A Tale of Two Replicas

The recent renewed discussion of the Talpiot Tombs, brought about by Simcha Jacobovici's post featuring an interview with Professor Émile Puech of the École Biblique in Jerusalem (See Simcha Jacobovici and the Talpiot Tomb again), and followed up by Prof. Puech's own statement on the affair , has sent me back once again to the photographs, the blog posts, the media reports and the articles that I have in the past spent such a long time looking at.  But this time I spotted something new, what I am calling "A Tale of Two Replicas".

Throughout the discussions of the Talpiot Tomb, right from the first, Simcha Jacobovici, James Tabor and others involved with the "Jesus Discovery" project (website here) have talked about and publicized what they call "the museum quality replica" of ossuary 6 from Talpiot tomb B.  But here's the curious thing.  It's not one replica.  There are two different replicas. As far as I am aware -- and I think I have read everything -- they have never admitted that they produced a second replica to replace the first.  (Please correct me if I am wrong).  And when one notices what changes between the two replicas, there is some cause for concern.

Here is the first replica.  This one was on the first version of the Jesus Discovery website and dates back to when the site was first published in February 2012, as you can see from the archive.org capture.

Replica 1 (February 2012)

Here is the second replica, which dates back, as far as I can tell, to April 2012, and which replaced the first on the Jesus Discovery website.  This is the one you see there now.

Replica 2 (April 2012)

If you think they look pretty similar, you would be right.  But there are some telling signs that illustrate beyond doubt that these replicas are different.  Let's take a look at them side by side:

Replica 1 (left) and Replica 2 (right)

There are several tell-tale signs.  Notice how in Replica 1, there are some lines drawn inside the square shaped object to the right of the vessel / fish, whereas in Replica 2, these lines are completely absent:

Replica 1 has a drawing inside the square which Replica 2 lacks

Notice also how the top left tip of the vessel / fish is next to the pointed part of a triangle in Replica 1 but next to the flat part of a triangle in Replica 2:

Triangle border differs next to top left of vessel / fish 

Similarly, notice how at the bottom left of Replica 1, the triangular shape protrudes across the border whereas in Replica 2, the triangle is neatly inside of its border:

Replica 1: triangle protrudes across the border in contrast to Replica 2

Similar observations could be repeated for other elements in the two replicas, but I am sure that you get the basic point.  Now one of the reasons that this is worthy of comment is that the replica (singular) has always been called "museum quality" and its accuracy has been praised.  Yet, far from this being one, accurate "museum quality" replica, it is two contrasting replicas, in which attention to detail is far from the order of the day.

It is not just the question of accuracy and representation that is at issue here, or the apparent failure to flag up the differences between the two replicas.  It is that Replica 2 makes several changes that may be the result of engaging with criticisms of the project.  Let me attempt to explain what I am getting at.

Replica 1 appears in all the publicity for the documentary, book and website from February to March 2012.  Replica 2 first appears, again as far as I can work out, and subject to correction, on April 3 or 4 2012, in Jerusalem:

Simcha Jacobovici shows off Replica 2 in Jerusalem, 3/4 April 2012

In between the release of Replica 1 and Replica 2, there had been a lot of criticism about the project's claims including, among other things, the idea that there are drawings of little "fish in the margins".  Robert Cargill demonstrated that the little oval shapes had been "inked in" so as to make them appear like fish.  Now notice how the "fish in the margins" changed between the two replicas. In Replica 1, before the criticism had appeared, they were presented as fish, with very clear, long tails:

Replica 1: "fish in the margins close up" (screengrab from Steve Caruso)

In Replica 2, which appeared after the criticism had been made, these shapes resemble more closely the actual shapes on the ossuary.  The tails have gone:

Replica 2: "fish in the margins" now appear more like ovals

Now, since Replica 2 appeared some time after Replica 1, I began to wonder whether there were also any changes in the way that the alleged YWNH ("Jonah") inscription appeared.  Does the alleged inscription differ at all between Replicas 1 and 2?  There is, indeed, a major difference in the way this appears between Replicas 1 and 2.  Here it is in Replica 1:

Close up of alleged "Jonah" inscription on Replica 1

This replica appears to have been produced before the "YWNH" inscription theory had emerged.  The lines really look like random lines.  Notice in particular what would become the letter "nun" -- it is here completely broken, just as it was in the CGI composite photograph and all the pictures up to this point (Do the lines in the "fish" head spell out Jonah?).  No one looking at this picture would for a moment think it was spelling out "Jonah".

However, in Replica 2, the transformation of these lines is remarkable.  Now the inscription could indeed be taken to spell out "Jonah".  Notice how the "nun" is now one single, connected line.  It is no longer broken.  The "he" is given the appearance of stopping with one thick line forming the top of the letter, and only a thin line going on to the border.  And the "yod" has a little loop on it just as it does in the "tracing" of the letters that appeared when the alleged inscription first came to light.  Here's a close-up:

Close up of Replica 2, showing YWNH lettering clearly marked

One can see the whole of Replica 2 in high definition here, if you want to take a closer look.  Notice also that there are no extraneous lines here.  Everything appears to be doing service in the representation of "YWNH".  Here's the tracing of the letters as it appeared on James Tabor's blog:

Yellow tracing of the alleged letters, James Tabor's blog, April 2012

In each, the "yod" has a loop, the "nun" is unbroken and the top line of the "he" does not extend all the way to the border.

I don't know what to make of all this, but I thought in the interests of analyzing Talpiot Tomb B, and the claims made by those involved with the "Jesus Discovery" project, it would be useful to lay out what I have found by analyzing the two contrasting replicas, and to see if others also see what I am seeing.  Why is it that the "fish in the margins" are recrafted in between Replicas 1 and 2?  Why is it that the "YWNH" inscription suddenly becomes clear only in Replica 2?

It may be worth adding that the replica shown to Prof. Puech in the video released last week is clearly Replica 2, which has a version of the "YWNH" inscription that we see above, and not the ambiguous representation of Replica 1:

Simcha Jacobovici shows Émile Puech Replica 2

As we have seen above, it is only Replica 2 that has a representation of the "YWNH" inscription that conforms with the interpretation of those involved in the project.  Did the representation of "YWNH" on Replica 2 influence Prof. Puech's reading?

Émile Puech's Statement on the Talpiot Tomb Images

I expressed some surprise over Prof. Émile Puech's apparent endorsement of Simcha Jacobovici's claims about the Talpiot Tombs on Thursday in a post headed Simcha Jacobovici and the Talpiot Tomb Again.

It now appears that Prof. Puech is very unhappy with the way that he was treated by Jacobovici and he has spoken out about this, first in en email reproduced on Jim West's blog, and subsequently in emails to several scholars including James Tabor, who publishes the email in a blog posted headed Emile Peuch’s [sic] Position on the “Jesus Discovery” and “Lost Tomb of Jesus” Films.

I am grateful to Prof. Tabor for publishing Prof. Puech's comments, and I think it is greatly to his credit that he has done so.  

I hope that Simcha Jacobovici will be issuing a public apology to Prof. Puech as soon as possible.

Simcha Jacobovici and the Talpiot Tomb Again!

I have spent a lot of time, some would say wasted a lot of time, engaging critically with claims made by Simcha Jacobovici in relation to two tombs excavated in Talpiot, East Jerusalem.  I won't go into detail on how things have panned out in the past, but I documented some of it in my article published on The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers, and have written a lot about it here on the NT Blog.  My most recent extended discussion is found on Bible and Interpretation, The Jesus Discovery? A Sceptic's Perspective, an article based on an enjoyable critical exchange with James Tabor and Christopher Rollston at SECSOR in March this year.

The general response from Simcha Jacobovici himself has either been dismissal or mockery.  Although he asked his critics to point out the mistakes, he has never responded to my attempts to explain why I am unconvinced by his claims, preferring instead either to ignore the critical response or to mock what he calls underwear bloggers.  That's me, and people like me, sitting on the couch, blogging in our underpants while we eat takeaway pizza!

In a post published yesterday, Jacobovici draws attention to a new interview with Professor Émile Puech of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, Jesus Tomb Finds Dramatic Support.  The post includes a video interview with Prof. Puech, who explains Jacobovici's theory about the tomb, indicating his own support for this interpretation, that the controversial image is actually an upside-down fish spitting out a stick-figure Jonah.  It is not a standard vase or vessel.  Moreover, Prof. Puech lends his support to the suggestion that the name "Jonah" is spelled out in Hebrew on the "head" of the "fish".

I must admit that I was a little surprised to see an esteemed, senior figure like Prof. Puech supporting Jacobovici's interpretation of the ossuary.  I accept that there will be disagreements in the guild, and that this is the stuff of academic debate.  I would love to be able to ask Prof. Puech what he makes of things like repeated geometrical shapes in the body of the "fish" that correspond to the same geometrical patterns on the borders of the ossuary, or the handles on the "half-fish", which make the Jacobovici interpretation so problematic for many of us, but I doubt that I will get the opportunity.

Nevertheless, that's the substance of academic debate, and I accept that academics just disagree with one another.  I should perhaps admit also that I was disappointed that there was no new substance in Prof. Puech's interview, i.e. there was nothing to refute those who have argued against Jacobovici.  It is interesting nevertheless that Prof. Puech is convinced by Jacobovici's unusual claims.  I find it surprising, baffling even, but there we are.  That's life in academia.

However, I do want to draw attention to elements in Jacobovici's post that I think problematic.  He attempts to summarize the debate so far, incorporating discussion of both Talpiot Tombs, and drawing attention to why he sees the case for the identification with Jesus and the Jesus movement to be so strong.

There are three particular elements I would like to draw attention to.  These are all elements that have been criticized in the past.  To suggest that each point is self-evident is the real problem here.  In summarizing the case for the identification of Talpiot Tomb A with Jesus and his family, Jacobovici writes:

(1) "Six of them have inscriptions. One of them explicitly states; 'Jesus, son of Joseph'"

The difficulty with this statement is that the inscription is really difficult to decipher.  Indeed Émile Puech himself is on record as doubting the clarity of this inscription, for example here:

Another prominent expert whom Jacobovici did not consult, across town in the tranquil offices of the French Biblical and Archeological School in east Jerusalem, was Prof. Emile Puech. His response to the inscription was much the same as Naveh’s. ‘It’s very crude lettering,’ said the bearded, French-born Father Puech. ‘The ‘Joseph’ is clear. The ‘son of’ is no problem. The ‘Jesus?’ It’s certainly possible to read it that way.’

It may be that Prof. Puech has changed his mind about this but, if so, there is no indication of this in the current article.  This is not to say that the inscription could not be "Jesus" but just to draw attention to our uncertainty about the reading.  It is absolutely not "explicit".

He also writes:

(2): "A third has 'Yose', a very rare version of Joseph. 'Yose', 'Joses' in the King James version of the Gospels, is described as a 'brother of Jesus' by the Gospels of Mark (6:3) and Matthew (13:55-56)".

This is incorrect.  Only Mark has "Joses".  Matthew has "Joseph". And the textual witnesses demonstrate unequivocally that the two names were regarded as interchangeable.

Jacobovici also claims:

(3): "If this is not enough, there was an inscription in Greek of a certain Mary called 'Mariamene'. In all of Greek literature, this particular spelling of Mary is used in reference to Mary Magdalene and no one else."

This is false. The word "Mariamne" is used twice in early Christian literature, once by Hippolytus (third century) and once in the Acts of Philip (fourth). On neither occasion does the author say that this Mary is "Mary Magdalene". Indeed, both authors, Hippolytus and the author of the Acts of Philip, depict Mariamne as having a sister named Martha, which illustrates that they are not talking about the historical first century figure of Mary Magdalene but the later, composite literary figure of the apocryphal Mary who incorporates characteristics from the full range of Marys.

Now of course it could be the case that my readings of the primary texts are wrong, in which case I would welcome some good, robust, critical engagement.  My guess is that I am more likely to receive dismissal or abuse, which is the norm, but I am always happy to be surprised.

Simon Schama's misreading of Paul

I've greatly enjoyed the first couple of episodes of Simon Schama's Story of the Jews currently airing on BBC2.  Schama is a wonderful story-teller and he knows how to make his subject matter compelling and memorable, always very impressive given the constraints of the documentary medium, with the need to summarize,  to simplify, to splice and dice.

Because of my admiration for Schama and the current series, I was disappointed to hear the kind of ignorant caricature of Paul that one would normally only see in a sensationalist documentary.  About fifteen minutes or so into the second episode, Schama looks at Constantine's conversion to Christianity, and begins to explain how early Christians reacted to Jews and Judaism.  This is my transcription of the section:

Born a Jew, like his saviour, was Paul who, within a few years of Jesus' death began the process of liberating Christianity from the claims of Jewish ritual.  Christianity was either universal or it was nothing.  So Paul aggressively de-Judaizes the Christian message and there was no surer way of doing that than insisting on the divinity of Jesus.  That violated the first supreme principle of Judaism which was the indivisible oneness of God.  Echad.  Two: "Father and son" had Jews scratching their beards.  Three: "The holy spirit".  Why not five?

And it was Paul who repeated the sinister note sounded in the early Christian Gospels, -- the Jews as Christ-killers crying out for Jesus' crucifixion -- "his blood be on us and on our children".

There are several problems with this section of the documentary, all of which could have been simply ironed out if Schama had consulted someone competent in the study of Christian origins.  To take them in turn:

(1) Although Schama acknowledges that Paul was "born a Jew", the implication is that Paul converted away from Judaism to something different, called "Christianity".  But Paul never mentions "the Christian message" or "Christianity" and he would have been appalled by the notion that he "de-Judaizing" anything, still less that he did so aggressively.  Paul insists on his Jewish identity and without understanding that, one cannot understand Paul (Phil. 3.4-6, Rom. 9.1-5) or, for that matter, the early Jesus movement.  Schama's misunderstanding is a classic one.  Paul is an eschatological Jew who believes that the Messiah has come and that the Gentiles are now being included in the people of God.  He is not founding a new religion purged of Jewish ritual.

(2) Affirming Jesus as Messiah and God's son did not "violate the first supreme principle of Judaism".  On the contrary, Paul believed that Jesus' appearance was an affirmation of that very principle, and he goes to some pains to stress this in his Christological re-affirmation of the Shema (1 Cor. 8.6, "Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live").  Nor does Paul talk about "the holy spirit" as a person of the trinity -- this is as anachronistic as "Why not five?" is sarcastic.

(3) No one, apart perhaps from some fundamentalists, think that the Gospels were written before Paul.  The line that Schama is quoting is from Matt. 27.25 and all contemporary scholars date Matthew long after Paul, some by decades.  So Paul is not "repeating the sinister note sounded in the early Christian Gospels", nor is that note found in Paul, who does not have a Passion narrative in his letters.

To reiterate, I think this is a superb documentary and I am a big fan of Schama.  But I think this section falls below his usual standards. One of the reasons that this is important is that getting the history right plays a key role in Jewish-Christian relations.  Given the appalling history of Christian attitudes to Jews and Judaism documented by Schama, it is worth paying careful attention to what Jews like Paul, right at the beginning of the Jesus movement, actually said.

How it used to look!

This is how it used to look back then (or at least as far back as I can get it on the wayback machine).  I must admit that I rather liked the old design, which I hand-coded.  That NT Gateway logo was designed by a nice guy called Geoff Love.

One of the funniest things is looking at the blogroll back then -- just two blogs!  A few weeks later it had expanded to four.  Good grief -- no wonder it was so much easier to keep up with what was going on in the blogosphere!

NT Blog's Ten Year Anniversary!

Happy birthday to me!  The NT Blog is ten years old today.  Its first post in what was then called "The NT Gateway Blog" went out on September 2 2003, Welcome to the NT Gateway Blog.  3,887 posts later and we are still here!

I began this blog as a bolted on extra to the New Testament Gateway which was then absorbing a huge amount of my time.  I'd been a fan of Jim Davila's Paleojudaica for a while and one day it dawned on me that I could do something similar.  I had never even heard of blogging until Paleojudaica appeared, and it struck me that a blog would enable me to gather together lots of the things that I had been trying to do with the NT Gateway, like drawing attention to great websites and adding "notices" of forthcoming events as well as, at the same time, discussing the New Testament in the news.

As time went on, the NT Blog became bigger than the site that spawned it, and the proliferation of other blogs enabled me to find my own niche.  I still wish that I could post more often, but I enjoy the blog, and I enjoy participating in the blogging community where I have found friends as well as some great intellectual stimulation.

I have written so often about the art of academic blogging, its successes and failures, that I don't have anything fresh to add here -- so please check out this cache of posts if you are interested: NT Blog: Academic Blogging.

My previous blogiversary posts are self-indulgently gathered here.

David Meadows celebrates ten years of Rogue Classicism today too -- don't forget to pop over there to thank him for all his great work over the years.  If only I had posted so often!

Many thanks to everyone over the years who has offered encouragement and who has commented and provided interaction on the other blogs.  There's no question about it -- it's the communal side of blogging that makes it worthwhile.

The art of writing negative book reviews

 A couple of years ago, I asked whether Paul Foster's review of Bartosz Adamczewski's Q or Not Q? might qualify as The most negative book review in our area?, having mentioned Peterson's review of Shedinger as another contender.  I am grateful to kolhaadam (in comments) for drawing attention to this one, just out in the Review of Biblical Literature, by Gregory Mobley, of a book by Marty Alan Michelson on Reconciling Violence and Kingship: A Study of Judges and 1 Samuel.  From the review:

I took no pleasure in reading this book, nor do I take any in cataloguing its flaws. The title itself with its initial, indecisive participle hamstrings progress toward coherence . . . . The publication history page, with its reference to the “british Library” damages the credibility before we even reach page i . . .

. . . . Who is to blame for what constitutes the most poorly written work of published “scholarship” I have ever read? . . .

. . . . Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book to anyone. Neither its ideas nor its writing meet any standard I recognize for publishable biblical scholarship.

So he's not mincing his words, then.  I must admit that I did enjoy this turn of phrase:

Nowhere does Michelson acknowledge that it served monarchic interests writing “after” to exaggerate the evils of the time “before,” in the same way that weightloss advertisements contrast images of slouching corpulence with svelte elegance.

It's interesting to ask how far it is worthwhile to write a really, really negative book review.  My general policy has been to turn down the invitation to write reviews of books that I think very bad.  I tend to think that there comes a point where it is better for a book not to be reviewed at all than for it to be reviewed really negatively.  I suppose I worry too much about what the author's mum might think if she were to see the negative review.  Perhaps negative reviews do have a part to play, though, in alerting publishers to material that has made it through their processes, or to alerting doctoral dissertation committees of radically dissenting opinions about the worth of the project.

Sean Freyne on Galilee, Jesus and Christology -- on Youtube

While reflecting tonight on the sad news of Sean Freyne's death earlier this week, I fell to wondering if any of his lectures had been recorded and released on Youtube and I am happy to say that there is a wonderful three lecture series from Yale Divinity School on "Galilee, Jesus and Christology".  These were the Shaffer Lectures at Yale in 2010.  Here are the text links followed by the embedded videos:

Sean Freyne: Galilee, Jesus and Christology, First Shaffer Lecture



Sean Freyne: Galilee, Jesus and Christology, Second Shaffer Lecture



Sean Freyne: Galilee, Jesus and Christology, Third Shaffer Lecture

Death of Paul W. Meyer

More sad news.  I was sorry to hear through Michael Gorman just now (on Fb) of the death of Paul W. Meyer.  Princeton Theological Seminary has released a notice here:

Paul W. Meyer

Word has been received of the death of Dr. Paul William Meyer, the Helen H. P. Manson
Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis Emeritus. Professor Meyer, who died at the age of 89 on Monday, July 29, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is survived by his wife, Mary Lou, and by two daughters, Katherine and Elizabeth.

The son of missionaries to India, Professor Meyer earned his Th.D. from Union Theological Seminary, New York, before beginning a teaching career at Yale University Divinity School as Assistant Professor of New Testament. At Yale, he began a lifelong friendship with J. Louis Martyn and was a teacher of both Wayne Meeks and Moody Smith. He subsequently became Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (1964-1970), before joining the faculty of Vanderbilt (1970-1978), followed by Princeton Theological Seminary where he served until his retirement in 1989. He was the Shaffer Lecturer at Yale in 1976. His collected essays, and his masterful, succinct commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, were published in 2004 under the title, The Word in this World, edited by John T. Carroll . . .

You can read more at the link above.

Paul Meyer was a fine scholar and also a true gentleman.  I was lucky enough to get to know him in recent years since he lived in North Carolina and was a regular at Joel Marcus's New Testament and Jewish Studies colloquium at Duke.  I hear from his students that he had a knowledge of the literature that was unsurpassed, but at the same time he was a gracious and insightful teacher.  He will be greatly missed.

Update (11.55pm): Many thanks to Matthew Montonini for sending over the picture above.

Death of Seán Freyne

I was very sorry to hear earlier in the week of the death of Professor Seán Freyne (Larry Hurtado, Jim West, Jim Davila, Michael Bird).  The Irish Times has its obituary here:

Eminent theologian Seán Freyne dies

One of Ireland’s best-loved and most respected theologians, Seán Freyne, has died in Dublin. Director of the Centre for Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, Dublin, he was professor of theology (emeritus) in the school of religions and theology at Trinity College.

His academic interests included a study of Galilee in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the historical Jesus, the gospels, and aspects of early Jewish and early Christian history. He published several books, most recently Jesus a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus Story . . . .

Freyne was a fine scholar who made a major contribution to the study of the historical Jesus, and especially Jesus' Galilean context.

He was also a kind, witty and delightful human being.  In a world where many academics think that pomposity is a virtue, Freyne was simply a pleasure to be with.  He let his erudition emerge in the process of engaging in an open and lively way with his audience, not in instruction or dogmatism.  I heard him lecture several times and it was always a pleasure.

I met him for the first time in August 1996, at the SNTS in Strasbourg.  As a young scholar at my first international conference, I often felt lonely and ill at ease, but Seán was one of the handful of senior scholars present who was kind and friendly.  I was on the same corridor as him in a rather steggy hall of residence, but he invited me to participate at his late night whisky gathering on condition that I brought my own glass.  All I could find was the lid of my deodorant bottle and I don't think whisky has ever tasted so bad, but it did not matter given that he made me feel welcome.

To get a feel for his scholarship and his lively, engaging personality, I recommend this interview done by BAR a couple of years ago:

BAR interviews Sean Freyne: Jesus of History vs Jesus of Tradition

Raymond E. Brown Website

Today, on the anniversary of Raymond Brown's death, Matthew Montonini has released a new website that pays tribute to him.  Anyone who has done any academic work on the New Testament knows and admires Ray Brown's scholarship and Matthew has done a great job in putting this site together:

Raymond E. Brown, S. S.

It features pictures, video-clips and several full PDFs of Brown's articles.  Strongly recommended.

The Canon of Doctor Who and the Canon of the New Testament

With the announcement of the twelfth doctor's casting still fresh in our minds, it's perhaps time for blog post about Doctor Who.  I've long thought that the way that Doctor Who fans talk about "canon" is rather different from the way that we might talk about the "canon" of the New Testament and, given that the term "canon" in fandom is derived from "canon" in early Christianity, I have sometimes thought about how the two discussions might inform one another.

My friend Chip, better known as the author of the esteemed Two Minute Timelord podcast, currently a Parsec Awards finalist, recently invited me to sit down for a chat in a time-dilation episode about this topic.  You can now listen to 2MTL 316.  Download it on iTunes, or using your standard podcast catcher, or listen here:

What IS "Doctor Who Canon" Anyway??? (Time Dilation)

It was great fun to have this discussion, and I'm grateful to Chip for the invitation.

More Caird Lectures Online

Jeffrey Gibson recently made available a whole bunch of audio recordings of George Caird's lectures.  I uploaded these to my webspace, and Matthew Montonini indexed them (See George Caird's New Testament Theology Lectures Online).

Jeffrey has now dug out another fifteen lectures, this time on the epistles to the Romans and the Synoptic Problem, and dating from 1983.  I have uploaded them (Raw indexing here) and Matthew has added links here:

George B. Caird New Testament Theology Audio Lectures

Matthew also blogs on this here.

Academic Blogging: What are the benefits?

Continuing on with Joshua Mann's questions (see Why Blog? and When and Why?), he asks next:

2. What are a few of the benefits you see in blogging?

I suppose one could ask about the benefits to the blogger and the benefits to the reader.  It's easier to talk about the benefits to the blogger.  Academics are a big-headed bunch and blogging gives them a nice outlet for their desire for self-publicity.  And the nice thing about academic blogs is that not many people read them, so the academics can get on their soapbox and go and sound off to a handful of readers and get that out of their system, hopefully honing their purer and better thoughts for proper publications like books and articles.

I sometimes wonder whether one should think of publication as being on a continuum, from tweets to blogs to critical notes to articles to introductory books to monographs.  The summit of all publication is the monograph, and the well-written monograph actually takes some real skill and effort.  Tweets, on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered.  Blogs are somewhere in between.  They take a bit more effort than a tweet but like them they are pretty ephemeral.  It's remarkable just how quickly we forget them, and that's if we ever read them in the first place.

When it comes to the benefits to the reader, I think there is one major benefit and here, again, I have to point to Jim Davila's Paleojudaica as a fine example of the genre.  The blogs have genuinely had some success in holding the media to account.  Extravagant claims in the media have often been successfully challenged in the blogs.  Here the collaborative, "horizontal" nature of some of the best blogs has made a key contribution because where many eyes look at the same data, they are more likely to notice key elements. Further, the range of different expertises in the different blogs also plays its part.

I'd like to think also that the blogs have helped those who read them to be a bit better informed about developments in our area.  I know that when I talk to the (vast majority of) colleagues who never read the blogs, I am often surprised about news items they have missed.  If you read the blogs, you do get to hear about interesting discoveries, new TV and radio programmes, sad deaths in the area, conference announcements, new books, new journals, new journal entries and so on.

So while we might poke fun at the bloggers, and laugh at their self-indulgence, in fact they have proved their worth in recent years by keeping us all informed and engaged, and sometimes, if all too rarely, entertained and amused.

Academic blogging: When and Why?

Now that my ridiculous pre-amble is written, here is the first of my answers to Joshua Mann's questions, with thanks for his interest, and apologies, in advance, if my answers are a bit rubbish. Question one and answer follows:

1. When and why did you start blogging?  

"When" is easier than "why".  If only it were this easy with dating the Gospels!  For the Gospels, I'm inclined to think there that the "why" is easier than the "when".  We know only roughly when the Gospels were written (sometime after 70, I argue), but it's fairly obvious why they were written (to tell the "good news" about Jesus Christ in narrative fashion to as many as far as possible).

But yes, it's about ten years since I started blogging.  I started blogging because I thought it would be fun.  Jim Davila was already doing it on Paleojudaica and he was brilliant at it.  He still is.  Somehow, Jim just has an instinct for how to do it well, and to this day I don't think there is anyone who has such a natural, instinctive feel for medium as Jim has.  Somehow, he is able to get exactly the right balance between between reporting the latest in the area and providing compelling, accurate and lucid comment, and without the sort of self-indulgence that is all to common elsewhere.

Actually, since I've started on this, let me rant a little longer.  What I like about Paleojudaica, and the reason that it is still the blog that provides the template, is that it understands what academic blogging is about.  It is about critical engagement with what else is out there on the net pertaining to the area in question.  Sometimes -- more often than not -- Jim can see that all that you need is a link and a description. Let the punters know what is out there -- quick link, quick description, quick bit of background,with links, if necessary.

But sometimes, Jim knows that a bit more is needed.  Because of the trust he gains by means of the sober, newsy items, he is able to add a little more comment when it is required. And he gains the reader's trust by giving us a whole list of background links.  "For background, see here", etc.  The reader is calmly assured that there is a history to to whatever the item is, and you will be able to follow it up in the blog.

I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons for the continued strength of Paleojudaica is that he has resisted adding a facility for comments.  I recently distinguished between what I call the "horizontal" blogs and the "vertical" blogs.  Vertical bloggers thrive on the interaction with their own commenters and generally resist the "horizontal" interaction with fellow bloggers.  Jim is the opposite.  With no comments at all, he can interact with other blogs where necessary, and with the focus on the news, he can avoid the self-indulgence that is too easy for those whose blogs largely focus on their own ideas and enthusiasms.  Moreover, he does pick up and engage with email commenters and my guess is that this too enhances the quality of the product.

But yes, it was because of Paleojudaica that I began blogging.  There was another major issue which was unique to me, however, which was that I was running a website called The New Testament Gateway that was giving me some grief.  Long before I had heard about blogging, I used to have a "log book" on the site which I used to record every update to the site.  I also used to have a "Featured Links" section.  A decade ago, it occurred to me that I could combine the idea of blogging, following Jim, with some of the peripherals from my NT Gateway, like the log book and the featured links section.  And this worked well for several years until I leased off the NT Gateway from the blog, and the NT Gateway blog became the NT Blog, as it is now.  So that's all to say that my blog was never quite the same as the purer biblioblogs.  It used to be an integral part of the NT Gateway, and you can see that if you look back through the archives, but now it is its own strange, malformed beast.

One last thing.  I love the fact that there are a million other blogs in the area and to a large extent, this has helped me to post less.  In the early days of the biblioblogs, when it was just me, Jim Davila, Jim West, AKMA, Stephen Carlson, Rubén Gómez, Tim Buckley and co, there were few reporting and commenting on the key news stories.  But now, you can guarantee that someone has got to it before you, and that enables you to be much more selective.

Why blog?

In one of my favourite TV series ever, The Prisoner (1967), there is an episode dealing with 1960s anxieties about the ever-increasing powers of the computer.  The episode is called "The General".  In the episode, our hero, Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) confounds the computer by asking it a question that has long been "insoluble . . . for man or machine".  The question is "WHY?"  But of course the answer to the question has always had a solution ready to hand.  The answer is, of course, "Why not?"

I feel the same way about blogging.  If someone asks me "Why blog?", my answer is "Why not?"  There is actually a danger in getting too navel-gazing about it.  If you want to blog, or think you might want to blog, give it a go.  See how it goes.  If you enjoy it, great.  If others enjoy it, even better.  If not, you've not lost anything, except perhaps a little time.

I was recently perusing the wayback machine's archive of the old Biblioblog interviews as part of my research for a paper I was writing for the SBL International (Biblioblogs.com still defunct).  Happily, the Biblioblog Top 50 has now rescued these from oblivion.  One of the things that is fun about looking at these interviews is that several of them are of bloggers that have long since vanished from the blogosphere.  And I think that that's great.  It's not great that they have gone (I loved Bruce Fisk's, for example), but it is great that they gave it a go and found that it was not for them.

Recently, Joshua Mann asked me a series of questions about blogging, one of which was "Why blog?", to which the answer is definitely, "Why not?"  Several have already had a go at Joshua's questions and have done a great job -- see his blog.

I suppose that what I am trying to get at is that you don't know until you've tried.  Why not give it a go?  I kind of love blogging and wish I did it more often.  And I suspect that there are loads of people who would be great at it who never give it a go.  And there are loads of people who are rubbish at it and who should probably have given up on it.

I was going to get to Joshua's questions in this blog post, but realize now that I have spent so long on my pre-amble that I am going to have to wait for the next post to answer the actual questions.  And that illustrates something about blogging -- it is spontaneous, self-indulgent, ephemeral and probably a complete waste of space.

Pericopes, passages or paragraphs?

Scholars love their jargon.  And New Testament scholarship is choc-full of jargon.  Sometimes I get a bit tired of it.  For a bit of fun, I am experimenting with banning myself from using certain jargon-y words and phrases in an introductory article I am writing at the moment.  One of the things I am trying to avoid is "pericope".

There are several disadvantages with the use of the term "pericope" for Synoptic-Gospel units of text.  The first is that it is a jargon-word and functions mainly to make scholars feel superior to everyone else.  It's "in" language.  If you talk about a Biblical "passage", you are not one of us!  You are probably doing a horrid Bible Study with your horrid, non-academic friends, and you have no idea about how to study the Bible academically.  If you were an academic, you'd talk about pericopes!  

The second disadvantage is that no one knows how to do the plural of "pericope".  It's pericopae if one is being truly clever and "in".  But some scholars worry that this is a step too far.  It's just too ponsey.  So they go for "pericopes".  And that looks even more ungainly.

The third great problem with the word is that it cannot survive in the age of auto-correct.  MS Word knows that there is no such word as "pericope".  Surely, you must be intending to write "periscope".  And it will change it for you.  Without even asking you.  It's a free chuckle every time I see "periscopes" in a student paper.  And lest I become too puffed up, I have found it more than once in my own hand-outs, where auto-correct has done its worst.

In any case, what was ever wrong about talking about "passages" in the first place?  The word "pericope" is in any case a legacy of the kind of form-critical approach to the Gospels that we have all long-since abandoned.  Austin Farrer so disliked that kind of atomistic approach that he used to talk about "paragraph criticism", noting that he was quite happy to look at isolated paragraphs but that, in the end, it was the Gospel as a whole that rewarded careful, critical study.

The joy of failed predictions

So with reference to my previous post, here is the interview question that made me smile when I re-read it.  The interviewer is Jim West, and the interview dates from December 2005:

BB: Who, among academics, would you like to see blogging who isn’t now?

MG: One of the glories of the blogosphere is its surprise nature. You can be really pleasantly surprised by who turns out to be a great and interesting blogger. On the whole the bloggers are all from the margins still, younger scholars, independent scholars, graduate students. To take the country I know best, the UK, for example, I know of no blog belonging to anyone with a chair. In that scene, I’d love to see Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, Philip Esler, Francis Watson, Maurice Casey, Christopher Rowland, Judith Lieu, Jimmy Dunn, John Barclay, and all the rest of the top brass blogging, but you and I know that that is never going to happen. So my basic answer is that I would like to see more of the top brass blogging, but I really doubt that it is going to happen. In the USA, I would have the same doubts about the top brass too. One recently retired, world famous NT scholar told me that he had never even knowingly visited a website. Many scholars, even now, have not even heard of blogs and blogging, and some who have have no idea that there are blogs in the Biblical Studies area. (Emphasis added).

I love my certainty about something that turned out to be wrong.  Not only does Larry Hurtado now have a well-loved and popular blog, but several others that I mentioned have also been involved with the blogs, including Richard Bauckham and Francis Watson.  And here in the USA, I never would have imagined that Bart Ehrman would end up blogging, albeit behind a paywall.

Now that we have some of the top brass blogging, it does make Jim's 2005 question worth asking again.  Who would we like to see blogging who isn't now?

Update (11.49am):  Still looking through biblioblogs.com, I am impressed by Jim Davila's answer to a similar question, a month later, in January 2006, just after his revelation about The Waltons:

BB: What do you see blogs becoming in the future?

JD: In the short run, I think that blogs will become ever easier to use and more and more common. I hope many more of our colleagues in biblical studies and related fields will start blogs. The long run is harder to predict, because our technological base is improving exponentially and it’s hard to tell what new resources it’s going to offer us. In general, as I’ve said before in my SBL Forum article and again my recent SBL paper in Philadelphia, I think that blogging is “an early and primitive manifestation of what will become the ubiquitous media presence of the individual.” In other words, over the long term we will all become more and more connected together through the far more sophisticated offspring of what we now call the Internet, and our connections to it and to each other will be less and less obtrusive and more and more natural and taken for granted. Big Media (what bloggers call, often disparagingly, “mainstream media”) will still have an important place, but it will become more and more interactive. Two-way communication between it and individuals and groups — all of whom ultimately will occupy the same, um, medium — will make Big Media much more readily and swiftly self-correcting than it is today and will present us with a media continuum with Big Media at one end and the individual on the other and every imaginable permutation of group-size in between.

That’s my guess, anyway.

I particularly love "I think that blogging is 'an early and primitive manifestation of what will become the ubiquitous media presence of the individual.'"

Biblioblogs.com still defunct

I've been writing a paper, now with first draft completed, for the SBL International in July.  It's advertised title is "Pods, Blogs, Websites and Mark," but I have retitled it as "Mark in a Digital Age: The Internet and the Teaching of Mark's Gospel".  Research for it has involved going back and re-reading old blog posts, which is enormously good fun.  I had forgotten, though, that the site biblioblogs.com, which used to be run by Brandon Wason, John Hobbins and Jim West, is now defunct and so was grateful to Mark Hoffman for drawing attention to the Wayback Machine Archive of the old site.  Some of the formatting of the interviews has become a little mangled, but otherwise it's all there.

I'm wondering whether we should archive this properly?  I am happy to host it if someone else can be bothered to grab all the files.

While reading my own interview from back then, I came across one hilarious failed prediction, which I'll comment on separately.

Tom Boomershine Performs Mark

I blogged about Performances of Mark's Gospel the other day and Matthew Montonini drew my attention to several clips of Tom Boomershine performing Mark online.  I suggested that perhaps someone might like to arrange these nicely into a playlist but, as my mother used to say, if you want something doing properly, you need to do it yourself, and so I have arranged all the available videos of Boomershine performing Mark into a YouTube playlist:

Tom Boomershine Performs Mark's Gospel



There are thirteen videos in total.  I have ordered them in Marcan verse order, with the exception of the SBL presentation featuring the Passion Narrative, which I have placed at the end.  Because they are filmed on three different occasions, you'll see Boomershine's clothes changing between videos.