Orality and Literacy VI: Literate authors of ancient texts

N. T. Wrong has posted on the Relative Unimportance of Oral Culture for Interpreting Biblical Books, reminding us of the fact that "Of those who wrote biblical books, the literacy rate was 100%". With the antibishop (thanks to Andrew Criddle for the term), there is always an enjoyable element of facetiousness, but his reminder about this blindingly obvious fact is actually a useful one because it forces us to think again about the role of the literate in a culture where there was widespread illiteracy, to come to terms with the role played by this elite. As Harry Gamble says,

In a community in which texts had a constitutive importance and only a few people were literate, it was inevitable that those who were able to explicate texts would acquire authority for that reason alone (Books and Readers, 9-10).

Moreover, as I have argued here (Orality and Literacy V: Illiterate Tradents), it is not just a question of taking literate authors of literary texts seriously. It is also a question of focusing on literate tradents. The idea of illiterate early Christian tradents remains problematic. Most of the tradents we know about were literate, and one of the earliest pieces of known tradition (1 Cor. 15.3-5) presupposes literate tradents and the importance of tradition interacting with what is written.

Now in that post, I did promise a note on Acts 4.13, where Peter and John are described as ἀγράμματοι, sometimes translated as "illiterate". Many commentators suggest that the word is more appropriately translated "uneducated" than "illiterate", not least because the same text, Acts, depicts Peter as quoting extensively, verbatim, from the Hebrew Bible (or perhaps more accurately here in Acts, the Septuagint). I make no presumption of historicity since it seems likely that Luke has composed those speeches; the point is that the author who depicts Peter and John as ἀγράμματοι in the same text also has them quoting their Scriptures verbatim. Therefore the likely meaning of the word, as Luke uses it, is "uneducated" and not "illiterate", and this verse does not provide a one-stop response to arguments in favour of the likelihood of literate tradents.

Dating Sacred Texts on the Basis of Fulfilled Prophecy

In a recent post, the ever intriguing N. T. Wrong discusses the Scholarly Dating of Daniel to After the "Prophecies" were "Fulfilled". Here in the biblioblogging community, we are all on first name terms, so I hope the bishop will not mind my calling him Tom. Tom quotes and then argues against a character who sees "The practice of late-dating the books of the Bible . . . as a position of faith on the part of those scholars who do so"; Tom pays special attention to John J. Collins on Daniel, and the quotation is worth repeating here:

The issue is not whether a divinely inspired prophet could have foretold the events which took place under Antiochus Epiphanes 400 years before. The question is whether this possibility carries any probability: is it the most satisfactory way to explain what we find in Daniel? Modern critical scholarship has held that it is not.
- John J. Collins, Daniel, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, with an Excursus on the Apocalyptic Genre (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1981): 11-12.

Tom's timely post coheres with what I have been arguing here (especially in Dating Game VI and Dating Game VII) with reference to the predictions of the temple's destruction in the Gospels. Allow me to quote from a section of my forthcoming SBL paper (31-32 in the current draft):

One of the standard arguments against the idea that Mark shows knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem is the reassertion of the text’s own character here as prediction. In his Introduction to the New Testament, David A. DeSilva suggests that “The primary reason many scholars tend to date Mark’s Gospel after 70 CE is the presupposition that Jesus could not foresee the destruction of Jerusalem – an ideological conviction clearly not shared by all.” But this kind of appeal, while popular, tends not to take seriously the literary function of predictions in narrative texts like Mark. Successful predictions play a major role in the narrative, reinforcing the authority of the one making the prediction and confirming the accuracy of the text’s theological view. It is like reading Jeremiah. It works because the reader knows that the prophecies of doom turned out to be correct. It is about “when prophecy succeeds”.

My concern about the popular appeal to what Jesus could or could not have done is that it does not take seriously the real issue, which has nothing to do with making a judgement about the historical Jesus. Rather, it is about observing the literary function of successful prophecy in the narrative in which it appears. The prediction only gains traction because the reader is saying, "Hey, yes! I know what that's about!" The issue is parallel to the one discussed here by Tom Wrong, and I am grateful to have his Daniel discussion to inform my own. James McGrath weighs in on Exploring our Matrix, with similarly helpful observations.

Professor Frank Walbank Obituary

Tomorrow's Times has an obituary of a renowned classical scholar whose works will be familiar to many:

Professor Frank Walbank: historian of classical antiquity

. . . . Throughout his life the bulk of this activity was devoted to the history and historiography of the post-Alexander period of ancient Greek history. By 1930 the publication of newly found inscriptions and papyri was transforming access to a period which had suffered from comparison with the Golden Age of 5th and 4th-century BC Greece; Walbank was among the first to see and seize the opportunity. The history came first, with biographies of two first-rank figures, Aratos of Sicyon (1933) and King Philip V of Macedon (1940). Lucid, comprehensive and judicious, they became and remain standard works of reference.

Behind them, however, lay the historian Polybius, whose surviving text, still substantial though a pitiful torso of the original 40 books, had had no commentary since the 1790s. From 1942 onwards Walbank set himself to fill that gap. Vol I, covering the fully extant books I-VI, came out in 1957, II in 1967 and III in 1979. Within that invaluable, peculiarly Anglo-Saxon genre of detailed “historical commentary” on ancient historical texts, they are reckoned to have set the gold standard: his appreciation of Johann Schweighauser’s 18th-century edition — “the more one works with this, the more one comes to admire its thoroughness and sound common sense” — applies with equal force to his own . . .

Walbank died on 23 October this year, aged 98.

Ellen Davis and The Green Bible

My colleague in the Graduate Program in Religion at Duke, Ellen Davis, appears on Duke Today to talk about The Green Bible:

C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles

Just spotted this on archive.org and it may be of interest to some:

C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles (London: Harper and Row, 1946)

SBL Paper on Dating the Crucial Sources in Early Christianity

My paper for a session at the SBL is now available online here. I was invited to write this paper for a new consultation on the Cross, Resurrection, and Diversity in Earliest Christianity (I have also been asked onto the steering committee). Session details are at the previous link, along with other papers for this consultation, and the paper is available here:

Dating the Crucial Sources for Early Christianity (MS Word)

Dating the Crucial Sources for Early Christianity (PDF)

Regular readers may spot some overlap with my blog sketches on the same topic, though the paper is longer and more detailed and on the whole post-dates the blog posts.

The Dating Game VIII: John, Thomas and Authorial Self-Representation

With the momentous events of last night still fresh in our minds, I hope readers will not mind my returning to the question of dating, as we approach the conclusion of this series.

In the most recent post, we looked for corroborating evidence that Matthew and Luke indeed post-dated 70, something that their dependence on a post-70 Mark would of course lead us to expect. In this post, I would like to turn to the Gospels of John and Thomas. Is there knowledge of the destruction of the temple here too? I think that there is, though their greater distance from 70 may be reflected in the fact that there are fewer references now to the destruction of the Temple. In Thomas’s case, this is also no doubt a function of its genre (Sayings Gospel in which narratives about the Temple are of course absent) and theological proclivity (the relative lack of so-called apocalyptic eschatology). Nevertheless, both texts allude to the destruction of the Temple, John in 2.19-20, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days . . . “ and Thomas in logion 71, “I shall destroy this house and no one will be able to rebuild it.”

The more blatant signs, though, of the relative lateness of John and Thomas lie in their attempts at authorial self-representation. Where earlier Gospels like Mark and Matthew are anonymous and avoid attempting to project an authorial presence to lend authority to their work, the author of the Fourth Gospel makes claims to have been present, most notably in 19.35 and of course 21.24, “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and wrote them down (καὶ ὁ γράψας ταῦτα). We know that his testimony is true,” similar in style and literary function to the Incipit of Thomas, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” In both, the authorial self-representation legitimizes the message of the book in a way absent from the earlier Gospels but found explicitly in later texts like the Apocryphon of James. John’s claim enables the author to establish his Gospel’s authority – he knows that the things he reports are true because he was there. In Thomas, there is a further step: the author was present and, moreover, he was privy not just to the public teaching but also the secret teachings (Incipit, Thomas 13).

There is a trajectory among these early Christian texts, from the absence of authorial self-representation in Mark and Matthew, to hints in Luke and Acts (with the first person found in Luke 1.1-4 as well as in the “we” passages in Acts), to the marked but nevertheless still unnamed authorial presence in John, to the explicit self-representation of Didymos Judas Thomas in its Gospel’s Incipit, a naming that also leads the reader to pay special attention to Thomas 13. The same texts likewise witness to a growing consciousness of predecessor texts, from the πολλοί of Luke’s preface, to the many other books that could fill the world in the last verse of John, to the twelve disciples sitting around writing their books at the Last Supper in the Apocryphon of James.

These observations depend in part on the work of Ismo Dunderberg, “Thomas and the Beloved Disciple” in Risto Uro (ed.), Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas (Studies of the New Testament and Its World; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 65-88, especially 80-88, though his use of the term "authorial fiction" (derived from John Kloppenborg) is not ideal. The term “authorial self-representation” is preferable because it characterizes the process more precisely and less prejudicially, and uses terminology familiar in literary criticism.

The Dating Game VII: Dating of Matthew and Luke

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the case for Mark's dating in the post 70 period, suggesting that the predictions of the destruction of the temple function to underline the authority of Jesus as the one who successfully predicted what the reader knew had now happened. The repeated and pervasive emphasis on the temple and its destruction is most plausible in this post-70 period. It is worth investing time on this question because if Mark was written after 70, and if Matthew, Luke and John are all familiar with Mark, then they too post-date 70. But does a closer look at the later Gospels correlate with this picture? For J. A. T. Robinson (Redating the New Testament), it was the lack of reference to 70 anywhere in the New Testament that proved decisive in his attempts at redating:

The fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and with it the collapse of institutional Judaism based on the temple - is never once mentioned as a past fact. It is, of course, predicted; and these predictions are, in some cases at least, assumed to be written (or written up) after the event. But the silence is nevertheless as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not bark.

The claim is unimpressive, though, given that most of the documents in question are either written in the pre-70 period (Paul’s letters) or set in the pre-70 period (Gospels-Acts). What is remarkable is that documents set a generation before 70 appear to speak so clearly about the destruction of the Temple. For Robinson,

That Jesus could have predicted the doom of Jerusalem and its sanctuary is no more inherently improbable than that another Jesus, the son of Ananias, should have done so in the autumn of 62.

The problem for this perspective is that Jesus ben Ananias’s prophecy occurs in a document that post-dates 70, Josephus’s Jewish War. As with Mark, it is important to ask the question about the literary function of the prediction in the narrative, here in a document that climaxes with the story of Jerusalem’s destruction. Indeed, a comparison between Jesus ben Ananias in Josephus and Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew and Luke provides further striking parallels. The oracle Matthew 23.37-39 // Luke 13.34-35 has marked similarities with the oracle in Jewish War 300-1, the same threefold focus on the people, the city, the temple. Jesus ben Ananias cries “a voice against Jerusalem . . .” and Jesus laments “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”. Jesus ben Ananias singles out “the holy house” and Jesus says “Behold your house is forsaken.” Jesus ben Ananias raises “a voice against this whole people” just as Jesus exclaims, “how often would I have gathered your children.” Moreover, the same context in Josephus features a portent of voices being heard in the temple saying “we are departing from hence” (μεταβαίνομεν ἐντεῦθεν, War 6.299), similar to the implication here in Matthew and Luke that God has left the temple – “Behold your house is forsaken and desolate” (Matt. 23.38). Such prophecies and portents function similarly in each of the texts and they point to a post-70 dating.

The Dating Game VI: Was Mark written after 70?

In the previous post in this series, we concluded by looking briefly at James Crossley’s commendable effort to rethink the dating of Mark. If that attempt is unsuccessful, it is nevertheless worth asking how secure the standard scholarly dating is. One of the values of challenges to the consensus is that they can send us scurrying back to the texts to think again about the issues and to reexamine our reasons for coming to particular views. My own thinking on the subject has been strongly influenced by three recent studies which successfully reinforce the grounds for locating Mark in the aftermath of 70, Brian Incigneri’s The Gospel to the Romans, H. M. Roskam’s The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in its Historical and Social Context and John Kloppenborg’s article “Evocatio Deorum and the Date of Mark”. Although these three disagree with one another on the details (e.g. the precise referent of Mark 13.14), all agree on the significance of the key text:

Mark 13.1-2, Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down.

For many, so blatant a prediction of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem settles the question of Mark’s date – it is written in full knowledge of the disastrous events of 70. For Kloppenborg,

“The fact that this seems to correspond so precisely to what occurred invites the conclusion that it was formulated (or reformulated) ex eventu” (431).

For Roskam,

“The evangelist could not have presented the prediction of the destruction of the temple as an utterance of Jesus with such firmness unless he was very certain about its fulfilment” (86).

Objections to this view are ably discussed by Incigneri (Chapter 3, "No stone Upon another"), who stresses Mark’s “over-arching concentration on the Temple” (154), the destruction of which is so important in his narrative that it is implausible that it was still standing when Mark wrote.

One of the standard arguments against the idea that Mark shows knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem is the reassertion of the text’s own character here as prediction. To take one example among many, David A. DeSilva, in his Introduction to the New Testament, suggests that

The primary reason many scholars tend to date Mark’s Gospel after 70 CE is the presupposition that Jesus could not foresee the destruction of Jerusalem – an ideological conviction clearly not shared by all (196).

But this kind of appeal, while popular, tends not to take seriously the literary function of predictions in narrative texts like Mark. Successful predictions play a major role in the narrative, reinforcing the authority of the one making the prediction and confirming the accuracy of the text’s theological view. It is like reading Jeremiah. It works because the reader knows that the prophecies of doom turned out to be correct. It is about “when prophecy succeeds”.

The text makes sense as Mark’s attempt to signal, in a post-70 context, that the event familiar to his readers was anticipated by Jesus, in word (13.2, 13.14) and deed (11.12-21) and in the symbolism of his death, when the veil of the temple was torn in two (15.38). The framing of the narrative requires knowledge of the destruction of the temple for its literary impact to be felt. Ken Olson has alerted me (especially in a paper read at the BNTC three years ago) to the importance of Mark 15.29-30 in this context. It is the first of the taunts levelled when Jesus is crucifie:

So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!

For the irony to work, the reader has to understand that the Temple has been destroyed; the mockers look foolish from the privileged perspective of the post-70 reader, who now sees that Jesus’ death is the moment when the temple was proleptically destroyed, the deity departing as the curtain is torn, the event of destruction interpreted through Gospel narrative and prophecy.

The point that is generally missed in the literature, especially that which comes from a fairly conservative perspective, relates to the attempt to understand the literary function of the predictions of destruction in Mark's narrative. John Kloppenborg is one of the few scholars who sees the importance of the literary function of the predictions, noting the role played by the literary motif of "evocation deorum" echoed here in Mark, e.g.

This raises a crucial distinction between omens and rituals that (allegedly) occurred before the events, and their literary and historiographic use in narrative (446).

Discussions about whether the historical Jesus was or was not prescient may be interesting, but in this context they miss the point. The theme of the destruction of the temple is repeated and pervasive in Mark's narrative, and it becomes steadily more intense as the narrative unfolds. Jesus' prophecies in Mark attain their potency because "the reader understands" their reference.

Biblical Studies Carnivals XXXV

The latest Biblical Studies Carnival, on Abormal Interests, is superb:

Biblical Studies Carnival XXXV
Duane Smith

The Dating Game V: Document and tradition

So far in this series of posts, we have been looking at the relative ordering of the crucial documents, focusing on the sequence of the documents without attempting to pin them to particular decades. As far as the canonical Gospels are concerned, we are looking at an order like this: Mark > Matthew > Luke > John. The time comes, though, when we need to attempt to pin these texts to points in time. As anyone familiar with New Testament studies will know, the dating issue is determined by a pivotal question: do the documents post-date the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE? Since Mark is the first in this sequence of documents, dating Mark would be a very helpful way of moving forward. If Mark post-dates 70, so do Matthew, Luke and John.

Before tackling that question, however, there are some necessary reminders. The discussion is inevitably clouded by the complications of textual tradition (observable) and textual tradition (hypothesized); I have spoken already (Preliminaries) about some of the difficulties involved with a document's evolution and range of dates and the inevitable difficulties that that causes the historian. Nevertheless, it is possible to speak reasonably about the dating of the documents as long as one bears these kinds of difficulties in mind. History, and especially ancient history, often needs to deal in approximations. It is a heuristic and not a descriptive discipline, and reasoned discussion of the date of given documents is achievable provided one proceeds with care.

It is important, for example, to distinguish clearly between the date of a given document and the date of the traditions within it and to avoid allowing document dating to get bound up with tradition history. How, then, should we conceive the question of dating a document? It should refer, I think, to the date of the given document as a observable, substantive entity with recognizable parameters such that it distinguishes itself from other documents. Matthew, for example, is recognizably Matthew and not Mark, even though it contains a lot of Mark. Luke is recognizably Luke; it is not Matthew and it is not Mark even though it contains a lot of the shape and the substance of those documents. In this kind of discussion, then, we need to be clear about what it is we are trying to date. We are dating the documents to which our texts bear witness, and not prior oral traditions, written traditions, or hypothetical earlier versions of the document in question. In this context, we are not investigating the dating of elements within the larger, later document; we are attempting to date the document itself.

A document can be no earlier than its most recent datable tradition. This is why, when we come to Mark, the question of its knowledge of the destruction of the temple is so important. If Mark is familiar with the events of 70, the presence of traditions earlier than 70 will be irrelevant. A good example of an approach that recognizes the distinction between the date of the document and the history of its traditions is Gerd Theissen's work on Mark's Apocalypse and Passion Narrative. He argues for versions of Mark 13, and of Mark 14-15, that date from the late 30s or early 40s, but thinks that Mark itself was written after 70.

It is in this context that I find myself reflecting on James Crossley's recent book, The Date of Mark's Gospel, published in the series I edit called Library of New Testament Studies in 2004. Crossley argues against the consensus that Mark should be dated somewhere in the region 65-75CE, suggesting instead that Mark's knowledge of Jewish Law, and the assumptions he makes about it, make best sense at a very early point, as early as mid to late 30s or early 40s. There are many things I like about James -- I am all in favour of young, attractive British blogging scholars who are willing to stick their necks out against the consensus on important issues, and who publish in LNTS. So I wish I were able to agree with the thesis of The Date of Mark's Gospel, but I don't. One of the book's virtues, I think, is that it effectively strengthens the case for a law observant Historical Jesus and Crossley's arguments to that end are effective. I am not persuaded, though, that James succeeds in narrowing the gap between Jesus and the author of Mark. As David Gowler points out in his review of James's subsequent Why Christianity Happened, "Jesus' Torah observance could still have been adequately represented by Mark in the 60s" (CBQ 69 (2007), 815-6 [816]). The notion that the originating circumstances of the tradition correlate directly with the perspective of the evangelist is problematic given the possibility that Mark is sometimes a faithful retailer of traditional material. Or, to put it another way, it is always going to be a tall order to demonstrate that assumptions apparently made in given traditions are identical with assumptions made by the author of the document in which they appear.

Moreover, where there are clear signs of Marcan redaction, they point away from Crossley’s thesis. In the key passage about hand-washing in Mark 7, the narrator’s framing of the material explains that hand-washing before eating food is something practised by “the Pharisees and all the Jews” (καὶ πάντες οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι). This does not set up the debate as an intra-Jewish one of the kind that Crossley’s thesis requires. The practice of hand-washing is established as something that all Jews do, and which Jesus’ disciples do not do (7.2, 5), setting up a contrast that Jesus’ words then speak into, a contrast that makes good sense on classic form-critical grounds. For Crossley, the reference here to “all the Jews” is a Marcan exaggeration, but this concedes the ground about the accuracy and precision of Mark’s knowledge of Judaism that is a major and necessary element in his case.

Witherington on Wikipedia

As I have argued here before (Wikipedia), the way forward for Wikipedia in the academy should be critical engagement rather than spurning. I have been critical of Ben Witherington's remarks on the subject in the past (New Testament scholars on Wikipedia; More on how to engage with Wikipedia) and today in a new blog entry, "What is truthiness?" The truth about Wikipedia, Ben has a little more. Referring to Shlashdot's comments on Simson Garfinkel's interesting article Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth, Ben writes:

My son the computer whiz sent me this recent article on the standard of 'truth' that Wikipedia uses, namely verifiability from a recognized source. When one couples this with the banning of original research, it leads to real problems, and explains why so many academics do not allow the use of Wikipedia in student papers much less in scholarly work.

The criterion of verifiability from a recognized source is in fact one of the reasons for the competence of many of Wikipedia's articles, and acts as a good model for students who are engaging critically with what Wikipedia says on a given subject. And the avoidance of original research is also entirely natural and right in an encyclopaedia of this kind. Encyclopaedia Britannica is the same -- it is not a place to publish original research. Original research is published in monographs and journal articles and not in encyclopaedia entries. Indeed the value of the encyclopaedia is that it directs the reader to good original research on the topic in question.

Incidentally, I do rather like the last line of Garfinkel's article:

That standard is simple: something is true if it was published in a newspaper article, a magazine or journal, or a book published by a university press--or if it appeared on Dr. Who.

Of course the truthiness there depends on whether one is talking about canonical Who or not (a remark for the geeks).

The Dating Game IV: What about John?

It is easy to find oneself spending so much time with the vexed question of the chronological sequence of the Synoptic Gospels, and the big Synoptic Problem questions that arise, that one can forget about the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas. To an extent, the relative neglect of these Gospels in this context is understandable. Whereas the Synoptic Gospels are clearly related on the literary level, there is no consensus about whether the same is true of John and Thomas. Does John know the Synoptics? Some say yes, some no. Does Thomas know the Synoptics? Again, opinions are divided. Clearly, this series of blog posts is not the place to solve this fascinating problem, but I would like to suggest a couple of ways in which we might be able to sketch out the possible lines of relationship between the Synoptics and Thomas and the Synoptics and John. I am currently in the middle of a book on the relationship between Thomas and the Synoptics, so the full argument will have to wait for its publication in the (I hope) not too distant future. As for John and the Synoptics, let me just say that I am persuaded by the evidence set out by several including C. K. Barrett and Frans Neirynck concerning John's knowledge of the Synoptics and that I would like to add an observation that may be of relevance.

So let us go to John and focus on an issue related to the phenomenon of fatigue in the Synoptics, discussed in the previous post. One of the indicators of familiarity with prior texts is a rewriting of elements in those texts in such a way that the author inadvertently creates anomalies or inconcinnities. One of the clear examples of this phenomenon in John occurs in his story of the anointing of Jesus by Mary in John 12.1-8. The story is parallel to Matthew 26.6-13 // Mark 14.3-9. The Johannine incident is clearly the same as the Synoptic incident: (1) It takes place in Bethany (2) just before Passover, (3) at a dinner where a woman has a jar of very expensive perfume of pure nard (Mark 14.3, ἀλάβαστρον μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτελοῦς; John 12.3, λίτραν μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτίμου; (4) she anoints Jesus; (5) there are complaints about the costliness of the perfume (τριακοσίων δηναρίων) which could have been given to the poor (καὶ ἐδόθη πτωχοῖς, John 12.5; καὶ δοθῆναι τοῖς πτωχοῖς, Mark 14.5); (6) Jesus says "Leave her. . . The poor you will always have with you . . . But you will not always have me" (ἄφες αὐτήν . . . τοὺς πτωχοὺς γὰρ πάντοτε ἔχετε μεθ' ἑαυτῶν ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε, John 12.7-8; ἄφετε αὐτήν . . . πάντοτε γὰρ τοὺς πτωχοὺς ἔχετε μεθ' ἑαυτῶν καὶ ὅταν θέλητε δύνασθε αὐτοῖς εὖ ποιῆσαι ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε, Mark 14.6-7); (7) Jesus interprets the anointing in connection with his burial (John 12.7, Mark 14.8).

John appears to have crafted this account on the basis of the Marcan narrative; the structure, the story, the wording have substantial links. The only major fresh elements in John are the naming of the woman as Mary, contextually determined by his resetting of the account as a postlude to the Lazarus story, and the naming of the one who complains as Judas, which itself may be derived from Mark 14.10-11, which comes straight after the anointing, and links Judas with an unhealthy interest in money. But there is one element in John that appears not to be found in Mark, Mary's wiping Jesus' feet with her hair (καὶ ἐξέμαξεν ταῖς θριξὶν αὐτῆς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ, John 12.3). This detail appears to come from Luke 7.38 (καὶ ταῖς θριξὶν τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμασσεν. . . ), where it forms part of Luke's story of the anointing, 7.36-50, his version of the Marcan // Matthean anointing. As there, it is an anointing by an anonymous woman in the house of a man called Simon, though Luke relocates it at an earlier point in the narrative, as often (cf. the Rejection at Nazareth, brought forward to Luke 4.16-30; Paul's first visit to Jerusalem, brought forward to Acts 9.25-6 and the Jerusalem Council, brought forward to Acts 15 from its "true" location in Acts 18.22), a move that necessitates some reworking of the details, especially the stress on the forthcoming death and burial. It is now a story about a "sinner", whose hair hangs down.

The anointing in each of the Synoptic accounts makes sense. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus' head is anointed with perfume. No hair is mentioned, no feet are are mentioned. In Luke, the woman wets Jesus' feet with her tears, an act of repentance, and she wipes them with her loose "sinner's" hair before she anoints them with perfume. But John's reminiscence of the Lucan detail about the wiping of Jesus' feet with her hair creates an anomaly. First, there is no reason for Mary, in John, to be wearing her hair like a "sinner", which is the point of the Lucan story. Second, because there are no tears in John, Mary's wiping of Jesus' feet with her hair means that the perfume ends up on her hair and not on Jesus. Jesus is the one who is supposed to be being anointed. This appears to be an example of John's secondary use of prior texts that has generated narrative inconcinnity and which helps us, therefore, to sketch John into a relationship of post-dating the Synoptics.

The Passion DVD release and other news

The Passion DVD is released in the UK tomorrow (20 October), and the Sunday Times marks the release with an interesting piece from Joseph Mawle (Jesus):

Best of times, worst of times: Joseph Mawle
Mawle, 34, played Jesus in the BBC’s production of The Passion this year. Here he recalls the trials of filming in Morocco — and the physical and mental strain of putting himself in the shoes of one of the most famous figures in history
Ria Higgins

. . . . By now it was around 8.30am, the sun was coming up and the torrential rain had given way to vast blue skies. Filming began a short distance from the Crucifixion site. The heat was already making me sweat and the high altitudes were taking their toll, too. At the forefront of my mind, though, was the pain and exhaustion I could only imagine Jesus feeling as he stumbled with his cross through the narrow, crowded streets of Jerusalem up to Golgotha. Nailing my arms to the cross was made possible by a prosthetics expert using special clips, fake nails and latex made to look like blood-drenched skin. Then I had to bend my knees to the right, resting my feet on an iron peg, while a second peg allowed me to rest one bum cheek. Hanging there with your arms stretched out and your knees bent was one of the most common ways used to crucify people by the Romans. . . .

Meanwhile, Doug Chaplin has an interesting post on Metacatholic discussing a remark made in the Bite My Bible blog relating to the depiction of the resurrection in The Passion. Mark Thompson (director general of the BBC) lauded The Passion for being "faithful to the gospel narrative"; Bite My Bible disputes that, citing the depiction of the resurrection -- "it shamelessly promoted the 'vision theory' of the resurrection of Jesus without an awareness of the flaws of this approach." Doug rightly disputes that and I am in agreement with him. What The Passion does here is innovative and yet faithful to the Gospels. There is an empty tomb narrative, as in all four canonical Gospels, which is hardly a "vision theory" approach, and the depiction of the disciples' difficulty in recognizing Jesus is all based on the Gospels -- Mary thinks that Jesus is the gardener (John 20.14-15); the disciples on the road ot Emmaus do not recognize him until they break bread with him (Luke 24.13-35).

While we are on the topic of The Passion, please excuse one small piece of self-indulgence. When checking up the IMDb page on The Passion, I was happy to see that they have added my credit as series consultant. Right at the bottom of the page, but definitely there.

No news yet on the American title and air date for The Passion yet, by the way.

The Dating Game III: Getting the Synoptic Gospels in Order

Getting the Gospels in order is one of the fundamental issues in the dating the crucial sources in early Christianity. Before attempting to work out whether we can locate the Gospels in any particular decade, there is preliminary work to be done, to see whether we can get them into sequence in relation to one another. The issue is separable into several separate questions, all of them controversial, all of them interesting, (1) the Synoptic Problem, (2) the question of John's knowledge of the Synoptics, (3) the question of Thomas's knowledge of the Synoptics. There are still other additional questions that we could add, like the relationship of the Gospel of Peter or the Didache to the others, but to make the task manageable, at least in an introductory discussion, it is worth focusing on the texts generally regarded in the scholarship as crucial to the task at hand.

Let us begin with the Synoptic Problem. I have written a couple of books on this topic and it is pointless for me to pretend that I am beginning fresh here so let me instead summarize my conclusions and then offer a special illustration of how I think we can stack up the Synoptic Gospels in sequence.

(1) Mark is the first Gospel and it was used as primary source by both Matthew and Luke. The Priority of Mark is rightly the consensus view in Gospel scholarship. Its major contemporary competitor, the Griesbach (Two-Gospel) Hypothesis does not adequately account for much of the Synoptic data, especially the combination of Mark's alleged omissions from and additions to the combined witness of Matthew and Luke, which generate a curious profile for Mark the redactor. (See further The Case Against Q, Chapter 2 and The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze, Chapters 3-4).

(2) Luke is dependent on Matthew as well as Mark. This theory (the Farrer theory) dispenses with the need to posit a hypothetical document, Q, to explain the extensive verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke that is not mediated by Mark. This is the thesis of my Case Against Q, summarized also for introductory students in the last chapter of The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (see also the Case Against Q website). It is an argument against a major element in what is currently the majority view in Gospels scholarship, the Two-Source Theory, which argues that Matthew and Luke used Mark independently of one another, which necessitates Q. Arguments for Luke's independence of Matthew are unconvincing, and evidence of Luke's familiarity with Matthew needs to be taken seriously. To take just one area, it is commonly said that Luke's re-ordering of Matthew's discourses is inexplicable, but it makes good sense when one pays attention to Luke's redactional habits with respect to Mark, and his narrative habits overall.

The direction Mark > Matthew > Luke can be observed by paying attention to an important but underestimated indicator of the genealogy of documents, the phenomenon of editorial fatigue. I have argued (Fatigue in the Synoptics) that Matthew's and Luke's dependence on Mark, and Luke's dependence on Matthew, can be seen in the way in which each evangelist will, on occasion, begin by making changes to a pericope, only to lapse into the wording of the source as time goes on, creating minor contradictions. Thus we can see Matthew using Mark in the story of the death of John the Baptist (Mark 6.14-29 // Matt 14.1-12), beginning the pericope by changing Mark's Herod "the king" to his own more accurate "Herod the tetrarch", only to lapse into calling him "king", with Mark, half-way through the passage. Moreover, he adjusts the plot of the story. Where in Mark, Herodias wants John killed, Matthew has Herod himself desiring to kill John, but then Matthew retains Mark's notice that Herod grieved John's death.

Luke appears secondary to Mark in the Feeding of the Five Thousand story (Matt 14.13-21 // Mark 6.30-44 // Luke 9.10-17), which he begins by resetting it in "a city called Bethsaida", which causes an inconcinnity when he later repeats, with Mark, "we are in a desert place here" (Luke 9.12).

The same phenomenon of editorial fatigue also shows Luke to be secondary to Matthew. In the Parable of the Talents / Pounds, Luke, who loves the 10:1 ratio, begins with a major change: ten servants, not three; and with one pound each. Yet as the story progresses, Luke gets drawn back to the plot of the Matthean parable, with three servants, "the first", "the second" and "the other". The wording moves steadily closer to Matthew's as the parable progresses.

I offer these brief examples of the phenomenon of fatigue to draw attention to the possibilities for using literary criticism to theorize about the direction of dependence among related documents. What will be of interest next will be to explore the still more vexed questions of the relationships between the Synoptics, John and Thomas.

Early Christian Writings on the way back

Today is obviously the day for returning heroes. Early Christian Writings is coming back soon, at least according to the dramatic announcement on Peter Kirby's website of that name.

Bible and Interpretation

As Jim West says, it is good to see that Bible and Interpretation is back, and with a slick new design. Perhaps along with welcoming their return, I could put in a request for an RSS feed?

Jim West has an article in the new edition about Biblical Studies on the web. He returns to the question of Wikipedia and its use in academia and makes one remark that surprises me:

Yet rather than providing reliable materials many academics adopt the default position that "it's already out there on Wiki and people just need to read that." This is, I suggest, a grave mistake (and potentially even a touch of laziness).

I am troubled to hear that academics are adopting that kind of position -- it is not something that I have come across. My own view is that students should not be reading it so much as writing it, testing it against their critical review of the secondary literature. I realize that that is aspirational, but I like to get the best out of my students.

The Dating Game II: Getting Paul's letters in order

One of the easy mistakes in the dating game is to shoot too quickly for absolute dates, to look in a given document for hints that might help us to pin it to a a specific date. Some of our documents, though, are not of the nature that will allow us to pin them to a particular decade, let alone a particular year, and in such circumstances, it is important to try to get them into the right relative order, to make sure that we are stacking them up in the right order with respect to one another. Our general reluctance to do this may have something to do with our general reluctance to get our hands dirty doing serious work on the Synoptic Problem, or to do the related, equally difficult work on other big issues that make some of us recoil, Pauline chronology, John's familiarity (or not) with the Synoptics, Thomas's use (or not) of the Synoptics. But if we are to make progress on dating our crucial sources, these are the kinds of specialist areas that we need to invest in.

Let us take what is perhaps the most straightforward area first, the issue of getting Paul's letters in order. We are lucky here to have a degree of consensus on the parameters and general shape of the question. We agree, broadly, that Paul's letters were written in the 50s, with the late 40s the very earliest we can go. And we have general agreement on the basics of how to frame Paul's life. No one seriously thinks that 1 Thesslaonians is a late letter, or that Romans is an early one. If there are serious disagreements about the integrity of 2 Corinthians, and the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, there is nevertheless broad consensus that the order of the undisputed letters goes something like this:

1 Thessalonians
Galatians
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
?Philippians
?Philemon
Romans

It is easy to be sure about Romans. Paul is explicit that he has preached the gospel fully in a circle from Jerusalem to Illyricum (15.19), and that he is on the way now to Jerusalem with the collection for the saints there, with a view to heading off next to Rome and then to Spain (Rom. 15.23-9). Now the collection provides us with the most helpful basic piece of sequential dating material because it is mentioned, at different states of development, in three other epistles, all of which predate Romans.

Gal. 2.10: Only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

1 Cor. 16.1-4: Now concerning the collection for the saints: you should follow the directions I gave to the churches of Galatia. 2 On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come. 3 And when I arrive, I will send any whom you approve with letters to take your gift to Jerusalem. 4 If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me.

2 Cor. 9.1-4: Now it is superfluous for me to write to you about the offering for the saints, for I know your readiness, of which I boast about you to the people of Macedonia, saying that Achaia has been ready since last year; and your zeal has stirred up most of them. But I am sending the brethren so that our boasting about you may not prove vain in this case, so that you may be ready, as I said you would be; lest if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready, we be humiliated - to say nothing of you - for being so confident.

This is a fine example of the way in which sequential biography mentioned in documents can help us to date those documents. Clearly the collection is at an early point in 1 Cor. 16 -- Paul has recently instructed the Galatians about it, and he is only beginning now to talk to Achaia about it; presumably he has not yet begun to talk to Macedonia about it. By 2 Cor. 9 it has advanced much further. At least a year has passed; Paul is expecting Achaia to be ready, and Macedonia is ready too. So 1 and 2 Corinthians are placed in their expected sequence with respect to one another, but both also earlier than Romans.

There is actually one more opportunity the material here provides, but it is an invitation often and surprisingly refused. The major, marked difference between 1 Cor. 16 on the one hand and 2 Cor. 8-9 and Rom. 15 on the other is that Galatia has dropped out. Where Paul, when he was writing 1 Corinthians, had expected the Galatians to participate, they are out of the picture by the time that he was writing 2 Corinthians, something further confirmed by their absence from Romans. The crisis in Galatia, therefore, appears to have taken place between the writing of 1 and 2 Corinthians. This is when Paul lost the allegiance of the Galatians who had turned to what Paul saw as "another gospel" and getting circumcised (Galatians). The order of Paul's letters, then, goes something like this:

1 Thessalonians
1 Corinthians
Galatians
2 Corinthians
?Philippians
?Philemon
Romans

Getting the relative dating of 1 Corinthians and Galatians right illustrates the value of dating questions in the study of Christian origins. The hints provided by Paul's biography for establishing that 1 Corinthians precedes Galatians correlate with other factors of interest in the study of Paul. What is the source of his gospel? Is it through human agency (1 Corinthians 15.1-11) or directly from God (Galatians 1.6-12)? What about his use of Jesus material? Is it a coincidence that his earlier epistles, 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, are rich in Jesus material but his later epistles are not? What about Paul, the Law and justification? Is it significant that the earlier epistles, 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, are light (to put it mildly) on the forensic language while the later epistles (Galatians, Romans, Philippians 3) feature it heavily?

The Oldest Bible

It is good to see Codex Sinaiticus still making the news and on Monday, Radio 4 (which most right thinking Brits, and many others too, love with passion) broadcast a half hour documentary:

The Oldest Bible

Roger Bolton tells the story of the Codex Sinaiticus bible, found in 1844 in a monastery in the Sinai Desert and then split between Egypt, Russia, Switzerland and the British Library. It is soon to be digitised for world-wide viewing, and poses a significant challenge to the Bible as we know it.

You can listen again from the link above, or by going straight to the iPlayer. It will be available for the next few days. Once I've listened, I will comment here. Meanwhile, an article related to the programme has drawn heavy criticism and helpful correction from Dirk Jongkind on Evangelical Textual Criticism. I would be interested to hear Dirk's and others' comments on the programme too when they have listened.

Duke Papyri Online Developments

This exciting local news was mentioned by David Meadows on rogueclassicism and is worth a mention here:

Ancient Papyrus Documents to be Available Online

DURHAM, NC -- A Duke University-led research team will use an $814,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop collaborative online editing tools for ancient documents preserved on papyrus.

The new electronic editing environment, when completed, will enable scholars –- regardless of their location -- to research, retrieve and display ancient texts, supplementary data and digital images of papyri.

The research team is led by Duke professor Joshua Sosin and university librarian Deborah Jakubs.

Sosin, associate professor of classical studies and history, co-directs the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, an online repository of ancient Greek and Latin documents preserved on papyrus, pottery and wood. The collection contains more than 50,000 published texts that can be searched electronically through the Papyrological Navigator (PN), a new interface that merges data from different scholarly projects to allow simultaneous searching of texts, translations and images. The PN, whose development was also funded by Mellon, is online at http://papyri.info . . . .

ITSEE News RSS feed

ITSEE (Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editions, University of Birmingham) has added an RSS feed: ITSEE News.

The Dating Game I: Preliminaries

I have been asked to present a paper at this year's SBL Annual Meeting in Boston on "Dating the Crucial Sources" for a new consultation entitled "Cross, Resurrection and Diversity in Early Christianity". Simon Gathercole is speaking in the same session; April DeConick is responding to me and Stephen Patterson is responding to Simon. John Kloppenborg will be in the chair.

It is a pleasure to be invited to give a paper, and a special pleasure to do so at one of the inaugural meetings of a new consultation. When one is invited to present, it will usually be in an area that overlaps with one's area of expertise, but which at the same time provides a fresh challenge, as here. I have written a little about dating issues but not a lot. It is something that interests me, but this is providing me with an opportunity to spend some time thinking through things in a more systematic and serious way. But where does one begin with such a broad topic? One of the pitfalls of attempting to date early Christian documents is to shoot too quickly for absolute dates, to try to pinpoint each text to a specific moment without doing the prior work on working out the relationships of documents to one another. Thus however much we might find matters like the Synoptic Problem not to our taste, it is essential to get on top of such things if we are to get some feeling for the most plausible relationship of documents to one another. It is a necessary prior step before attempting to fix documents to a specific date or range of dates.

Before that, though, several more preliminaries and important reminders:

(1) What is a document? I once wrote an article on Q called "When is a text not a text?". Although it dealt specifically with the hypothetical document Q, it got me thinking about the broader issues of what we mean when we talk about "texts" and "documents" in antiquity. Of course we all know that we do not have autographs and we know that there were no printing presses, but textual critics rightly remind the rest of us to behave like we actually know that that is the case. Too often, we lapse into treating our scholarly constructs as if they are the actual artefacts that they are only aspiring to be. At the very least, we need to keep reminding ourselves in discussions like this that we are not dealing with fixed points and known entities but with reconstructions and approximations.

(2) A Document's Evolution: there is a related issue here, that the more we become text-critically sensitive, the more we are inclined to reflect on the evolution of the documents we think we know. When we try to date Mark's Gospel, what are we dating? Something that approximates to our scholarly reconstructions of Mark 1.1-16.8 or something akin to what the vast majority of witnesses have, a Mark that goes on beyond 16.8? When we try to date John, are we imagining a version with or without the pericopae adulterae, with or without Chapter 21? When we date Thomas, are we dating textual antecedents to the Oxyrhynchus fragments, where where Coptic Thomas's Saying 77 is found with Saying 30, or constructs more akin to the Coptic, or both or neither? Even in our print culture, a document's history is often about a date range rather than a fixed point in time. When I refer to John Knox's Chapters in a Life of Paul, do I date it to its original influential edition in 1950 or the revised version of 1987, in which he reacts to his own critics of his earlier work? (And to make it still more complicated, we could insist too that even the 1950 edition featured revised versions of articles written in the 1930s). The point here is that sometimes our attempts to date documents precisely ignore what we know to be the case, that documents are not static entities even today, let alone in antiquity.

(3) Text and Tradition: There is a further related issue that often causes confusion. We sometimes speak as if a document is as early as the traditions it contains. Or, to put it in another way, we confuse tradition history with a document's dating. Thus a document first penned in the year 80CE might contain good traditions from the early 30s. One first penned in the 60s might be full of historically dubious legends. We should be careful to make sure that in attempting to date a document we are not simply dating the traditions contained in that document.

It is not my intention, though, just to talk about the difficulty of the task at hand, but rather to make sure that certain warnings are in place before embarking on the journey ahead. I want to make clear that where I do talk about dating documents, I am doing so in full knowledge that there are difficulties here, and that we speak in a shorthand that sometimes has to bypass complex issues to which we will have to return.

Biblical Studies Carnivals XXXII to XXXIV

On Metacatholic, my friend and former graduate student Doug Chaplin has done a superb job with the latest Biblical Studies Carnival:

Biblical Studies Carnival XXXIV

It is thorough, well-judged, well written -- a fantastic job. As I often seem to comment now, the burgeoning blogging world, and the impossibility of keeping up with everything, is making the carnival ever more useful and important. I must apologize, therefore, for failing to mention the two previous carnivals:

Biblical Studies Carnival XXII (Ancient Hebrew Poetry, John Hobbins; in three parts -- Part Two; Part Three)

Biblical Studies Carnival XXIII (Pisteuomen, Michael Halcomb)

The latter is a new blog to me, but difficult to read in my browser, with a kind of black text on dark grey background.

Journal for Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism latest

Another new article has been added to the Journal for Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism, Volume 5:

5.6: Hans Foerster, "The Celebration of the Baptism of Christ by the Basilideans and the Origin of Epiphany: Is the Seemingly Obvious Correct?" (PDF)

The Passion Resource Pack now available

The Bible Society's resource pack for The Passion (2008) is now available to buy. It is the first time the DVD has been available to buy, and it comes with a range of educational resources. Here is their press release:

Bible Society’s Passion resource pack is now available to buy online!

Be one of the first to own the DVDs and schools and church resources. Visit www.biblesociety.org.uk/thepassion to order your copy now.

Priced just £19.99, the two-DVD set featuring all four episodes of The Passion will be an invaluable resource for RE teachers across the country.

For teachers – teach The Passion, and encourage investigation.

The resource includes materials on CD-ROM for Key Stage 3, GCSE and 16+ RE. It will save on preparation time and give you a raft of new and creative ideas to engage students.

The CD-ROM is also available as a teacher’s book, priced £7.99.

For church leaders – bring The Passion to life in your church and community.

The DVDs and CD-Rom include a 4-part home group guide and creative resources. These can be used in services, Lent groups or home groups to understand, digest and explore the issues thrown up by the events that took place between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Be one of the first to own the DVDs and resources. Visit www.biblesociety.org.uk/thepassion to order your copy now.

The standard release DVD will be out in October.

Secrets of the Cross, Episode 2: Who Really Killed Jesus?

The first episode of this series of four documentaries, Secrets of the Cross, was called Secrets of the Jesus Tomb and was broadcast on the UK network channel Five on 2 September (and reviewed here). The second documentary went out last Tuesday, so I am a little late with my review here.

Matt Page has provided an excellent review on Bible Films Blog and also on rejesus. Matt gets this one exactly right. There were some real strengths here -- the team of experts selected (Helen Bond, Ann Wroe, James Tabor, Shimon Gibson and one or two others) were excellent, the use of location shooting was well done, and on the whole the documentary approached its subject matter in a historically responsible way, albeit with an occasional unnecessary black-and-white history vs. theology contrast.

This documentary, which like the previous one is made by CTVC, avoided the extremes of fundamentalism on the one hand and sensationalism on the other, and it packed a decent amount of historical detail into the narration and the expert interviews without becoming convoluted. We heard about the Pilate inscription in some detail, and there was an enjoyable scene where Helen Bond, who was on screen more than anyone else, drew the key part of the inscription in the sand by the sea. As well as the experts, there was some newly filmed silent drama, in the modern documentary style, featuring a black Jesus, lots of blood, some Roman soldiers and several scenes with Pilate. It was quite well done, though it is difficult not to find it a bit distracting, especially if one is familiar with the inevitably superior film portrayals of the same events, which are of course too expensive to use in documentaries like this.

On the whole, the programme avoided cliché, though at one stage Jesus' actions "set him on a collision course" with Rome. The history was in the main responsibly done, and it avoided condescending to the audience. Among other virtues, the programme makers did not shy away from addressing the difficulty of the evangelists' portrayal of the Passion, especially Pilate's hand-washing and the crowd's blood guilt line in Matthew. The only minor criticism I would want to make would be that it presented a rather hard-and-fast line, explaining to the audience how things were without allowing for the inevitable difficulties of doing ancient history, with room for contrasting views among different scholars. Documentary makers sometimes underestimate the extent of the audience's interest in the process of doing history, and of weighing contrasting opinions.

After this greatly superior second entry in the series, I am looking forward to the third documentary, Mary Magdalene: Saint or Sinner, which aired tonight and is repeated on Sunday at 11am, and which is also available free to UK users on Demand Five.

Expository Times latest

The latest issue of Expository Times is now available to subscribers. Here are details of the articles of interest on the NT:

Expository Times
1 October 2008; Vol. 120, No. 1

Matthew and the History of its Interpretation
Dale C. Allison, JR
The Expository Times 2008;120 1-7
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/120/1/1?etoc

`For those Outside, Everything Comes in Parables': Recent Readings of the Parables from the Inside
Alison Jack
The Expository Times 2008;120 8-15
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/120/1/8?etoc

The Historical Jesus for Beginners:
James H. Charlesworth, The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2008)
Paul Foster
The Expository Times 2008;120 33
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/120/1/33?etoc

Earliest Christianity in a Roman Context:
E. A. Judge. The First Christians in the Roman World (WUNT 229; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008)
Paul Foster
The Expository Times 2008;120 40
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/120/1/40?etoc

Book Review: A COMPENDIUM OF NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS
J. G. van der Watt (ed.), Identity, Ethics, and Ethos in the New Testament (BZNW 141; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2006)
Tobias Nicklas
The Expository Times 2008;120 45-46
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/120/1/45-a?etoc

Book Review: JUSTIN MARTYR IN CURRENT PERSPECTIVE
Sara Parvis and Paul Foster (eds), Justin Martyr and His Worlds (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007)
Michael Holmes
The Expository Times 2008;120 46-47
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/120/1/46?etoc

Book Review: LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF A CRITICAL READING OF THE BIBLE.
John Holdsworth, Getting Started with the Bible (London: Canterbury Press, 2007)
A. Leslie Milton
The Expository Times 2008;120 47
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/120/1/47?etoc

Book Review: IMPROVE THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT: ERASMUS AND BEZA
Jan Krans, Beyond What Is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2006)
Dirk Jongkind
The Expository Times 2008;120 49
http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/120/1/49?etoc

Review of Biblical Literature Latest

It's time to catch up on the Review of Biblical Literature. These are those from the last two emails and as usual, I am listing those on the New Testament and related topics:

Frederick E. Brenk
With Unperfumed Voice: Studies in Plutarch, in Greek Literature, Religion and Philosophy, and in the New Testament Background
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6275
Reviewed by Thomas J. Kraus

James H. Charlesworth, ed.
The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Second Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5896
Reviewed by Matthew Goff

Zeba A. Crook and Philip A. Harland, eds.
Identity and Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean: Jews, Christians and Others: Essays in Honour of Stephen G. Wilson
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6363
Reviewed by Thomas W. Gillespie

Rodney J. Decker
Koine Greek Reader: Selections from the New Testament, Septuagint, and Early Christian Writers
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6213
Reviewed by Pierre Johan Jordaan

Mark W. Hamilton, Thomas H. Olbricht, and Jeffrey Peterson, eds.
Renewing Tradition: Studies in Texts and Contexts in Honor of James W. Thompson
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5715
Reviewed by Nathan Guy

Larry J. Kreitzer
Hierapolis in the Heavens: Studies in the Letter to the Ephesians
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6426
Reviewed by Daniel Darko
Reviewed by Stephan Witetschek

Daniel L. Smith-Christopher
Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes: Speaking Peace to Power in the Bible
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6081
Reviewed by Hector Avalos

B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort
The Greek New Testament with Dictionary
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6182
Reviewed by Allan J. McNicol

Stephen C. Barton, ed.
Idolatry: False Worship in the Bible, Early Judaism and Christianity
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6399
Reviewed by Thomas J. Kraus

Kent E. Brower and Andy Johnson, eds.
Holiness and Ecclesiology in the New Testament
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6347
Reviewed by James M. Howard

David B. Capes, Rodney Reeves, and E. Randolph Richards
Rediscovering Paul: An Introduction to His World, Letters, and Theology
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6287
Reviewed by Rodrigo J. Morales

Paul M. Fullmer
Resurrection in Mark's Literary-Historical Perspective
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6450
Reviewed by Pheme Perkins

Edith M. Humphrey, ed.
And I Turned to See the Voice: The Rhetoric of Vision in the New Testament
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6286
Reviewed by Bart J. Koet

David J. Lull
1 Corinthians
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6208
Reviewed by Anthony C. Thiselton

Steve Moyise and Maarten J. J. Menken, eds.
Deuteronomy in the New Testament: The New Testament and the Scriptures of Israel
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6343
Reviewed by Michael A. Lyons
Reviewed by David Lincicum

Stanley E. Porter, ed.
Paul and His Opponents
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5158
Reviewed by Justin K. Hardin

Journal for Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism latest

Another article has been added to the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism Volume 5:

5.5 Michael Wojciechowski, "Aesopic Tradition in the New Testament" (PDF)

Travel Diary: Minneapolis, Sunday

I had another job to do before heading back home. I talked for an hour to the Adult Education group at Westminster Presbyterian Church on what we can really know about the Historical Jesus, and how we can know it. Again, it was a good, large audience, with lots of excellent questions and comments, and I made a really conscious effort to speak more slowly so that those present could understand my foreign accent, apparently with some success. I walked them through some of the key issues in Jesus research, looking at the question of sources, explaining the Synoptic Problem and introducing them to non-canonical sources like the Gospel of Thomas, explaining historical context and introducing them to people like Josephus. And I talked about the value if beginning one's historical journey with the crucifixion and working backwards from there.

I flew back to Raleigh-Durham at lunch time and arrived at 5, catching up on a couple of articles, a couple of Russell Brand podcasts, and some sleep, on the way.

Travel Diary: Minneapolis, Saturday

This is my first ever visit to Minneapolis. At first sight, the city reminds me a bit of Seattle, which we visited last year (Travel diary). I am staying close to Westminster Presbyterian Church where I am speaking this weekend at an event co-sponsored by Luther Seminary and United Theological Seminary. There were 120 or so attending, and I am always impressed by those willing to give up a Saturday to listen to someone talking about the New Testament. I know that I am pretty loathe to give up my Saturday morning lie-in unless I really have to. The topic was "Who do you say that I am? The History of Jesus as Messiah", a title worked out in consultation with Kathy Michael, associate pastor at the church and the main organizer of the event. It arose from a series of lectures I gave earlier this year at the BAS event in Fort Lauderdale, "Monarch or Messiah? The King of Jewish Expectation and the Christ of the New Testament", itself developed from the Logos Lecture I gave in June 2007, "Did Jews in Jesus' day expect the Messiah?" The focus is my ongoing research on messianism in Second Temple Judaism and how an understanding of that material helps us to revise the way we look at Christian origins and the New Testament.

They worked me hard but made me welcome. Instead of the four lectures over two days I gave in Fort Lauderdale, here I gave three lectures in a 9-3 event, but with plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion, and breaks for coffee and lunch. I found those who came knowledgeable, interested and full of good questions and comments (as well as the odd, expected idiosyncratic contributions from two or three). Perhaps the greatest surprise, though, was the extent to which some present struggled to understand my British accent. Several people commented that they could not catch everything I was saying. It is true that when animated I do speak a little quickly, and I suppose I am going to have to work harder in future, especially with this kind of audience, to slow down a little. I have been lecturing at Duke for three years now and I often ask if they are able to catch everything I am saying, but they are just a bit too polite to tell me otherwise. It may also be an age-related issue since those who struggled to understand me were a little elderly.

The 3pm finish gave me a chance to get a nap in before we headed out for a fantastic dinner at a superb restaurant called Nicollet Island Inn. They are looking after me very well.

Travel Diary: Minneapolis, Friday

I am lecturing in Minneapolis this weekend (Minneapolis event) and regular readers will be familiar with the fact that I write travel diaries on occasions like this.

As I write, I am sitting in a familiar spot, the Varsity Grill and Sports Bar at Raleigh Durham International Airport (RDU), enjoying a nice Sam Adams. The place is bustling tonight. I think to myself, "Ah, it's because it's Friday night -- people are out enjoying themselves" but then remember that no one actually comes to a bar at an airport on a Friday night unless they are travelling. I am so used to travelling with my family recently, having taken six flights this summer, from DC to Philadelphia to London to Nantes to London to Philadelphia to DC again, that it is odd being in my own company, with just the blogging machine and Sam Adams to keep me company. I like to sit facing outwards, at one of the tall stools set up to allow you to do people watching on all the people going by, at the same time doing a little everyday eavesdropping on several conversations happening behind me.

Tonight is only about the travel. Minneapolis is a two and a half hour flight from Raleigh Durham, and I am going in tonight so that I am able to be up bright and early in the morning and to begin the study day at 9.

Minneapolis Event

I am speaking this weekend in Minneapolis at an event organized by Westminster Presbyterean Church, Luther Seminary and United Theological Seminary. Full details are here:

Who do you say that I am? (brochure) (PDF)

Here is an excerpt from the publicity:

“Who Do You Say That I Am?”… The History of Jesus as Messiah
A Day of Lecture, Exploration, and Discussion Led by Dr. Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Saturday, September 13, 2008
8:30AM—3:00PM
Westminster Presbyterian Church
1200 Marquette Avenue
Minneapolis

Reports and travel diary will, I hope, follow.

More British New Testament Conference Reports

It is good to see some more reports coming in on this year's British New Testament Conference in Durham (see previous post):

Dunelm Road (Ben Blackwell)
Early Christian History (James Crossley)
Euangelion (Michael Bird)
Nijay K. Gupta
Paleojudaica
Sean the Baptist (Sean Winter)

These are all excellent and enjoyable reports, and I love the pictures on Paleojudaica while wondering whether that gathering is now beginning to burst at the seems?! One thing is missing in the above reports and comments, though. No one mentions the poor secretary who makes all this happen. If the job is as time consuming now as it was when I did it, Louise Lawrence definitely deserves a word of thanks.

British New Testament Conference 2008

The British New Testament Conference 2008 gets underway today in Durham. Although the website is still hosted here on NTGateway.com, I am not able to make it on account of being several thousand miles away, but the programme (PDF) looks interesting; see also the seminars. I look forward to reports from the ground, so far just Jim Davila on Paleojudaica.

Update (Friday): Nijay K. Gupta reports on day one.

Secrets of the Jesus Tomb, on Five

Last night, the British channel Five (one of the five network channels in the UK, and the youngest) aired a new documentary produced by CTVC (who have a short page on it here) entitled The Secrets of the Jesus Tomb. According to The Guardian, it achieved 1.4 million viewers, which is probably about par for the course for a Five documentary. Five documentaries are not aimed at a high brow audience and in general are relatively undemanding, with plenty of exposition and repetition, some over-simplification and a straightforward structure, a narrative with talking heads and some drama. This documentary sits soundly in that sub-genre. If you were looking for a BBC4 style documentary, you would be disappointed. If you are a New Testament scholar hoping to see something new or different, you would almost certainly be disappointed. But the casual viewer, with a limited knowledge of the subject area, with the telly on in the background while doing the washing up, would find it pretty easy viewing. That casual viewer might have found it enjoyable and even informative.

For those who have followed the Talpiot tomb controversy over the last eighteen months (covered extensively on this blog), this documentary would not have provided any surprises, but for those looking for an introduction to the story, it would have been useful. And the absence of Simcha Jacobovici, and a more sceptical conclusion to the documentary made it much easier viewing than the Discovery Channel original Lost Tomb of Jesus that aired in the US in March 2007.

This documentary told the story of the discovery of the Talpiot Tomb, featuring reminiscences from Amos Kloner and Shimon Gibson, and it then developed the theory that this could be Jesus of Nazareth's tomb with visuals of each ossuary, and the writing translated to English. The middle section of the documentary made the case for that identification with extensive comment from James Tabor who was apparently filmed in Jerusalem. The narration in this section featured a lot of oversimplification and side-stepping, especially the confident assertion that Jesus had sisters called Mary and Salome, and that his brothers Judas and Simon would not be in this tomb because they were still alive after 70CE. And the (I think weak) case that the so-called Mariamne inscription points to Mary Magdalene was overstated (see my posts on Mariamne, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, Mariamne and the Jesus Family Tomb, Mariamene and Martha, Stephen Pfann, The Statistical Case for the Identity of the "Jesus Family Tomb" and others in the series) as were several of the other elements in the case.

The middle section of the documentary was peppered also by comments from Bart Ehrman and Tal Ilan, who also appeared in the final, sceptical section of the film in which the idea that this could possibly be Jesus of Nazareth's tomb was seriously questioned. The statistical case was discussed and broadly dismissed, though unfortunately without contributions from those like Randy Ingermason who have published on this. By the end of the programme, the case for the identification was left looking pretty deflated, and our casual viewer who had held on all the way through, now having finished his washing up, might have wondered whether it was really worth spending the time on a case that seemed weak. Still more should have been done on the sceptical side, though, and I was disappointed by the lack of involvement of several experts who have contributed to the debate, especially Stephen Pfann.

The documentary makers should, however, be lauded for avoiding sensationalism and for sounding fairly reasonable, at least by the end of the programme. A few features showed some sensitivity to scholarly conventions, like the use of "BCE" and "CE" (unexplained in the programme) rather than "BC" and "AD", but at other points repeated cliché (Christianity rocked to its foundations) and banality (Jesus was not a Christian) will have turned away the educated viewer. And if they said that ossuaries were bone boxes once, they said it a hundred times.

I always look at the credits on programmes like this, not least so that I can see if I know any of those involved. One disappointment here was that there was no historical consultant or advisor listed. I think it is a mistake for documentary makers not to employ proper historical consultants. They are inexpensive, they can be a gold mine of valuable information and there are things that experts can see that the programme makers will miss. It is a way of improving the quality of the final product, avoiding errors and holding yourself to account.

Some have reacted unfavourably to the documentary, most notably Andrea Mullaney in today's Scotsman, who calls it "moronic" -- Real Life Stupidity on a Biblical Scale (HT: Jim West). Since Mullaney is rightly unimpressed by the claims explained in the new documentary, one wonders what she would have made of the original Discovery channel documentary, produced by Simcha Jacobovici, that allowed so little room for dissenting voices. Andrew Billen in The Times was not much more impressed:

The programme displayed a surer mastery of the obvious. “One of the most famous figures in history,” the commentary explained about Jesus, “the truth about his life remains a mystery. But one thing is certain: Christ was not a Christian. Christianity only came into being after he died.” The conclusion that this feeble documentary more or less arrived at was something else obvious: the tomb probably wasn't Jesus's at all.

Robert Collins in the Telegraph was a little more positive, though he ends with the comment that "Like all Turin Shroud-esque conspiracies, it’s irresistible until the contradicting evidence comes along to spoil all the fun."

Update (Friday): Matt Page comments on Bible Films Blog.

Five years old today

The NT Gateway Blog is five years old today (Previous blogiversaries: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007). And this is post number 2,853. Happy blogiversary too to Rogue Classicism, also five years old today.

Did Wright coin the term "the new perspective" on Paul?

As everyone knows, the term "the new perspective on Paul" was coined by Jimmy Dunn in 1982, on 4 November, at his Manson Memorial Lecture at the University of Manchester, subsequently published in 1983 in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983), 95-122, and reprinted in several places, most recently online at the Paul Page. And yet four years earlier, N. T. Wright had already used the term,

N. T. Wright, "The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith": The Tyndale New Testament Lecture, 1978, Tyndale Bulletin 29 (1978), 61–88, reproduced at the N. T. Wright page

The debate between Stendahl and Käsemann concerns the relation, in Paul’s thought, between justification and salvation-history — between the Apostle who preached the Lutheran Gospel of justification by faith and the Paul who was called, in God’s historical purposes, to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. It would not be an overstatement to say that all the major issues in Pauline interpretation are contained (at least by implication) in this debate, and in one lecture there are therefore bound to be oversimplifications and downright lacunae. I want to try nevertheless to present what I take to be a new view of Paul. . . .

. . . . This debate has all the makings of a classic, with the agenda including wide-ranging issues in Pauline theology detailed exegesis of several passages, and challenges to traditional dogmatic frameworks, all with inescapable twentieth-century overtones. I want now to contribute to it by offering a new way of looking at Paul which provides, I believe, not only an advance in the debate between Stendahl and Käsemann but also a new perspective on other related Pauline problems. I shall first sketch out this new view and argue briefly for its central thrust, and then show how it offers new light on the debate.

Who'd have thought that Wright gave us not only "the third quest" but also "the new perspective"? He has a lot to answer for!

Bible and Archaeology Fest XI in Boston

I am speaking at the following event in November for the first time. Nice to be among the "renowned"!

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BIBLE AND ARCHAEOLOGY FEST XI

Featuring 20 renowned Bible & archaeology scholars!

Boston, MA
November 21-23, 2008
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Full details, with booking forms, full schedule and so on, available from the link above. My talk is on Sunday morning and is entitled "When were the Gospels written?" This is a new event for me and I am looking forward to participating.