"How reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?" New article in JSNT

I have an article in the latest Journal for the Study of the New Testament:

How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?
Mark Goodacre

James Robinson’s narrative of how the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered is popular and compelling, a piece of fine investigative journalism that includes intrigue and blood vengeance. But there are several different, conflicting versions of the story, including two-person (1977), seven-person (1979) and eight-person (1981) versions. Disagreements include the name of the person who first found the jar. Martin Krause and Rodolphe Kasser both questioned these stories in 1984, and their scepticism is corroborated by the Channel 4 (UK) series, The Gnostics (1987), which features Muhammad ‘Ali himself, in his only known appearance in front of camera, offering his account of the discovery. Several major points of divergence from the earlier reports raise questions about the reliability of ‘Ali’s testimony. It may be safest to conclude that the earlier account of the discovery offered by Jean Doresse in 1958 is more reliable than the later, more detailed, more vivid versions that are so frequently retold.

Full citation: Mark Goodacre, "How reliable is the story of the Nag Hammadi discovery?", JSNT 35/4 (2013): 303-22

Geza Vermes: The Guardian Obituary

The Guardian this morning published its obituary of Geza Vermes.  Unlike The Times, The Guardian's obits are not anonymous, and Philip Alexander does a predictably fine job:

Geza Vermes Obituary
Expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity
Philip Alexander

It's a superb piece, and features Alexander's own reminiscences as a student of Vermes.  There is one rather debatable line, that Vermes "helped launch the new quest for the historical Jesus".  The term "new quest" is normally given to the quest that began in 1950s Germany among Bultmann's students, and especially Ernst Käsemann, crystallized in the title of James Robinson's 1959 book, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Vermes is more usually associated with the end of the new quest and not the beginning of it.  Some link him with the so-called "third quest", though Vermes himself shied away from such labels.  But that aside, a fine obit.

Geza Vermes: Obituaries, tributes and more

Martin Goodman has a fine obituary of Geza Vermes published today on the Wolfson College website:

Professor Geza Vermes - Obituary

Today's Telegraph has its obituary of Geza Vermes (HT: Jim Davila and David Meadows):

Professor Geza Vermes

It's a well-written piece, though it has an error -- The Religion of Jesus the Jew was published in 1993, not 1996.

There is also an AP story (HT: Jim West) that has been widely disseminated, e.g. in The Guardian.  There are one or two oddities in the piece, e.g. the note that Vermes wrote several books on the historical Jesus, "The first, 'Jesus the Jew,' was published in 1973, followed by 'The Authentic Gospel of Jesus' (2003)".  This leaps thirty years, over Jesus and the World of Judaism and The Religion of Jesus the Jew, both of which are mentioned later in the article.

Among the bloggers, in addition to those mentioned the other day, James McGrath, T & T Clark, James Tabor and others have tributes.

Two more items I had not previously spotted: John McCarthy interviews Geza Vermes in this radio programme from BBC World Service (26 minutes):

Heart and Soul: Geza Vermes

And the Standpoint magazine has a tribute here:

Professor Geza Vermes, 1924-2013
Daniel Johnson

The article links to a remarkable cache of online articles by Geza Vermes written over the last five years:

Standpoint Articles by Geza Vermes

They include pieces on Crucifixion, Writing and Rewriting the Bible, Hagiography, Jews, Christians and Judeo-Christians, Herod the Great, Josephus on Jesus, Isaac, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus.

Geza Vermes on video

I mentioned Geza Vermes's appearance on Jesus: The Evidence (Channel 4, 1984) the other day.  There are several other appearances by Geza Vermes on video online.  The following are both "official" clips.  The first is this whole lecture from 2009:




It is a lecture on "The Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls" (Louisiana State University's Hill Memorial Library, September 29, 2009), in which Prof. Vermes is wearing a Dead Sea Scrolls tie (of the Community Rule)!

This one I have mentioned before, A Jewish view of Jesus, from Sydneyanglicans.net:



It is in a series entitled The Christ Files and is filmed at Yarnton Manor, Oxford, and dates from 2011.  And there is now a slightly longer version of the same piece (4 minutes) here:



The Christ Files: Geza Vermes interview from CPX on Vimeo.

And in case you missed it, here is the link again to Vermes's appearance on Desert Island Discs in 2000.

Geza Vermes's legacy

Following on from the sad news of the death of Geza Vermes earlier this week, The Times today has its obituary:

Geza Vermes

Unfortunately, most of the obit is behind a subscription wall, as regular readers will know.  Meanwhile, in The Guardian, Hugh Muir's diary today mentions his passing:

Great sadness, finally, at the death at 88 of the great British biblical scholar Geza Vermes. He was a sweet-natured, scholarly man of Hungarian Jewish origins, who survived the Holocaust, became a Catholic and later reconverted to Jewry. In 2004, on the release of Mel Gibson's bloodthirsty film The Passion of the Christ, with all its claims of authenticity, the Guardian took him to a press preview. As the audience recoiled from the scenes of bloody violence, we could hear him chortling. Why so? "It's quite obvious that none of the actors could speak Aramaic," he told us afterwards. He knew hokum when he saw it.

Prof. Vermes's passing has been widely reported among the blogs.  In particular, I'd recommend James Crossley's interesting comments over on the Sheffield Biblical Studies blog, including the following:

Yet at the same time, Vermes’ work is still problematic for scholarship whether or not this is acknowledged (often it is not). His version of Jesus’ Jewishness did not have a strong emphasis on Jesus ‘transcending’, ‘overriding’, ‘making redundant’, or even ‘intensifying’ aspects of Judaism (Judaism, that is, as assumed or constructed by a given scholar or scholarship more generally) that is still found in scholarship and is not so different from the pre-Vermes era. In other words, this makes Vermes stand out from the constant rhetoric of Jesus the Jew that has come after Vermes. I think it is worth being blunt by stating that scholars continue to use Vermes as a Jewish scholar and his influential work on ‘Jewishness’ to justify supercessionist positions (implicit or explicit) that Vermes would not have accepted nor recognised and, unlike Vermes, often without reading sources from the Judaism supposedly ‘transcended’. Apart from some notable exceptions, Vermes’ challenge has still not been met on a widespread scale in historical Jesus scholarship.

I have a lot of sympathy for what James says here.  I sometimes wonder whether scholars have learned the wrong lessons from Vermes, looking to take "Jesus the Jew" and find a role for him in reconstructions that are every bit as thickly mired in Christian theological agendas as were the German, Lutheran historical Jesuses of the "new quest" that they so criticize.  It's why the subtitle of Vermes's seminal book, A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, is  in many respects more important than its main title.

John Barclay, "Paul and the Gift: Gift-Theory, Grace and Critical Issues in the Interpretation of Paul"

St Mary's University College at Twickenham, London, last week opened its new Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible and launched the centre with a guest lecture from Prof. John Barclay on "Paul and the Gift: Gift-Theory, Grace and Critical Issues in the Interpretation of Paul", now available for our enjoyment on Youtube:




Thanks to Chris Keith, who also introduces the talk in this video. News item here.

Geza Vermes, 1924-2013

Jim Davila and Michael Law have let us know the sad news of the death this morning of Geza Vermes.

Geza Vermes was a legend.  It is rare for a scholar to make so massive an impact in the guild in different areas, the study of early Judaism and the study of Christian origins.  His Penguin  paperback, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, was for many of us our first encounter with the scrolls, and the book has remained in print for decades.  His scholarly contributions on the scrolls as well as on other areas in early Judaism have been seminal, yet he will perhaps be best remembered for his work on Christian origins, and especially the Historical Jesus.

It has almost become a cliché to point out that his Jesus the Jew (1973) was revolutionary, but its impact was indeed massive.  I remember seeing the book for the first time in our home when I was a teenager in the 1980s and being somewhat taken aback by its title and its appearance, with lots of Stars of David all over it.  In the early 1970s, with the new quest for the historical Jesus still in full swing, it was still de rigueur for Jesus to be depicted as some kind of Lutheran figure championing his gospel in contrast to a law championed by petty legalists.  The exciting thing about reading Vermes's book was that he had actually read the rabbinic texts that many a New Testament scholar only pretended to know.

In many other books in the four decades afterwards, Vermes continued to draw attention to reading early Christian texts in conversation with a proper knowledge of early Jewish texts.  He never saw these texts as "background".  This was not "the World of the New Testament".  Instead, these texts were themselves evidence in the quest, themselves part of the conversation.  His enduring legacy was in the subtitle of Jesus the Jew -- "A Historian's Reading of the Gospels".  Again it might sound hackneyed now, but that itself is largely the result of Vermes's work -- he stressed the importance of reading the Gospels as a historian would read them.  He was effectively democratizing the quest of the historical Jesus.  Like all good history, it should not matter who is asking the questions.  Like all good history, the study is open to all, no longer thickly mired in the theological agendas of those engaging in the enquiry.

I became fascinated with Geza Vermes's work when I saw him on the Channel 4 documentary Jesus: The Evidence in 1984.  This was something of an iconoclastic piece and I have written about it on the blog before. Here's a clip that nicely gives you a feeling for the curiously compelling way that Vermes attacks a topic:


When I arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate a year later, I was eager to hear Dr Vermes (then a Reader at the Oriental Institute) in person.  For me, it was like seeing a celebrity.  I went along to a talk that he gave about Jesus: The Evidence (later published -- see note here) and loved it.  And later, when I took a special paper on Varieties of Judaism, I went along to his classes on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.  It was a privilege not many Oxford students took up.  While E. P. Sanders and Tom Wright were lecturing to hundreds in the Examination Schools, Geza Vermes was talking to just a handful of us in the Oriental Institute.

As a graduate student and later also as a scholar, I occasionally got to meet Geza Vermes.  I remember how on one occasion at lunch at Wolfson College, where Vermes would mix with the students, and chat away to his colleagues, he explained to me why he thought that most approaches to the Synoptic Problem were wrong.  He noted that his article on forty years of the Dead Sea Scrolls had gone through so many different versions that he himself did not know which one was prior and which one was later.  He imagined that something quite similar might have happened among the evangelists.

The last time I saw him was sadly now a decade ago, when we were both part of a controversial BBC documentary filmed at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew Studies, focusing on the Virgin Mary.  He was witty and charming, and I remember that he was very happy to have his simple sandwich lunch provided at the BBC's expense.

In spite of his erudition, Geza Vermes was a gifted communicator and understood well how to appeal to a broader public.  His little books were hugely popular, and he often wrote short op-ed style pieces for British newspapers.  To my amazement, he was also a consumer of the blogs, and sometimes popped along to this blog to comment.

And what's more, he's the only scholar in our area that I can think of who has been on Desert Island Discs.  And that really is matter of distinction.  (You can download or stream the episode, which was broadcast in 2000, here).

He will be greatly missed.

Some horrid typos in Sanders's Paul: A Very Short Introduction

I love E. P. Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2001) and always assign this little book as essential reading for my class on Life and Letters of Paul (itself formerly taught by Ed Sanders here at Duke).  In re-reading sections of it this term, I noticed some horrendous typos on one page.

In the table headed "Terminology for righteousness and faith" on p. 54, we see the following list of Greek transliterated words:




dikaistyne (righteousness, justification
diksios (righteous, just)
dikaisun (to justify)
pistis (belief, faith)
pistos (believing, faithful)
pistetein (to believe)

Only pistis and pistos are ok; the others should of course be dikaiosunē, dikaios, dikaioun and pisteuein.

I checked the older version of the book, Paul (Past Masters; Oxford: OUP, 1991) and there, in what is also a much nicer printing that is much more readable, the transliterations are accurate.  So it looks like the problem occurred in the typesetting of the new Very Short version.  I hope that they can correct this before the next printing -- it looks so horrible.

The Jesus Discovery? A Sceptic's Perspective

The third in the series of papers on the claims made by James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici on the Talpiot Tomb is now up on the Bible and Interpretation website.  All three papers are revised versions of presentations given at the SECSOR meeting in Greenville, SC, on March 16 this year:

The Jesus Discovery?  A Sceptic's Perspective

Mark Goodacre

My paper gathers together my thinking about Talpiot Tombs A and B as they have emerged here on the NT Blog over the last five years.  The primary focus is the more recent claims about Talpiot Tomb B (Is it is fish? Is it a vase? Is it a stick man with seaweed wrapped around his head? Are those scales of a fish or patterns on a vessel?  Are those fins or handles?) but there is some discussion also of Talpiot Tomb A, and I am afraid that I could not resist the temptation to bring out John, Paul, George, Alan, Martin and Ziggy for a reunion concert.

Renewed thanks to Ralph Hawkins for the invitation to speak last month at SECSOR, to Mark Elliott for inviting us to publish our papers on Bible and Interpretation, and to James Tabor and Christopher Rollston for stimulating exchanges.

Christopher Rollston Revisits the Talpiot Tomb

The second of the three papers relating to the claims of Simcha Jacobovici and James Tabor on the Talpiot Tomb is now available on the Bible and Interpretation website is now available.  (See earlier post, Revisiting the Talpiot Tomb):

The Talpiyot (Jerusalem) Tombs: Some Sober Methodological Reflections on the Epigraphic Materials
Christopher Rollston

2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium

Details are now available for this exciting event:

2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium

The 2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, “Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives,” will take place at York University September 26–28, 2013.

The event is organized by Tony Burke (York University) in consultation with Brent Landau (University of Oklahoma). It brings together 22 Canadian and U.S. scholars to share their work and discuss present and future collaborative projects.

There are more details at the link above.  There are some great speakers at the symposium, including Tony Burke, Brent Landau, Jean-Michel Roessli, Pierluigi Piovanelli, Charles Hedrick, Stephen Patterson, Cornelia Horn, Nicola Denzey Lewis, Lee Martin McDonald, Annette Yoshiko Reed,  F. Stanley Jones, Stephen Shoemaker, Mark Bilby, David Eastman, Kristian Heal, Mary Dzon, Janet Spittler and Lilly Vuong.

I'll be there too as a respondent to the paper by Stephen Patterson.   Many thanks to Tony Burke for his hard work in organizing this fascinating symposium.

Revisiting the Talpiot Tomb

Back in March, James Tabor, Christopher Rollston and I spoke at the SECSOR (Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion) meeting in Greenville, SC, on the topic of The Jesus Discovery:  The New Archaeological Find that Reveals the Birth of Christianity by Simcha Jacobovici and James Tabor.  Bible and Interpretation is now publishing, over the next several days, our papers from that session, beginning today with the following:

The Tombs at Talpiot: Overview of "The Jesus Discovery"

James Tabor 

Christopher Rollston's and my papers are to follow over the next couple of days.

Citing "years of research" in sensationalist writing

Back in 2005, I noted that citing "years of research" on a given topic can be a worrying sign, as for example in the statement that "In more than fifteen years of investigation Carotta has found the traces which lead to the Julian origin of Christianity".

The same claim about the number of years spent researching a topic occurs in some recent sensationalist writing.  This time, Jesus is not Caesar but King of Edessa:

Following 25 years of research, Ralph Ellis has discovered that Jesus was a prince of Edessa in northern Syria . . . .

It's a rule of thumb that if an author is appealing to the number of years spent researching a topic, the claim may well be suspect.

Peer-reviewed article responding to a blog post: what is the etiquette?

In a blog post back in 2010, I sketched out an idea that had occurred to me in class one day, that a conjectural emendation might explain one of the bizarre and famous features of our one major textual witness to the Gospel of Peter, A Walking, Talking Cross or the Walking, Talking Crucified One?  I suggested that the scribe may have misinterpreted a nomen sacrum for σταυρωθεντα ("crucified one"), instead imagining that σταυρον ("cross") was meant.

In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Theological Studies, Paul Foster provides a detailed critique of the blog post, "Do Crosses Walk and Talk? A Reconsideration of Gospel of Peter 10.39–42", JTS 64 (2013): 89-104.  The article is now available to view for subscribers.  At a future point, perhaps when I have worked up the idea fully for publication, I would like to comment on the content of the article, but in this post I'd like to reflect a little on the phenomenon of a peer-reviewed article in a major journal providing a full critique of a blog post.

I will confess to mixed feelings.  On one level, I am really flattered that Foster, and the editors of JTS, regarded my blog post of sufficient merit to warrant an extended response, and I am grateful to them, I think, for noticing my blog and regarding it so highly.  On another level, I have to admit that it makes me slightly uneasy to see my random jottings here subjected to the same kind of detailed critique that one would normally reserve for scholarly books and peer-reviewed articles.

The difficulty in part may be that there is not really any established etiquette for this kind of thing.  Blogs and the blogging phenomenon are still pretty young, and we don't really know yet how they should fit into the scholarly landscape.  Should we treat them like casual academic gossip, a kind of online senior common room, or is every post fair game for a full, formal response in a peer-reviewed journal?

One thing that focuses the discussion for me is to compare the status of the blog post with the status of the academic conference paper. Many scholars add a kind of rider to their conference papers, "Work in progress; not to be cited" and so on.  The point there is that conference papers are for discussion at conferences but not (yet) in formal publications.  I think I see something similar for blog sketches like mine -- it will, I hope, eventually make its way to publication, but it does not yet have that kind of status. Indeed, in the case in question, I did subsequently present the idea in a conference paper (International SBL, London, 2011), which will form the basis of a future formal publication.

For me, the blog is something more informal, more chatty than the published paper.  I write differently here from the way that I write in peer-reviewed articles. My tone is much more colloquial.  I speak differently in the classroom, differently again in the NT Pod.  So now that I look back at the blog post in question, I notice that I talk casually about the cross "bouncing out of the tomb"; I use a little cartoon illustration; I speak in the first person a good deal and I speculate openly. It is all round much more informal and colloquial.

This not to say that the discussion of blog posts in formal publications ought to be out of bounds.  I have myself published an article discussing the role played by blogs in the discussion of the Talpiot Tomb (The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers).  Others like James Crossley have written extensively on the blogging phenomenon and what it may reveal about the guild.  Nevertheless, I think there is a difference between those sorts of broader discussions about the phenomenon and writing at length about a blog report of work in progress, a post that is explicitly a kind of work-in-progress sketch.

But perhaps I am wrong about this.  I have had some discussion with Paul Foster via email, and I have corresponded also with one of the editors of JTS who expressed some surprise at my reaction to the publication.  I'd be interested to hear what others think about the etiquette here.  For one thing, I can't remember another example of this, and if Paul Foster and JTS are trend-setting, it may be worth our while thinking through the implications this has for the topics and the tone of our blogs.  I suspect that it will make an impact on how far and in what manner I sketch out new research ideas on this blog but this too may require some additional thought.

B. H. Streeter and Lewis Carroll

I am grateful to a friend who drew to my attention to a connection between B. H. Streeter (1876-1937), famed for his contributions to Gospels scholarship, and Charles Dodgson, better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll.

After a little searching, I found this interesting tidbit in the Oxford Magazine for February 13, 1901, under "Queen's":

ADDISON SOCIETY: The Rev. B. H. Streeter (hon. member) read a paper on "Alice and Her Wonderland," on Thursday.

I wonder if the paper survives?  My friend tells me that Streeter also read the paper to the Addison Society in 1925, and that he had composed it as an undergraduate, while Dodgson was still alive.

A Celebration of Mary Magdalene in The Bible series

Amber Rose Revah as Mary Magdalene

I have been blogging for some time about The Bible series currently airing on History Channel.  We are now eight hours into the series, with the final two hours to come next Sunday (Easter Day).  In this post I would like to turn to a feature of the series that has so far gone without comment in other reviews, the depiction of Mary Magdalene.  I will not hide from the reader just how thrilled I am with the way that Mary Magdalene (Amber Rose Revah, left) is played.  In order to explain why, I will need to reflect first on the depiction of Mary in other Jesus films.

Throughout the history of Jesus films, the depiction of Mary Magdalene has been disappointing.  And that's an understatement.  Some would say that it has been scandalous.  It has been absolutely standard to depict her as the repentant prostitute, harmonizing Luke 7.36-50 (anonymous "sinner") and John 8.1-11 (anonymous woman taken in adultery) with references to Mary Magdalene (Luke 8.1-3, Mark 15.40-41 etc.).

In Jesus Christ Superstar (dir. Norman Jewison, 1973), Mary (Yvonne Elliman) is the repentant prostitute, who now does not know how to engage with Jesus ("I don't know how to love him").  The character combines elements from all of those stories.  Jesus castigates Judas for being judgemental, "If your slate is clean, then you can throw stones; if it is not, then leave her alone".  Without her sinful past, there is no story.

So too in The Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988), Barbara Hershey's Mary Magdalene is depicted in the brothel, and her repentance is part of the action of the film.  As in so many Jesus films, she becomes the woman taken in adultery found in many of our textual witnesses in John 8. She is dragged before Jesus and presented to him in a scene that is absolutely standard in Jesus films.

Even Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ (2004), which focuses the action solely on the Passion Narrative, manages to insert a flashback to the story of the woman taken in adultery.  Monica Bellucci's Mary is humbled by her experience, at the feet of Jesus, now beginning a new life with him:

Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene in Passion of the Christ

When one is so used to this cliché, one almost comes to expect it in a new Jesus film.  Surely, once again, we will see Mary Magdalene, the repentant prostitute, the "sinner" who comes to Jesus to anoint his feet, the adulterous woman who was nearly stoned but for Jesus' intervention.  It is so standard a part of the grammar of Jesus films that it would be surprising not to include it.

But of course New Testament scholars have been at pains for years in trying to rescue Mary's reputation.  Books by Karen King, Jane Schaberg, Esther deBoer, Robin Griffith-Jones and others have underlined that the evidence for Mary the prostitute is nil.  There is nothing in the New Testament to suggest that Mary was a prostitute.  Moreover, the discovery and publication of the Gospel of Mary, alongside a critical appraisal of other early Christian texts in which Mary features, has served to rescue her reputation over the last generation or so.

It is therefore a matter of great joy to see The Bible series reflecting the best scholarship on Christian origins and depicting Mary as one who follows Jesus and ministers to him from Galilee (Mark 15.40-41; Luke 8.1-3) all the way to Jerusalem, following him to the cross (Mark 15.40-1, John 19.25), his burial (Mark 15.47) and his resurrection (Mark 16.1-8; John 20.1-18).

Amber Rose Revah as Mary Magdalene in The Bible

There is no part in the story where Mary is made to appear like a repentant prostitute.  When we get to the famous scene found in some witnesses of John 8.1-11, the pericope adulterae, far from being the woman at the centre of the action, she is depicted comforting the woman's son; that's her just behind Jesus and the woman in this production still:

The Woman taken in Adultery, The Bible

Mary is depicted throughout among the band of Jesus' disciples, a key part of the action, in the boat at the Walking on the Water pericope, at Jesus' side as he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, and so on, and always there in the group shots like this (also a production still):

Jesus and disciples, including Mary Magdalene, The Bible

Of course the Gospels depict Mary as one of several women who travelled with Jesus -- Joanna, Susanna, Mary of James and Joses, Salome among them (Luke 8.1-3; Mark 15.40-41 etc.) -- but the narrative benefits from homing in on one key character, just as The Bible series singles out Peter from the inner group of Peter, James and John.

In a recent talk ("Myths of Mary and the Married Jesus"), I suggested that while popular culture often provides the context for the reception of scholarly claims about Mary Magdalene, there are important ways in which the scholarship has begun to change popular culture.  This has happened on at least one other occasion in recent history, when Paloma Baeza played Mary Magdalene as a disciple of Jesus in BBC / HBO's The Passion (2008), and again not as a prostitute:

Paloma Baeza as Mary Magdalene, The Passion (BBC / HBO)

I remember the late Esther de Boer writing to me back then to express her delight that finally there was a Jesus film that did not depict Mary Magdalene as a prostitute.  I only wish she were still alive, and Jane Schaberg too, to see Amber Rose Revah's wonderful portrayal of the character in The Bible series, and I dedicate this post to their memory, with great affection and gratitude for their scholarship.

NT Pod 65: The Women at the Cross

It's about time we had a new episode of the NT Pod. I've just released NT Pod 65: The Women at the Cross. Details over on the NT Pod page.

Understanding Caiaphas -- The Bible Series

The Bible series continues on History Channel tonight and introduces, among others, the character of Caiaphas.  The character of Caiaphas presents one of the greatest challenges for any Jesus film or Passion play, and many have failed the test, making Caiaphas a cartoon, caricature baddie who makes no historical sense and who is offensive to boot.

There are, however, exceptions.  When I consulted on The Passion (BBC / HBO, 2008), I was delighted to find that Frank Deasy, the writer, and Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer, were eager to make all the characters in the drama understandable, even sympathetic.  This is Frank Deasy discussing how he wrote Caiaphas:




One of the elements that I found so admirable in Deasy's script was the idea of giving Caiaphas a family, a wife and daughters, and allowing us to see something of his life.  Ben Daniels himself reflects on the role in a BBC video interview here.

The Bible series is in the same tradition.  Although it cannot give as much screen time to Caiaphas as something like The Passion, it still works hard to try to understand the character and the historical context.  I know that Helen Bond's book Caiaphas: Friend of Rome and Judge of Jesus? (Louisville: Westiminster John Knox, 2004) was used by the production team in order to help them to understand and so to write the character, and Helen herself was one of the consultants on the series.  (For those not familiar with Helen's work, a great place to begin is her online piece Joseph Caiaphas: In Search of a Shadow).

Caiaphas in The Bible is played by Adrian Schiller, one of several Doctor Who alumni to appear in the series.  Schiller played Uncle in the magnificent 2011 episode The Doctor's Wife, penned by Neil Gaiman.  You can see him interviewed about playing Caiaphas, with several clips, here:





Schiller shows a fine understanding of the historical issues here, with the crowds that would have been in Jerusalem at Passover.  A couple of quotations:

"There is no reason to think that he was anything other than utterly sincere in his beliefs and his adherence to his religion . . . .

Well, the challenge I wanted to meet was to present a reasonable man, an intelligent man, a man with a problem. And I hope that people watching the series will be sympathetic to difficulties he was faced with.

Simply because the influence of these stories is so enormous and so widespread, it's important people know more of the detail, whatever your views about religion or God or morality. You can't ignore these books, so don't!"

Here is the preview for tonight's episode:





Oh, and Doctor Who fans should also look out for Paul Marc Davis, the Trickster from the Sarah Jane Adventures (and Chieftain in Doctor Who episode "Utopia"); he plays Simon in The Bible.

The Bible Series -- Drama and Historical Context

While I realize that the only thing people seem to want to talk about at the moment in connection with The Bible Series is the alleged resemblance between a still of Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni and President Obama, I will risk talking about several other features of the most recent instalment of the drama, which was broadcast in Sunday evening on History Channel.  Here is a recap of the episode (courtesy of the History Channel website):




One of the aspects that I appreciate in the New Testament episodes of The Bible series is the attention paid to historical context.  One of the challenges for film-makres on this kind of project is to provide some explanation of the historical context without weighing the narrative down with turgid exposition. I talked about this a little in relation to BBC's The Passion in 2008 in a piece that also found its way onto the DVD, "The Passion" and Its Historical Context.

The Bible nicely illustrates the political situation at the turn of the era by drawing in an incident from Josephus's Jewish War 1.33.2 (648-655), the cutting down of the golden eagle over the great gate:

Josephus describes the young men as gaining courage from the report of Herod the Great's ill health.  The Bible series depicts that bad health in an extraordinary and memorable scene where Sam Douglas as Herod lies bloated and in agony with leaches all over his body.  This scene is a great adaptation of the story from Josephus and, as I commented the other day, Sam Douglas's Herod is up there with Peter Ustinov's iconic depiction of Herod in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977).  Here is Douglas:

While Herod is suffering away in his palace, the viewer gets to meet Mary and Joseph for the first time, in Nazareth in Galilee.  The viewer is treated to an imagination of a first century BCE synagogue.  This, of course, is difficult to imagine given our lack of detailed knowledge, but I was delighted to see Mary and Joseph sitting down next to one another, in a scene that depicts the meeting of their eyes.

Since several people have asked me about the role of an academic consultant, this is the kind of thing that one comments on.  There was a question, for example, over whether or not to depict Mary and Joseph separated into different parts of the synagogue, a male section and a female section.  This is where a consultant points out that there is no evidence for that kind of segregation in this period.  It is one of those areas where history and drama come together -- the scene works better as drama if the two are side by side, but it coheres at the same time with what we know of the history.

This is not, of course, to suggest that attempts to provide historical context trump the drama.  The Biblical texts are what drive the narrative, and one of the ways that the episode dramatizes the Birth Narrative is to combine Matthew's story about the Magi and Herod (Matt. 2.1-12) with the context previously established.  Although the narrative provides the traditional three wise men (to coincide with the three gifts, Matt. 2.11), just one of them consults with Herod, and he is given the traditional name Balthazar:

Focusing on one character among the several from the Biblical text is something that often happens elsewhere in order to generate a story that is easier to follow; compare the miraculous haul of fish later in the episode (based on Luke 5.1-10) where only Peter is present .  This Balthazar is similarly the spokesman for the magi in the nativity scene itself.  The whole clip is available on Youtube here.  It begins with Balthazar seeing the star:




The depiction of the Nativity is traditional, harmonizing elements from Matthew 2 with elements from Luke 2, but it's very effective, very moving.  Leila Mimmack's Mary is just sublime in this scene.  I tweeted the other night, while the episode was being broadcast, that you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by her performance here (after which several respondents responded that they were indeed in possession of hearts of stone).

Once the narrative moves forward by a few years, the political context requires some further explanation.  Once again, turgid exposition is avoided and instead we see an encounter between Pontius Pilate, the newly arrived governor of Judea, and Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea.  The encounter between them sets the scene nicely for the drama to follow both in the immediate context -- John's baptism and death, and the broader context -- the trial and crucifixion next week:

The conversation between the two men not only establishes the politics of the region and the period but also the question of a "Messiah" and what this language means.  It reminds me of Peter Ustinov's Herod the Great in Zeffirelli's  Jesus of Nazareth, who tells Proculus (a fictional character from Rome), over a sumptuous feast, all about the dreams of a "Messiah" figure and what this means.  But by having this kind of conversation just before the beginning of Jesus' mission, The Bible is able to segue neatly straight into John's baptism and messianic preaching.  "You need to keep an eye on your Messiah", Pilate says, as the film cuts straight to Jesus walking along the side of the River Jordan, with snatches of what I think is a kind of "Jesus theme" in Hans Zimmer's score, here heard for the first time in the drama:

And when it comes to Jesus' walking, I can't help thinking of Martin Scorsese's comments about the importance of making sure that your Jesus walks normally, and not a couple of inches above ground.  He loved Pasolini's Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) in which Jesus clearly just walks.  Diogo Morgado, who plays Jesus in The Bible, gets this right too.  He does not glide; he does not float; he walks.  In fact, there is a lovely moment towards the end of the episode where Jesus sploshes through the water to get to Peter's boat for the miraculous haul of fishes story.

There are many others things I would love to discuss about this episode of The Bible, but I will conclude with just one.  Although it came in for a lot of criticism from academics and others, one of the things that Gibson's Passion of the Christ did well was the "point of view" shot, whereby the viewer would see events as Jesus sees them, often the trigger for a flashback, a flashback that was often Jesus remembering something.  Here in The Bible, there is a great point of view shot, as Jesus goes down into the waters of baptism, and we see things as he sees them:

He is looking at John, as he emerges from the water.  It's an impressive scene not least because this is the kind of area where one could end up being really crass and cheesey.  In the Synoptics' narrative, a dove descends and there is a voice from the heavens.  The Bible does not attempt to depict that directly, but simply suggests Jesus' epiphany by showing a shot of the sky as he emerges.

(Note: the above pictures are mainly screenshots taken from episode 6 with a view to illustrating the points I am making; the second picture (of Sam Douglas as Herod) is a publicity still from History Channel).

The Bible Series - into the New Testament

The Bible Series has continued to have massive ratings, with over 10 million for last Sunday's second two-hour instalment. Next Sunday's two hour instalment features Jeremiah and Daniel, Exile and Return, in hour one and the Nativity story, John the Baptist and Jesus in hour two. There is a new trailer available:



I must admit that I have never quite known how to picture Jeremiah in my mind.  Has there ever been a depiction in a mainstream film or TV series?  Somehow, Raad Rawi's depiction in The Bible really works, though, sufficiently that I might almost be imagining this face in future readings of the text.

A couple of things are worth looking out for here. I think Sam Douglas makes a great Herod, rivalling Peter Ustinov's iconic portrayal in Jesus of Nazareth (dir. J. Franco Zeffirelli, 1977). And I love Leila Mimmack's adorable portrayal of young Mary, which rivals any portrayal of Mary in film and TV that I have seen, including Olivia Hussey in Jesus of Nazareth, Keisha Castle-Hughes in The Nativity Story (dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2006) and Tatiana Maslaney in The Nativity (BBC, 2010).

The preview also shows glimpses of a remarkable scene that dramatizes Josephus's narrative of the cutting down of the eagle over the gate of the temple -- definitely one to watch out for in the episode.

There is a shorter preview available here:




And speaking of young Mary, there is an interview with Leila Mimmack here, interspersed with clips from the episode:





It is probably worth adding also in this context the longer clip of the Nativity episode that they released last Christmas:




I must admit to finding this facetious comment on Entertainment Weekly a little amusing: " Next week, the mini [series] could get a ratings boost by the addition of a new fan-favorite character — Jesus Christ joins the show once The Bible gets into the New Testament."

The End of Google Reader

I am very disappointed with the news that Google Reader is coming to an end. USA Today reports that Google Reader is shutting down in July, and the news is widely reported elsewhere.

Since I moved over from Bloglines to Google Reader some years ago, Google Reader has been part of my every day way of experiencing the internet, especially blogs and podcasts. Google Reader also generates the blogroll I have to the right of this blog.

So we have until July to find a good replacement. Does anyone have a good recommendation? It has to be free, it should not have a magaziney-type interface, and it must at least have the functionality of Google Reader, ideally with the ability to generate a nice blogroll for a specifically chosen group of sites. I suspect I'm asking too much?

Late Antiquity Made New Symposium: The Poster

Thanks to Maria Doerfler for this fantastic poster for the symposium celebrating the work of Elizabeth Clark, coming soon at Duke!

Blog notice here. For more see details here.

Thomas and the Gospels Reviews and Inteviews

I am grateful to Christopher Skinner for posting an interview with me about my book Thomas and the Gospels over on his Peje Iesous blog.

Interview with Mark Goodacre (Part 1)

Interview with Mark Goodacre (Part 2)

I am also grateful to Tony Burke for this fair, appreciative but critical review over on Apocryphicity:

A Review of Mark Goodacre's "Thomas and the Gospels"

Speaking of reviews, I somehow failed, inexcusably, to mention this essay by Loren Rosson III over on The Busybody:

Retrospective / Review: Q, Thomas and Killjoy Scholarship

It looks back at my Case Against Q and forward to Thomas and the Gospels. I kind of like the term "killjoy", though I have tended to use the term "spoilsport" in the same context in the past of that kind of reluctant scepticism that I find myself cursed with.

I have also been lucky enough to be reviewed over on Matt Page's Bible Films Blog:

Book Review: Thomas and the Gospels

I am a big fan of Matt's blog and I am looking forward to hearing his reviews of History Channel's The Bible in due course.

And Rafael Rodriguez reviews the book, and has some really nice things to say as well as some helpful criticisms here on Verily, Verily:

Goodacre, the Synoptics and the Gospel of Thomas

I'd love to find some time to interact with some of Rafael's points in due course.

Thanks also to Michael Bird, Jim West, Thomas Creedy, and I think also James McGrath (but can't find the link, soz) for appreciative mentions.  Apologies to any I have missed -- please let me know in the comments below.

Thomas and the Gospels is available from Eerdmans, SPCK, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk.  There is an Eerdmans interview (8 minutes) as well as a book trailer (one minute).

The Bible Series a Massive Ratings Success

I expected The Bible Series on History Channel to debut strongly last night, but I had no idea just how well it would do.  Apparently, it had a massive 14.8 million viewers on the night, 13.1 million of whom watched the first broadcast between 8pm and 10pm.  Details here:

History's "The Bible" is the Number 1 Cable Entertainment Telecast of the Year

To put this into some kind of context, other cable shows like Doctor Who on BBC America get a couple of million viewers.  Over 14 million puts it up there with the top rated, prime time shows on the main networks.

Congratulations to all of those involved!  #TheBible was also trending world-wide all evening, and #NinjaAngels made an appearance too!  You can catch a few short clips of those NinjaAngels, in this short video:

The series continues next Sunday on History at 8/7C.

Previous blog posts on The Bible here.

The Bible Series: The Consultants' Role

I have been blogging off and on for a few weeks on the forthcoming History Channel series, The Bible, which begins airing in the USA tonight, 8/7C.  There are ten episodes and two are broadcast each week, culminating with the final two on Easter Day, 31 March.  There are now tons of video clips available, but here's one of my favourites, a nice montage of scenes set to The Script's "Hall of Fame":

One of the reason for scholarly types to be encouraged is that the executive producers, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, did hire a large group of academic consultants.  The group is so large that I must admit that I don't know everyone who was involved, but I can confirm that I was involved, and so were  Helen Bond, Craig Evans, Joshua Garroway, Paula Gooder and Candida Moss.

Garroway comments on his experiences as a consultant in an article on CNN's Belief Blog:

Another consultant was Rabbi Joshua Garroway, an assistant professor at the Hebrew Union College and an expert on early Christianity and the Second Jewish commonwealth (circa 530 B.C. to 70 A.D.) Judaism. He was a paid consultant on the project.

“One of the issues that came up frequently in the comments was the goal of the production was to remain faithful, or at least as faithful as possible, to the narrative and text of the Bible, as opposed to a historical critical approach,” he said.

“The series is not meant to be a historical feature but as a representation of the biblical narrative which is at times historical and at times not,” Garroway said.

One reason Garroway thought he was brought in was because in parts of the New Testament, “there are less than generous depictions of Jews, Jewish leaders and Jewish traditions.”

One of several Jewish scholars involved, his role as a New Testament scholar was to help the production stay faithful to the text but also “diminish as much as possible scenes or statements that could be construed as overly negative toward Jews and Jewish judgment.”

While he thinks the project has an overall Christian orientation, “I think they did well.”

“I don’t think it will run into the same problems that Mel Gibson’s movie ("The Passion of the Christ") did because the producers have been somewhat conscientious about forestalling some of the things that could produce that effect in the Jewish community,” he said, referring to perceptions of anti-Semitism from the 2004 film.

Craig Evans comments in an article in the Herald:

Craig Evans, professor of New Testament studies at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, was one of about 40 consultants and faith leaders recruited from around the world to ensure the show’s historical and scriptural accuracy.

“We have loved our relationship with Craig,” said Downey, adding that the well-known scholar and his wife became close friends as Evans guided the New Testament parts of the project with his “expertise and love of Scripture. … He’s been a great blessing.”

Evans’s task involved reading and re-reading the script, initially to correct mistakes and then to examine dialogue and the authentic representation of the culture and history of the Middle East in New Testament times.

“This was a challenge,” said Evans, who has previously consulted for National Geographic documentaries, among other projects. “How do you work it all into a movie?”

And I talked to the Huffington Post about the project the other day:

Mark Goodacre, a New Testament scholar at Duke University who was one of several academics who consulted on Downey and Burnett's script, said there are bound to be questions of interpretation, accuracy and “what's included and not included” in any Bible adaptation.

“We tried to make sure things held together historically, but in any adaptation that's a compelling drama you have to draw lines and make connections through dialogue, scenes and narrative,” said Goodacre, who noted the series relies on a mix of Biblical translations with dialogue that appeals to modern viewers.

“You don't want people talking King James English, but there are recognizable lines and, of course, iconic places," he said. "But [Downey and Burnett] are also not afraid to provide some linking pieces and do things that are not direct. It's very naturally done.”

Broadly speaking, the role of the consultants began back in 2011 when planning on the series was beginning.  I first met the producers in Greenwich, London, in July that year.  Our main role was to look at scripts as they were produced and to offer comments, but also to answer emails and phone-calls, and to advise on details in the scripts from the scholar's perspective.

Last year, in the autumn, we got to view early cuts of the episodes and once again to offer comments, and to draw attention to anything we thought required special attention.  It was a fascinating experience because it gave you an insight into the world of TV production to see the partially finished episodes, and to watch things coming together.  I had the same experience watching these early edits that I had when watching the BBC / HBO Passion in 2008 -- it's a profoundly moving experience to see scripts with which one has become very familiar now becoming reality.  And although these were early edits, and one watched them out of sequence, I have to say that I was not disappointed.  It's a superb series.

The consultant's role is always, inevitably, a very minor role in something like this.  The producers themselves are the ones calling the shots, and they don't need to talk to people like us at all.  And it must be frustrating for them to be talking to people like us who really don't know anything about film-making.  But it's greatly to their credit that they were willing to spend so much time asking the views of academics and taking their views seriously, and I was impressed throughout the experience with the time they took to listen to all the little suggestions we had.

Eerdmans' Video Book Trailer for Thomas and the Gospels

If the eight minute video interview about Thomas and the Gospels is a bit on the long side, Eerdmans have produced a nice short "book trailer" version here:


View it on Eerdword here.

Interview about Thomas and the Gospels on Eerdword

Thanks to all the bloggers and social media folk who have posted this video, and many thanks to Eerdmans for filming it and editing it.  It's eight minutes or so long, and it's focus is my book Thomas and the Gospels (Eerdmans, SPCK, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk):




View the video on Eerdword here.

Amy-Jill Levine delivers Clark Lectures at Duke

The Kenneth Clark lectures are an annual highlight of the Duke calendar.  This year, Amy-Jill Levine is the Clark lecturer, and the series kicks off today:

--
Kenneth W. Clark Lectures 2013:

Guest Speaker: Amy-Jill Levine

Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies, and Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Science; she is also Affiliated Professor, Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge U.K. Holding a B.A. from Smith College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, she has honorary doctorates from the University of Richmond, the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, the University of South Carolina-Upstate, Drury University, and Christian Theological Seminary. Her recent books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus and The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (co-authored with Douglas Knight). With Marc Brettler she edited the Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford). A self-described Yankee Jewish feminist, Professor Levine is a member of Congregation Sherith Israel, an Orthodox Synagogue in Nashville, Tenn., although she is often quite unorthodox.

Schedule

Lecture 1
“’I didn't mean to sound anti-Jewish': Historical ignorance, cultural stereotype, and New Testament interpretation”
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
10:00 – 11:15 a.m.
0016 Westbrook, Duke Divinity School

Lecture 2
"Of Bridegrooms and Virgins: Jesus and Jewish Women"
Thursday, February 21, 2013
12:20 – 1:30 p.m.
0016 Westbrook, Duke Divinity School
--

Late Antiquity Made New: Duke Symposium Celebrating Elizabeth Clark

I am delighted to post this notice of a forthcoming symposium honouring the work of my colleague Elizabeth Clark:

LATE ANTIQUITY MADE NEW

A CELEBRATION OF THE WORK OF ELIZABETH A. CLARK

April 11-13, 2013

Duke University

Durham, NC 27708

Full Program & Schedule:  http://sites.duke.edu/clas/symposium-2013/symposium-schedule/

Registration (Free and Open to all!):  http://tinyurl.com/bsbby3q

Late Antiquity Made New brings together more than fifty internationally recognized scholars of Late Ancient and Early Christian Studies and their related disciplines.  The conference has two projects: documenting the emergence of “Late Antiquity” as a discipline within and beyond the Study of Religion during the past four decades, and exploring directions for contemporary and future research in the field.

With Keynotes By:

Patricia Cox Miller (Syracuse): “Caressing the Wolf's Head: Reading Animals in Early Christianity”

Dale Martin (Yale): “Armed and Not Dangerous: Jesus in Jerusalem”

Catherine Chin (UC-Davis): “Aristocratic and Apostolic Genealogies in the Late Fourth Century”

We warmly welcome all guests.  For further information, please contact Maria Doerfler at med33@duke.edu

Sponsored by

John-Kelly C. Warren Roman Catholic Studies Endowment

Evelyn and Valfrid Palmer Roman Catholic Studies Endowment

Dennis and Rita Meyer Endowment Fund

The Center for Jewish Studies

The Duke/UNC Center for Late Ancient Studies

Duke Department of Religion

Duke Divinity School

Duke University Graduate School

The Academy of American Religion

Department of Religious Studies, UNC Chapel Hill

Duke History Department

Trinity College of Arts and Sciences

Office of the Provost

More Bible Series News and Video Clips

It's been a week or two since I've posted anything on the forthcoming History Channel Series The Bible, executive produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey.  I and several others (including Helen Bond, Paula Gooder, Candida Moss and Craig Evans) acted as academic consultants on the series.  An extended trailer is now available here:





Several more clips are also available on Youtube. This is from episode 1 about Abraham and features interview footage with British actor Gary Oliver who plays Abraham:





I love the fact that he remembers watching Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth when he was eleven, which means that he is a similar age to me -- and that was a memorable experience in my life too.

This video is in the same format -- interview footage with British actor Lonyo Engele who plays, rather appropriately, the Guardian Angel, also in the first episode. He also talks about how he has seven angel tattoos on his body! There is some footage here of the destruction of Sodom.





This one is in the same format again, an interview with British actress Kierston Wareing who plays Delilah in Episode 3, along with footage from that episode. There are some interesting reflections here on the accent she used; she is an Eastenders actress who has a cockney-sounding accent but she wants to make sure that she can be understood by the American audience:





From the same episode, British actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster plays Samson's mother. There are again video clips and she talks about how she had to sit in the make-up chair for hours when she is aged.





And the great thing about Sharon Duncan-Brewster is that she has also appeared in Doctor Who, in the 2009 tenth doctor "special" "Waters of Mars".

Lots more stuff is appearing regularly on The Bible Series website including useful episode summaries.  I will continue to post blog updates here as these new publicity materials appear.  Previous posts under this label: The Bible Series.  See also Facebook and Twitter.

Myths of Mary and the Married Jesus on Youtube

The Cadbury lecture I gave in Birmingham just over a week ago is now available on Youtube here:



Or watch it on Youtube here.  The lecture is 48 minutes long.  It features much of the powerpoint, but some slides have been omitted for copyright reasons. All of the Q&A is also features, though under the veil of darkness.

Update (12 February 2013): I have now made the audio available as an extended episode of the NT Pod.  This version has the advantage of enabling you to hear the talk without seeing the speaker constantly waving his arms around.