toward the study of the ancient world with a broader focus beyond the "canonical" works written in Greek and Latin. B.'s work blazes this path in admirable fashion, for its valuable methodology allows us to approach works traditionally outside the "classical" canon with an appreciation of their origins in a world under the influence of Graeco-Roman literature and culture.

Bibliobloggers @ CARG

On Biblical Theology, Jim West mentions the CARG (Computer Assisted Research Group) session on biblioblogging at the forthcoming Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. I was asked to put the session together by Kirk Lowery of the CARG. Here are some details as we have them at this stage. First, the blurb:

The phenomenon of "blogging", the maintenance of a regular on-line journal or weblog, has proliferated massively in recent times. As in all areas of life, political, religious, cultural, art, entertainment and media, so too in the area of academic Biblical Studies, the blog is an informative, innovative, up-to-the-minute way of discovering more about the subject, discussing the latest developments, interacting on controversial topics and enjoying the lighter side of the discipline. These "biblioblogs" are now widely consulted by those in the guild, and are contributing something of interest and intelligence. But what is the future of the biblioblogs? What is their scope for development? This session gathers together a panel of pioneers in this area and asks about the pleasures, the pains and the prospects for biblioblogging.

I'm afraid I find that alliteration so difficult to resist! I will be presiding and giving a 5-10 minute introduction to the session; there will then be two main speakers, Jim Davila and Rick Brannan. Rick Brannan's presentation has an abstract as follows:

PastoralEpistles.com is an attempt at sharpening the focus of a biblioblog. It is one part blog, to allow for the regular random-yet-informed musings that define the popular biblioblogs of the day. It is also one part annotated bibliography, with bibliography content added blog-style, integrated directly in the site RSS feed. This allows the regular addition and annotation of material into the normal flow of the blog. The software that is PastoralEpistles.com is a collection of scripts, written in JScript, running on Microsoft's Internet Information Server. The blog and other post data (e.g. bibliography information) is kept in XML. All posts and other entries have different sorts of metadata encoded to allow for future processes to create subject or reference indices of the site material. The structure of PastoralEpistles.com is extensible, so other "post types" may be added in the future, allowing PastoralEpistles.com to grow and adapt over time. For instance, an "article" post type could be created simply by adding an XML file that defines the structure of the "article" to the proper location on the server. This flexibility will hopefully allow PastoralEpistles.com to adjust itself as biblioblogs grow and mature over the next few years.

The remainder of the session will probably revolve around panel discussion featuring in addition to those already mentioned A. K. M. Adam, Tim Bulkeley, Stephen Carlson, Ed Cook, Torrey Seland (hopeful rather than confirmed) and Jim West. More as and when I have it.

Update (Thursday, 13.55): lots of comment on this post, some also relating it to my earlier one on Blogging addiction. Most importantly, see Jim Davila's post on Paleojudaica, which adds what I did not have, Jim's title and abstract, here now reproduced in full for completeness:

ENTER THE BIBLIOBLOGGERS

The rise of weblogs or "blogs" (basically just web pages produced with software that facilitates frequent updates and allows links to individual posts) as a media and political force has been an important cultural milestone in the last few years. Along with political pundits, hobbyists, diarists, etc., biblical scholars and those in related academic disciplines have also been establishing a niche for themselves in the "Blogosphere." By common consent, or at least in resignation, biblical scholars who blog refer to themselves as "bibliobloggers." As of this writing in the spring of 2005, for the last two years I have operated a blog called PaleoJudaica, which focuses on news and Internet content on ancient Judaism and its historical and linguistic context. Since PaleoJudaica began, there has been a gradual but ultimately geometric increase in the number of biblioblogs. At present I am aware of more than two dozen.

Given the rate at which web-based technology and its effects on our culture are developing, it is difficult to predict more than half a year in advance what aspects of blogging will be of greatest interest at the time of this CARG session. But I plan to share with you some of my experiences with PaleoJudaica and also to describe my work on Qumranica, a blog I have set up for the spring semester of 2005 for a course I am teaching on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I will also discuss some of the uses to which I and other bibliobloggers have put our blogs, such as commenting on and supplementing media stories in our areas of expertise; noting errors (which frequently are rife) in such stories; reporting on scholarly conferences we've attended; sharing our preliminary thoughts on our research; and sometimes providing advance summaries of scholarly work we are publishing.

NB also Stephen Carlson on Hypotyposeis, Ed Cook in Ralph the Sacred River, Jim West in Biblical Theology, Rubén Gómez in Bible Software Review Weblog and Rick Brannan in Ricoblog

More Google Print

A handful of items I've recently looked at using Google Print Search:

Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women: Studies of Named Women in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002)

Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)

Carol Meyers, Toni Craven and Ross Kraemer, Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001)

John Painter, Mark's Gospel (London & New York: Routledge, 1997)

John J. Pilch, The Cultural Dictionary of the Bible (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999)

Richard Valantasis, The Gospel of Thomas (London & New York: Routledge, 1997)

Norman H. Young, Syntax Lists for Students of New Testament Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Head on a Platter @ Laudator Temporis Acti

On Laudator Temporis Acti, Michael Gilleland points to the interesting parallel between Mark 6.17-29 // Matt. 14.3-12 and "a remarkably similar episode from the life of Lucius Quinctius Flaminius, consul in 192 B.C., expelled from the Senate by Cato the Censor in 184 B.C." The story is found in Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch and Michael has the texts handy:

A Head on a Platter

Michael notes that the parallel is not mentioned in the commentaries available to him. It is, however, occasionally mentioned in recent literature, e.g. according to Ross Kraemer, Kathleen Corley and John Dominic Crossan both claim that Mark invented the story on the basis of the one about Lucius. See Ross Kraemer, Herodias I in Carol Meyers, Toni Craven and Ross Kraemer, Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001): 92-4.