Death of Paul W. Meyer

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

Paul W. Meyer

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

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

You can read more at the link above.

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

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

Death of Seán Freyne

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

Eminent theologian Seán Freyne dies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond E. Brown Website

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

Raymond E. Brown, S. S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Caird Lectures Online

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

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

George B. Caird New Testament Theology Audio Lectures

Matthew also blogs on this here.

Academic Blogging: What are the benefits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic blogging: When and Why?

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

1. When and why did you start blogging?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why blog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pericopes, passages or paragraphs?

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

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

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

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

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

The joy of failed predictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s my guess, anyway.

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

Biblioblogs.com still defunct

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

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

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

Tom Boomershine Performs Mark

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

Tom Boomershine Performs Mark's Gospel



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

Great discussions of the biblioblogs -- another request

I was delighted by the response to my post Blogging Mark - Input Requested Please.  The comments there have very much helped me to think through my paper on Mark in the digital age for the SBL International coming up soon in St Andrews.

In writing that paper, I am footnoting some good, round-up discussions of the blogs and blogging in our area, and I am keen to get some links in to a range of good discussions, and not just repeating my own boring stuff.  What I am thinking of are those posts that reflect critically on the successes and failures of the biblioblogging phenomenon over the last decade or so.  My footnote currently reads (and please excuse the ugly formatting because it's pasted from a horrible old MS Word document):

For reflections on the history and development of blogs in this area, see especially James R. Davila, “Assimilated to the Blogosphere: Blogging Ancient Judaism,” SBL Forum , April 2005, http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=390; “Enter the Bibliobloggers,” University of St Andrews School of Divinity Website, November 2005, http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/abstracts/enterthebibliobloggers/, and “What Just Happened: The rise of ‘biblioblogging’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century”, 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Atlanta, http://paleojudaica.blogspot.co.uk/2010_11_14_archive.html#1715486029034288246.  See also Mark Goodacre, “Pods, blogs and other time-wasters,” NT Blog, 17 November 2011, http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/pods-blogs-and-other-time-wasters.html.

In other words, at this point, it's just Jim and me.  What other nice round-up reflective posts on the biblioblogging phenomenon should I add?  Thanks for your help.  This is a great example of the communal internet and the joys of horizontal blogging!

Performances of Mark's Gospel

I have sometimes heard people talking about amazing one-man (and it usually is a man) shows performing Mark's Gospel.  I am currently working on a presentation about Mark's Gospel in the digital age for the SBL International and I began to wonder if there were any great one-person presentations of Mark's Gospel on Youtube.  And there are a few.  They vary greatly in quality and degree of irritation and some, it has to be said, are a little acTORish, but here are a few that I have found interesting.

My favourite is currently this version in German by Eric Wehrlin.  It's nicely produced and has good live intro-music and outro-credits too:

This one is by Max McLean and I have to say that he sounds terribly like Tom Baker (Doctor Who), so if you want to hear Mark's Gospel performed by the fourth doctor, this is the one for you:





It is indexed on Youtube by chapter, and the above is the playlist linking all sixteen chapters.  The translation appears to be the NIV, but with some of McLean's little edits.  One of the advantages of this version is that it introduces nice maps on screen whenever necessary, and we get the odd sound effect. He introduces some humour into the performance in such a way that surprising pieces end up seeming amusing, which of course is one of the advantages of a live performance.  I must admit that this one is really growing on me.  There is more on its own website, Mark's Gospel on Stage with Max McLean.

There are some interesting issues with live performances that may help us to think through the performance of texts in antiquity.  For one thing, I was struck how in both Wehrlin's and McLean's performances, Mark's broken sentence at Mark 2.10 ("but in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . ."), often said by Biblical scholars to be somewhat colloquial, works very well.

Similarly, one has to make a judgement about the ending of Mark.  In both performances, the actors also perform the longer ending.  I suppose the Biblical scholars will all balk at this, so ingrained is it that Mark finishes at 16.8, but actually, the relatively unfamiliarity of Mark 16.9-20 gives each performance a strange freshness.

There are other performances available on Youtube, some much less professional than these two, and there are clips of others.  One that may be of interest is Whitney Shiner, who is an actual Biblical scholar, here filmed performing Mark 7.  This is not a professional video, but it gives an idea of his performance including, once again, the use of humour.




It looks like he is in the classroom, but there is no further information about the performance here.  I once heard Shiner performing pieces of Mark 15 at the SBL Annual Meeting.  I am curious as to whether he has ever done a performance of the whole thing.

Update (12.45pm): More! Thanks to Matthew Montonini for drawing my attention to several clips of Tom Boomershine performing Mark, all the more interesting since he is my respondent at the SBL International Meeting at St Andrews.  Perhaps I could ask him to perform a piece for me at the session!

This piece is an audience recording of his performance of part of Mark's Passion Narrative in Greek as well as in translation.  Boomershine contextualizes the performance with some comments about Mark's composition too, which contrasts somewhat with the less scholarly introduction to Max McLean's show above:




And although there is not yet a complete recitation of Mark's Gospel by Boomershine on Youtube, there are several nicely-produced clips (but don't be put off by Boomershine's quite extraordinary shirt, which you do eventually get used to).  This clip is Mark 15.1-15:




As far as I can see, no one has yet put together a playlist of all the clips. If anyone feels like doing that, and would like to let me know, I'd be really grateful.  The other clips are: Mark 3.31-35, Mark 7.1-23, Mark 13.3-17, Mark 14.3-9, Mark 14.53-65.  There are some clips from a different performance and this time Boomershine is more conventionally dressed:





For these, see also Mark 1.9-15, Mark 2.1-14, Mark 8.13-21 and Mark 10.1-12.

Judging from the number of views these clips have had (in the teens for some of them), very few people know about this resource.  In some ways it is not surprising given the lack of metadata for each video -- you'd have to know to search for Boomershine.  Searches on things like "Mark as story" or "performances of Mark" or "Mark one man show" and so on would not turn these up.  Perhaps this blog post can go some way towards changing that.

Update (1.46pm): Thanks to three minute theologian (comments) who reminded me of Alex McCowen's famous performance of Mark's Gospel.  There are some low-quality mp4s of the performance on Youtube.

In Our Time tackles Prophecy

Yesterday's In Our Time on Radio 4 tackled "Prophecy" and it featured one of my favourite New Testament scholars, Justin Meggitt:

In Our Time: Prophecy

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the meaning and significance of prophecy in the Abrahamic religions. Prophets, those with the ability to convey divinely-inspired revelation, are significant figures in the Hebrew Bible and later became important not just to Judaism but also to Christianity and Islam. Although these three religions share many of the same prophets, their interpretation of the nature of prophecy often differs.
With:

Mona Siddiqui
Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh

Justin Meggitt
University Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion and the Origins of Christianity at the University of Cambridge

Jonathan Stökl
Post-Doctoral Researcher at Leiden University.
Producer: Thomas Morris

You can listen online on get the podcast.  It's nice to see the NT Gateway featuring on its recommended reading list too.

Dale Allison appointed at Princeton Theological Seminary

Dale Allison is on the way to Princeton!  The news is in this press release:

World-Class New Testament Scholar Joins Princeton Theological Seminary Faculty

—Dale C. Allison will teach in Princeton beginning fall 2013—

Princeton, NJ, June 12, 2013–Princeton Theological Seminary is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Dale C. Allison Jr. as the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Studies, effective July 1, 2013. Allison joins the faculty in the Department of Biblical Studies.

“When we were looking for a world-class scholar, we surveyed 45 academic leaders in the field of New Testament,” said Seminary president Craig Barnes. “Professor Allison’s name was consistently at the top of everyone’s list. Not only is he at the cutting edge of his field of scholarship, he is also a fabulous teacher, and clearly devoted to the service of Jesus Christ.”

More at the link above.  Great news for PTS.

Blogging Mark: Input Requested Please

At this year's International SBL, I am participating in the Gospel of Mark section along with Thomas Boomershine, Eve-Marie Becker, Jeremy Punt and Elizabeth Struthers-Malbon.  The theme of the session is "Communication, Pedagogy, and the Gospel of Mark".  My contribution is a discussion of "Blogs, Pods, Websites and Mark: How the Internet Affects the Teaching of Mark's Gospel" and I am working on my paper at the moment.

Since my paper focuses on the roles played by the internet and the blogs in the teaching of Mark, I would love to get some input from the blogging community on this one.  My problem is that I am fine talking about the generalities, and I have a good general sweep through.  However, when it comes down to using good, precise examples, I realize how few actual blog posts I can remember.  I can remember most of my own, but I really don't want this paper to be about me!

So I would like to ask my fellow bloggers if they have any ideas on this topic and, in particular, if they have any specific blog posts and series of posts that they think impact on this topic of teaching, researching and communicating Mark via the internet.  Many thanks in advance.  If you blog about this, please could you add a comment below too so that I don't miss anything good?  Thanks.

Here's my abstract so that you can get an idea of the lines along which my project is moving:

Teaching Mark's Gospel in the internet age presents multiple challenges and opportunities. The difficulty for most instructors is that they are digital immigrants, trained to access Mark in linear fashion in printed Greek New Testaments, Synopses of the Gospels and Biblical Translations, while their students are all digital natives, whose first access to the text may be via phone, tablet and laptop, with many navigational possibilities and different layers. So too with so-called secondary literature, the contemporary student is as likely to access Youtube, iTunes U and the blogosphere as they are the dusty articles and dated monographs that we love.

But to embrace the new opportunities provided by the internet encourages instructors to rethink their approach to Mark in several ways: (1) The informal, often colloquial nature of blog posts can make the scholarship far more accessible to students, as well as encouraging them to try their hand at blogging about Mark themselves; (2) Podcasts make access to scholarship for blind and visually impaired students more straightforward and they enable all students to study away from the desk; (3) Websites that use dynamic ways of representing the Gospels and Gospel scholarship open up new avenues for both instructors and their students. Examples (good and bad) of the these phenomena in the teaching of Mark illustrate how to get the best out of digital Mark and digital Marcan scholarship.

Who Was Jesus? (BBC, 1977)

One of the neglected advantages of television documentary is its potential to act as archive, a resource for scholars.  On this blog I have often talked about documentaries likes a Jesus: The Evidence (Channel 4, 1984), which provides footage of many great and now deceased scholars, including Geza Vermes and Morton Smith.  In a recent article, I talked about how the Channel 4 series The Gnostics (1987) provides our only known extant footage of Mohammad 'Ali al Samman, the alleged discoverer of the Nag Hammadi codices.

Along similar lines, I have recently begun thinking about the potential of the BBC documentary from 1977 entitled Who Was Jesus? to inform us about New Testament scholars and scholarship of its day.  The difficulty, however, was in tracking down a copy.  The book based on the series, also published in 1977, is fairly easy to track down on the second-hand book market and I picked mine up for about £4.00 a couple of weeks ago (and it has "35p" pencilled into the inside cover).  The book is co-authored by Peter Armstrong and Don Cupitt and it is published by the BBC.

I think my parents had a copy of this book too since it looks very familiar to me.  I am also pretty sure that my mum (who was an RE teacher) made an audio recording of the series because I have some memories of having listened to it back in the day.  And I recall hearing John Fenton's voice, something that I now find confirmed by looking at the list of consultants, about more of which in a minute.

The book itself is an excellent, popular level introduction to historical Jesus study, clear, well-written, nicely illustrated and surprisingly contemporary in feel.  In fact, those who think that the study of the historical Jesus has made significant progress in recent years would be well-advised to take a look at this book written 36 years ago, with chapters on "the Jewishness of Jesus" and discussions of Jesus' apocalyptic, eschatological message, and stress placed on the Temple incident.  And those who think that interest in the idea that Jesus never existed is new will be surprised to find the book opening with a study of the question, "Did Jesus Live?"

Information on the documentary itself is less easy to come by, but according to the BFI website, it was two hours long and it was presented by Don Cupitt and produced by Peter Armstrong.  There is an impressive list of consultants: John Fenton, Nahman Avigad, L. Y. Rahmani, George Caird, Christopher Butler and Sydney Carter.  Given John Fenton's listing as a consultant, I am really hoping that my memory of his appearance is accurate and that I will get to see my former teacher  on film.

Anyway, this post is of course brought on by Peter Armstrong's released yesterday of a fascinating eighteen minute clip of the programme (Caird, Flusser and Cupitt on Who Was Jesus?).  Dare we hope for more?

Caird, Flusser and Cupitt on Who Was Jesus? (1977)

Peter Armstrong, producer of Who Was Jesus? (BBC, 1977), has uploaded a twenty minute clip of the programme to Vimeo, and it makes fascinating viewing.  The documentary was a two hour BBC investigation into the historical Jesus conducted by Don Cupitt, dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and one of the original media dons.  This segment of the programme features Cupitt interviewing George Caird in, one assumes, his office, with books neatly ordered on the shelves behind, followed by some footage of a woman (unnamed) handling Qumran fragments, gluing pieces together and looking at them under the microscope.  Then David Flusser is interviewed also, presumably, in his office with books and papers less neatly stacked up behind him:



There are so many features of interest here to those interested in the history of New Testament scholarship and TV documentaries.  I had never seen David Flusser on film before, so that itself is a fascinating experience.  And although I recently saw George Caird on film for the first time, in the Mansfield College video produced by the same Peter Armstrong, here one experiences another side of the man, somewhat more relaxed and frequently smiling.  His comments about Jesus not expecting the end of the world and instead expecting the end of Israel's world very much prepares the way for his student N. T. Wright.

The style of documentary is also fascinating.  On the evidence of this segment, audiences 36 years ago were more patient than they are now.  It is much less sound-bitey, more conversational and as a result -- I would say -- more engaging than many a modern documentary.  The piece really does not speak down to its audience, and even tackles the possibility of Aramaic sources behind Luke's Gospel using graphics that still look nice decades later.

And it's a reminder that Don Cupitt himself really was the master of this kind of documentary.  He cuts a younger and more dashing figure than I recall from the 1980s, and he has an inquisitive, non-patronising means of delivery.

I can't wait to see more of this documentary.  Many thanks to Peter Armstrong for making this section available, and thanks to Matthew Montonini for spotting it and blogging it.

Gospel of Thomas Goodies

Many thanks to Jason von Ehrenkrook for letting me know about the publication of this review of my recent book on Thomas over on the Enoch Seminar Online:

Review of Thomas and the Gospels
Tucker Ferda

It's also available as a PDF here.  I am really grateful to Tucker Ferda both for the kind things he says about the book and also for the astute critique, to which I will give some thought.

And thanks to Brice Jones for the notice of this video interview with André Gagne about the Gospel of Thomas.  It's interesting stuff and I hope to comment on it if I get time:



Hey, is that my book I can see just behind his left ear?!

David Parker on the Digital Bible at the Hay Festival

There is a nice report in the Telegraph on a talk given by Prof. David Parker (rightly called "the country's leading Biblical scholar") at the Hay Festival:

Hay Festival 2013: Digital Bible will be 'personalised'
Louise Gray
Speaking at the Hay Festival, the country's leading Biblical scholar has claimed that people will download the versions of the Bible they like best, perhaps even mixing and matching different readings.

. . . . "In the world we are entering, the concept of the Bible will be completely different," he said. "It has become like an individual copy you have, you can annotate it and change it within the bounds of technological abilities."

Prof Parker said the move from paper to digital was as important as the shift from scroll to books. He pointed to the use of words like 'tablet' and 'scroll' in digital media and said it would be used in the same way as ancient manuscripts . . . .

HT: Rachel Kevern

The Synopsis, the Exploding Helicopter and Pictures or Conversation

I am constantly baffled by how few scholars allow themselves the luxury of illustrating their articles on the Synoptic Gospels with a nice Synopsis of the Gospels.  I like to tell my students that there are few articles on the Synoptics that would not be greatly improved by the addition of a nice Synopsis of the passage in question.  In this respect, Synopses are like exploding helicopters in films.  Just as there are few articles that would not be improved with the addition of a Synopsis of the Gospels, so too there are few films that would not be improved by the addition of an exploding helicopter (Roger Corman via Mark Kermode).

I suspect that the reticence proceeds from several factors.  First, it takes a long time to construct your own Synopsis, even of just the one pericope.  Many scholars are computer-literacy-challenged and balk at the pain of constructing their own Synopsis, with all its word alignments and line breaks, let alone having to master the use of a decent Greek font.

Moreover, some scholars have never taken a course on the Synoptic Problem and are reticent to risk exposing their ignorance by constructing a Synopsis that misses key pieces of data.

And many scholars are happy with the existing Synopses on their desks (these days usually Aland, though some, like me, still prefer Greeven) and they assume, wrongly, that their readers will turn up the relevant page in the Synopsis when they are reading the article.

But there are so many benefits to producing your own illustrative Synopses of Gospel passages in your academic writing.  For one thing, there will often be a specific piece of data to which you wish to draw attention.  Producing your own Synopsis, perhaps with some nice underlining to draw attention to the key point, can help the reader to visualize the data instantly, and without the added hassle of looking up the passage in Aland or Greeven.

The effort involved is nothing like as bad as it was in the days of typewriters and drawing.  Although it can sometimes be a little frustrating, producing Synopses is like any other element in word-processing -- practice makes perfect.  A simple table is the way to do begin, with single line spacing, no paragraph spacing or indents, left alignment and lots of carriage returns.  There are plenty of good electronic texts that you can use as the base text too, even if one wishes to tweak them.

For me, it's a bit like Alice's observation at the beginning of her Adventures in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

As Alice knew, pictures and conversation break up bland and boring blocks of text.  Far too many articles on the Synoptic Gospels are made up of boring old blocks of prose, with no Synopses or tables. And what is the use of an article, thought Mark, without Synopses or tables?

George Caird's New Testament Theology lectures online

Earlier this week, Matthew Montonini posted a link to a fascinating film from 1970, Mansfield College - Marking the Principalship of John Marsh.  The film was made by Peter Armstrong, later a BBC Producer, and I made comments about it here on Wednesday, John Marsh, George Caird and Oxford in 1970.

The posting of the video led to a Facebook discussion during which it emerged that Jeffrey Gibson was in possession of 62 files of audio recordings of George Caird's New Testament Theology lectures from Oxford from 1979 to 1982.  I offered to host these files so that others could also hear these lectures from this famous New Testament scholar.

I have uploaded the files to this location:

George B. Caird: New Testament Theology Lectures

But that is just a list of linked files.  The files beginning "NTT1" are numbered from lecture 3 to lecture 38, and they date from the academic year 1979-80.  The files beginning "NTT2" are numbered by date (in the format year/month/day) and date from the academic year 1981-2.

[Update, 11.55pm:] Matthew Montonini has now produced a web page which can act as the main hub, with the numbering and dates clarified, so this is the place to go:

George B. Caird New Testament Theology Audio Lectures (1979-1982)

We are hoping to continue to revise that page as we listen to the lectures and work out what is what.  See also  Matthew Montonini's blog post.

Many thanks to Jeffrey Gibson for sharing the files and the above photograph.  Thanks too to Matthew Montonini for interacting with me on this project -- it has been an enjoyable experience.

Geza Vermes in Times Higher and BAS

Jim Davila mentions an obituary for Geza Vermes in today's Times Higher Education Supplement:

Geza Vermes, 1924-2013
Matthew Reisz

The Biblical Archaeology Society has also published a tribute:

Geza Vermes (1924-2013)
Hershel Shanks

The latter links to a fascinating interview with Geza Vermes, dealing with his autobiography, the Dead Sea Scrolls scandal, the revision of Schürer and Jesus the Jew, among other things:

Escape and Rescue—An Interview with Geza Vermes
An Oxford Don’s peregrinations

It is from June 1994.  Here's an excerpt:

HS: One of your specialties has been the historical Jesus and the background of early Christianity. Do you feel this peregrination of yours has given you a unique perspective?

GV: I would like to think that as far as scholarly studies are concerned, this is irrelevant. But it is pretty obvious that what I’ve been through must have helped considerably, first and foremost to acquire the technical knowledge and to understand the viewpoint of an insider. As an insider, you know how the other fellow thinks. At the same time, you come to realize that there is an enormous amount of misunderstanding and blindness and confusion in both camps regarding one another that really prevents them from perceiving historic reality accurately. Perhaps I kid myself by thinking that I’ve performed something useful in producing a historically valid portrait of Jesus without preaching either to one or the other. I trust I am an objective and a detached historian. I don’t want to convert Christians to Judaism. I simply want to learn and to provide knowledge to others who seek to understand things better.

It's all worth reading.

One further thing.  Stephen Goranson (see his comments here) pointed out an error in the New York Times obituary of Vermes and they have today published a correction:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 23, 2013

An obituary on Friday about the religious scholar Geza Vermes erroneously attributed a distinction to him. He was one of the first to write a doctoral dissertation about the Dead Sea Scrolls — not the first.

Well done to Stephen for setting the record straight and well done to William Yardley and the New York Times for making the correction.  I am very impressed. The Telegraph could learn from this -- its error-laden plagiarized obituary of Marvin Meyer is still available online with no corrections or apologies (see The Telegraph's Plagiarized Obituary for the story).

John Marsh, George Caird and Oxford in 1970

This fascinating video from 1970 celebrates John Marsh (1904-1994), who was principal of Mansfield College, Oxford from 1953 to 1970.  New Testament scholars know him from his Pelican New Testament Commentary Saint John, which was I think the first book I ever read on John's Gospel.  They also know him as the translator of Rudolf Bultmann's The History of the Synoptic Tradition, still one of my favourite books on the New Testament (of course).



The video was produced by Peter Armstrong, who went on to become a producer at the BBC, where he used John Marsh as a religious consultant.  Armstrong produced the BBC documentary Who Was Jesus? with Don Cupitt in 1977.

There are many features of interest.  New Testament scholars will also be fascinated with the footage of George Caird lecturing on the Epistle to the Hebrews (around the ten minute mark).  He is lecturing in his gown, a tradition that has continued across the years, and the audience, almost entirely made up of male students (with one nun) are seen thinking hard and making intense notes.  There are some great hairstyles and glasses on show among the students that anchor the piece nicely in the 60s.

The film also shows footage of a typical Oxford-style one to one tutorial with a student reading his essay on Little Dorrit to his rather young looking tutor.  We see a marquee being erected throughout the film, and then at the end a bit of great late 60s style music and dancing, nicely illustrating the contrast with the more sedate academic life.  You see Mansfield College's high table, and get to eavesdrop on a conversation between Marsh and Caird.  Caird was the incoming principal of the college (1970-77).  I ate at that high table myself some years later, on several occasions, as a guest of John Muddiman, who was my doctoral supervisor.

The film begins with some wonderful footage of Oxford in 1970.  It's remarkable how little traffic there is around.  One vehicle is an old-fashioned milk float with the three-wheel drive.  And this makes the interview with Nathaniel Micklem (the previous principal of Mansfield) all the more striking -- Micklem comments on how quiet it was in the Oxford of 1911 with "no motors, no aeroplanes and no automatic music, machine music.  No tractors in the field.  England was quiet.  You could hear the lark".

Also, don't miss the footage of a "sermon class" at which ordinands sit round and discuss a sermon.

A thoroughly enjoyable film for all sorts of reasons. Thanks to Peter Armstrong for making it and uploading it to Youtube, and to Matthew Montonini for drawing it to our attention.

John, Jesus and History Conference

Thanks to Tom Thatcher for letting me know about this conference, and to Jim West for announcing it in  his blog too, and for this Scribd version of the notice, which I am borrowing here:

John, Jesus and History Conference (November 20-22 2013)

Geza Vermes -- Economist obituary

The Economist has a superbly written obituary of Geza Vermes.  It is from the print edition but has just been published on the net:

Geza Vermes
Geza Vermes, a Jew, ex-priest and translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, died on May 8th aged 88

And subscribers to the Church Times will be able to read the following:

Tributes to Vermes
Ed Thornton

Geza Vermes - New York Times Obituary

The New York Times has just published its obituary of Geza Vermes, and it is well done.

Geza Vermes, Scholar of Dead Sea Scrolls and ‘Historical Jesus,’ Dies at 88
William Yardley

Geza Vermes -- LA Times and Forward

The LA Times has published its obituary of Geza Vermes:

Geza Vermes dies; wrote about Dead Sea Scrolls and life of Jesus

Geza Vermes, who died at 88, was one of the first scholars to translate the scrolls into English. He later wrote engaging works about the Jewish origins of Jesus

Rebecca Trounson

There are comments from Lawrence Schiffmann, David Ariel and me. 

Also today, the Jewish Daily Forward has published its obituary:

Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to Jewish Roots, Dies at 88

Convert to Catholicism Never Shied Away From Judaism

Benjamin Ivry

Joshua Jipp wins 2013 Achtemeier Scholarship

Many congratulations to Joshua Jipp who has been awarded the 2013 Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship  Richly deserved!  I was lucky to have Joshua in my graduate class on the Gospel of Thomas in 2007.  He left us to take a doctorate at Emory and is now Assistant Professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  Press release is available here.

Multiple Tributes to Geza Vermes in the Marginalia Review

The Marginalia Review has this morning published multiple tributes to Geza Vermes, all from top brass scholars of early Judaism and early Christianity like Paula Fredriksen, Jimmy Dunn and Fergus Miller.  Many thanks to T. Michael Law:

Tributes to Geza Vermes, June 22, 1924-May 8, 2013

The full roll call is: T. Michael Law, Sir Fergus Millar, Emanuel Tov, Paula Fredriksen, Tessa Rajak, Joan Taylor, Philip Alexander, Sidnie White Crawford, Timothy Lim, Charlotte Hempel, James D. G. Dunn, C. T. R. Hayward and Jim Davila.

"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.