Blogging mechanics 2: Comments old and new

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced blogger's own comments feature (New Blogger Features), explaining that while this was preferable to the old Haloscan comments, I did not want to lose a year's worth of old comments and so decided to put the two side by side. Unfortunately, no one seems to have realized that the "New comments" link was supposed to be the one to click and use, and commenters still used the old Haloscan "Comments" link. So I am trying something different -- I've relabelled the old Haloscan comments with "Old Comments" and the Blogger feature with just "Comments". So please use the "Comments" link and not the "Old comments" link. I hope that that makes sense; if not, I'll just scrap the older comments link anyway, but I'd prefer to keep it so that the older comments stick around.

Blogging mechanics 1: links in new windows

Should blogging links open in new windows? One correspondent and one commenter say yes; two commenters say no, one suggesting that one can always do this anyway oneself with a right click of the mouse. So I'll stick with the status quo -- links will not open in new windows unless the user chooses to make them do that. Frankly, I would probably forget to keep doing it anyway; blogger enables one to add links quickly and easily and adding a little extra code each time is not ideal. One other relevant note -- if, like me, you read blogs in Bloglines, links open in new windows anyway, always keeping Bloglines in the background.

Review of Biblical Literature latest

There is always time, of course, for the latest reviews on NT themes from the Review of Biblical Literature

Edwards, Mark
John
Reviewed by William M. Wright

Gorman, Michael J.
Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul & His Letters
Reviewed by Timothy Gombis

Gorman, Michael J.
Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul & His Letters
Reviewed by Renate Viveen Hood

Kazen, Thomas
Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity?
Reviewed by Darian Lockett

Moxnes, Halyor
Putting Jesus in His Place: A Radical Vision of Household and Kingdom
Reviewed by Zeba Crook

Wakefield, Andrew Hollis
Where to Live: The Hermeneutical Significance of Paul's Citations from Scripture in Galatians 3:1-14
Reviewed by Kenneth Pomykala

Bits and bobs, blog blips and breaks

When late on Thursday night I happily wrote that I would be blogging again on Monday, I'd not realized just how overworked I'd be on my return from travelling. I am so behind at the moment with absolutely piles and piles of work and more that I do not foresee being able to blog much at all this week.

Friday's travel was work related -- filming for a forthcoming BBC / Discovery programme called Jesus' Family Tree. My interview was filmed in the lower library at Worcester College, Oxford, a lovely old-fashioned library with old tomes that were obviously rarely consulted. My interview focused particularly on things like Thomas (in legend and history), the story of the Virgin Birth, questions about Joseph's former marriage, Jesus' relationship to his brothers and sisters during his ministry and especially at the crucifixion and beyond; and the genealogies. The last time I talked about the Virgin Birth on TV I got into trouble and I couldn't help being a little conscious of that. The general experience was slightly different from others I've had. The director was conscious of exactly what she was looking for in the interview and some of the questions I was asked multiple times (e.g. in the piece on Thomas, I was asked to do it again without saying 'Judas' because that was to be introduced by the narrator before this clip). I've done a bit of work for TV and radio, and every one is different, almost always enjoyable in different ways. This programme, by the way, does not go out until next Spring in the USA (Discovery Channel) and not until 2006 on the BBC. This is not a programme that I have a consultant's role on; I'm just a participant, so have no idea at this stage how it will turn out. But it looks pretty interesting -- two episodes totalling 100 minutes are planned, and much of the location filming, in Israel and elsewhere, is already done.

I have been doing some more reading and thinking about crucifixion while travelling and can now, I think, answer my own question of a week and more ago (Ancient Narratives of Crucifixion) and would like to do explain here when I get a chance.

I have also almost finished Jesus and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and have jotted down pages of notes, especially on John Dominic Crossan's article, "Hymn to a Savage God". I'll be adding these here when chance allows. Overall, I am impressed with the book. It reads much better than the under-edited rival, Perspectives on the Passion of the Christ, much of which I really disliked. I'll be explaining my reactions to both of these as soon as chance allows. At the moment, that is not looking like being imminent, alas.

Blogging rest

I am away in Oxford, London and Paris this weekend and will not be taken my blogging machine with me, so the weblog is taken a break until Monday. See you then.

Theologians urge caution over Passion DVD

Beliefnet today carries this story:

Christian Leaders Urge Caution on 'Passion' DVD Release
By Kevin Eckstrom

A statement signed by 97 theologians, pastors and other church officials said the "visually powerful portrayal" of the death of Jesus in Gibson's film includes "numerous explicitly anti-Jewish elements that we consider an affront to the gospel."

"It encourages misunderstanding of the role of Jews and their leaders in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus' death; it includes gratuitous anti-Jewish portrayals; and its promotion by Christians has largely ignored the pain and concern of the Jewish community about the film," the statement said.

The statement was coordinated by John Merkle, a professor of theology at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in Minnesota, and Peter Pettit, director of the Institute for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. . . .

. . . . They also had strong words for their Christian colleagues. "We ... find it lamentable that Christian leaders so easily pass over its anti-Jewish character in favor of what they perceive to be its positive aspects," the signers said.

Notable signers included Harvey Cox and Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, Mary Boys of Union Theological Seminary, former Swedish Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendahl and the Rev. John Pawlikowski, director of the Bernardin Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Without wanting to sound facetious, I am surprised that only 97 signatories could be found. When I surveyed scholarly reaction to the film, I was amazed by the number of those who reacted negatively to the film, certainly the vast majority of those Biblical scholars who commented in public. I'd be interested to see the full text of this statement, but my concern would be that sweeping generalizations of the kind quoted above actually discourage a critical engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of the film, instead encouraging a descent into caricature that can only limit what the signatories are presumably hoping to achieve.

Mahlon Smith's Blog

Many thanks to Gail Dawson for this one:

Virtual Religion Weblog

This is "the Online Journal of Mahlon H. Smith", recently launched, and a very welcome addition to the blogosphere. Most of my readers, I am sure, will know of Mahlon Smith's work, and especially his pioneering web sites on religion and Christian origins which include Virtual Religion Index, A Synoptic Gospels Primer, Into His Own: Perspective on the World of Jesus and Jesus Seminar Forum. Mahlon and I have never met, but we have been internet friends for years and I am looking forward to reading this new, occasional journal. Recent entries include one on adding a Google Search (and follow-up). I have recently come over to Google's Site Search myself (see blog entry on) because I reached my page limit with PicoSearch's free search, which I have used now for about six years. At present my own Google site search only appears here on the blog, but I have been impressed enough with it to add it to the NTGateway as a whole when I next get the chance. (It searches NTGateway.com as a whole, but what I mean is that at present the search box only appears here on the blog and not elsewhere on the NTGateway).

Well worth reading is Mahlon's entry on Gibson Agonistes, all about the article he wrote on The Passion of the Christ, how that article came about and its afterlife, with PDF and booklet versions and the like. It's nice to hear that I am not the only one who on occasion ends up putting in an all-nighter to get work finished. Indeed the last time I did that was over my own article on The Passion of the Christ for the new book. Perhaps there's something about writing about the Passion during the night that brings out the best in us?

I'll end this enthusiastic post by adding a request to Mahlon for an RSS feed for the blog. As a consumer of multiple blogs, the only effective way to keep up with them these days is to read them via an aggregator like Bloglines.

Passion of the Christ book arrives

Jesus and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ I was happy to find in today's post my copy of this book, Robert Webb and Kathleen Corley (eds.), Jesus and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History. I am looking forward to reading those parts that I have not had a chance to read yet (the majority of it). If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can read more about it here, or you can order it from Amazon here.

SBL Seminar Papers Discussion continues

Further to my post on this topic yesterday, More on the SBL Seminar Papers, see now also:

Copyright and Blogging (Rubén Gómez at Bible Software Review)

Copyright and SBL Papers (Stephen Carlson at Hypotyposeis)

The SBL, Copyright and Scholarly Courtesy (including updates, Jim Davila, Paleojudaica)

Jim gets to the nub of my own concerns with this comment:

This is an unannounced and, as far as I know, undiscussed departure from the previous policy regarding SBL Seminar Papers. Some of the volumes have pointed out that the papers are preliminary work, which is fair enough, but there's never been a hint that they shouldn't be cited and, indeed, they have frequently been cited in the secondary literature. I've published two papers in the SBLSP myself, at least one of which has been cited elsewhere, indeed in the last few months. It never would have occurred to me to expect the citers to ask my permission first.

I've had just the one article published in the Seminar Papers and my understanding was like Jim's -- I would certainly not have expected people to ask my permission before quoting from the article, much less citing it, nor have they. In fact I've been delighted when it has been cited. Jim also comments:

The new policy doesn't make any sense for the printed and bound volumes, let alone for Internet publications. It seems to be aimed at small seminars of, say, a dozen or fewer people in which they circulate the papers among themselves for discussion and feedback before revising and publishing them.

This, I think, compliments my point that the new rider essentially devalues the role played by the Seminar Papers -- what is now the incentive to publish this way? An example. This year I am giving a paper in the Mark Group. Our papers will be circulated in advance to the members of the group but we were also offered the chance to publish in the Seminar Papers, for which we had to get our papers in long in advance. (Mine is still not written yet). I regarded the Seminar Papers as a higher status publication than the informal sharing of papers among members of the specific group.

I agree with many of Jim's comments on the practical difficulties that the new rider introduces.

One comment on Stephen's remarks:

Much of my previous comments in my "'Copyright Confusion'" were colored by what is now an apparently false assumption that the on-line papers are preprints of articles for a forthcoming printed edition of the Seminar Papers 2004. As a result, I was under the impression that the restrictions were only temporary until the "official" publication and would therefore be analogous to a media embargo that is often imposed by journals such as Nature, which grant pre-publication access with pre-publication restrictions. But Mark Goodacre states that "The on-line version replaces the older paper version," a critical fact I overlooked. Is this true? Are they really replacing the printed version with the on-line? If so, whatever policy considerations I was assuming based on temporary restrictions are less appropriate here. (Also, since the Seminar Papers used to be available at the meeting, whatever assumption I had about revising them in response to comments at the meeting was off too.)

Yes, the relevant section on the SBL Site is the following:

The new version, which replaces the paperback edition, will provide convenient, timely access to papers intended to be read prior to the Annual Meeting. The decision, made early in April by the Research and Publications Committee, recognizes a new opportunity for scholarly exchange before and during the Annual Meeting. (SBL Seminar Papers on-line)

The invitation to publish in the Seminar Papers was pretty broad -- it went out at least to the leaders of the seminars, groups and consultations so that they, in turn, would invite all those who were to speak to contribute to the Seminar Papers should they wish to do so.

JSNT latest

The latest edition of JSNT is now available:

Journal for the Study of the New Testament Vol. 27 No. 1 (September 2004)

Contents are as follows:

Domestic Space and Families in Early Christianity: Editors’ Introduction
Margaret MacDonald and Halvor Moxnes

Domestic Architecture and Household Relations: Pompeii and Roman Ephesos
Michele George

Rich Pompeiian Houses, Shops for Rent, and the Huge Apartment Building in Herculaneum as Typical Spaces for Pauline House Churches
David L. Balch

Towards a Typology of Levantine/Palestinian Houses
Peter Richardson

Domestic Space, Family Relationships and the Social Location of the Q People
Santiago Guijarro

Lord Jesus Christ: A Response to Professor Hurtado
Maurice Casey

Devotion to Jesus and Historical Investigation: A Grateful, Clarifying and Critical Response to Professor Casey
Larry W. Hurtado

The Text-Critical Function of the Umlauts in Vaticanus, with Special Attention to 1 Corinthians 14.34-35: A Response to J. Edward Miller
Philip B. Payne

Book Reviews

The links above go to the abstracts. Full text is available to subscribers and institutional subscribers. (My institutional subscription is not working at the moment -- Ingenta are refusing to read the Birmingham authentication and Swets do not yet have the latest edition on-line -- annoying because there are a few articles here I'd like to read).

Trobisch URLs

Religion-Online have been reorganizing their site again, with all new URLs, which is going to cause quite a bit of updating for me. Here's one for starters: David Trobisch, The Oldest Extant Editions of the Letters of Paul updated on both my Paul the Apostle and Textual Criticism. Note that Religion-Online have the incorrect URL for Trobisch's homepage; it should be this: Dr David J. Trobisch. There is actually a good deal to explore there, including several full-text articles, for which you need to click first on the tiny link at the top of the page to Curriculum Vitae.

More on the SBL Seminar Papers

Following on from my posting on the SBL Seminar Papers On-line, Jim Davila comments on Copyright Confusion on Paleojudaica. In addition to Jim's remarks, a couple of things strike me here: the major departure from the tradition of the SBL Seminar Papers, which have often been cited and quoted in other publications, and the lack of necessity for the rider. If scholars simply want to put work in progress on-line, then the SBL Seminar Papers does not strike me as the obvious or best place to do it. They can self-publish on their own web site, they can circulate to colleagues and friends and members of the seminar group in question, and they can publish temporarily on the individual section's web site (many SBL groups now have their own web site). In other words, the presence of the fresh, especially emphasised rider downgrades the importance of the SBL Seminar Papers, making them no more than temporarily published works in progress. Is there an implied distinction working here between proper publication = print and temporary, work in progress = web? Is this the end of an era?

Update (23.32): Matthew Collins sends a helpful clarificatory email:

First, thanks for the mention - hopefully more folks will visit the site.
Second, my original intent in putting the rider on the papers, however, was not one of claiming copyright or any such thing (you'll notice I don't say they are copyrighted, only that one should ask permission). Rather it was to reinforce the idea of scholarly courtesy in recognizing the provisional nature (both in print and online) of the Seminar Papers as a publication. We have had this approach to the Seminar Papers since its inception. I have seen (and heard) quotations of papers printed in the Seminar Papers used to argue that scholar X holds a particular point of view - when in fact in the final version of the paper published elsewhere, scholar X either takes a very different view or doesn't address the perspective quoted. The Seminar Papers has always been a provisional publication designed to stimulate scholarly interchange at the meeting through the circulation of papers in advance of the meeting. The fact that these papers were bound in a nice volume and sold made many assume they were finished and copyrighted products. If you look at the print versions of the past, you will note the only copyright claimed is for the printed collected volume. Authors still retained all copyrights and publication rights.

And Stephen Carlson anticipates some of these comments in a useful posting on Hypotyposeis.

JTS latest

The Journal of Theological Studies has a new issue:

The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 55, Issue 2, October 2004

I'm afraid that it is still subscriber / institutional subscription only. There are bags of interesting reviews, as usual, and one article that touches directly on the New Testament:

Purity of Heart in Jesus' Teaching: Mark 7:14-23 Par. as an Expression of Jesus' Basileia Ethics
Christian Stettler
pp. 467-502

Accordance: Links to Oaksoft

This circular has gone round from Helen Brown at Accordance:

We have a problem with Google: sites are rated partly by the number of sites that link to them. Since we changed our domain from www.oaksoft.com to www.accordancebible.com, we are at a disadvantage in that virtually no webpages link to the new domain. Although the old links still work seamlessly, we need to work to improve the number of sites that do link to the new domain.

Please correct the links on your site, and keep in mind that all the subsidiary pages and links have changed completely.

The only link I have is to an old blog entry on Biblical Studies Bulletin 31, so I hereby add above a link to the new URL. I should add that the New Testament Gateway as a policy links only to free software, so the lack of inclusion of Accordance, of course, is no comment on the programme and its well-known qualities.

I imagine that the concern is if one were to type something like "Bible software" into Google, when Accordance would come number 12 in the list, and not in the all important top few. If, however, one had already heard of Accordance by word of mouth, and typed in "Accordance", it does come up top, and with both URLs.

Review of Biblical Literature latest

Latest from the Review of Biblical Literature:

Malherbe, A. J.
The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary

This page links to several review of the book, with an Introduction by John Fitzgerald and Reviews by:

Jan Lambrecht
Edgar Krentz
Charles Wanamaker
Johan Thom
Margaret Mitchell

Silva, Moisés
Interpreting Galatians: Explorations in Exegetical Method
Reviewed by Ron Fay

Zahl, Paul F. M.
The First Christian: Universal Truth in the Teachings of Jesus
Reviewed by D Seiple

Hays, Richard and Ellen Davis, eds.
The Art of Reading Scripture
Reviewed by Roy Melugin

Pokorný, Petr and Jan Roskovec, eds.
Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis
Reviewed by Peter Frick

SBL Seminar Papers On-line

The SBL Seminar Papers are now available on-line:

SBL Seminar Papers 2004

The on-line version replaces the older paper version. It looks like the on-line version has created fewer rather than more submissions, unless it is just that the number looks fewer when one sees them on-line. Unlike the older paper version (again, if I remember correctly), there is a statement limiting their usage and flagging these up as works in progress:

Because these papers represent works in progress, they should not be quoted or otherwise cited without permission from the author.

Here are the papers that touch on New Testament themes. All are PDFs:

S21-60 Formation of Luke-Acts Consultation
Claire Clivaz, University of Lausanne
"A Sweat like Drops of Blood" (Luke 22:44): at the Crossing of Intertextual Reading and Textual Criticism

S23-10 John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern Section
Olutola K. Peters, Emmanuel Bible College
Politics of Violence in the Apocalypse of John: Moral Dilemma and Justification

S22-115 Mark Group
Lawrence Wills, Episcopal Divinity School
The Sacrifice of the Hero and The Death of Jesus in Mark

S22-17 Matthew Section
Mary Kay Dobrovolny, Vanderbilt University
Who Controls the Resources? Economics and Justice in Matt 20:1-15

S22-18 Midrash Consultation
Herbert Basser, Queen's University
The Value of the Gospels for Reading the Rabbis

S22-77 Synoptic Gospels Section
T. M. Derico, Trinity College, Oxford
Upgrade and Reboot: A Re-appraisal of the Default Setting

New look for the N. T. Wright Page

Kevin Bush's "Unofficial web site dedicated to the Bishop of Durham" has a nice new look; visit it at:

N. T. Wright Page

Carlson on Kloppenborg on Goodacre Part 2

On Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson has the second part of his critical review of John Kloppenborg's "On Dispensing with Q?: Goodacre on the Relation of Luke to Matthew":

Kloppenborg Review on Matthew's Additions in the Triple Tradition

I don't have any comments to add here, but it's well worth reading; I look forward to the next section.

What's in a blog @ Bible Software Review Weblog

There's an enjoyable post on Bible Software Review Weblog, enjoyable not least because I found myself in agreement with most of what Rubén Gómez says:

What's in a blog

He is picking up from an article from October 2003 in NetGuideWeb giving hints on what makes a good blog. Some comments on comments:

"Don't worry about who's reading, and just write about what's interesting to you. Don't try to please some external person, just focus on writing about stuff you think is interesting." — Easy to say, and easily done... at the beginning. Later on I've noticed that you tend to take into account the profile of your audience and the feedback you receive. So you end up writing about what you consider interesting and think your readers will appreciate.

Agreed; looking back on a year of blogging, I am pleased by how often feedback has helped me to craft this blog. Sometimes I've even asked a question like "Is it worth my while adding this kind of announcement?" and have had positive feedback saying "yes, please continue" and so on. But otherwise, I avoid being neurotic about content. As long as it touches on the topic of the blog, i.e. the academic study of the New Testament, and I think it worth posting, it goes in.

But these are the comments (on comments) that particularly struck a chord with me:

"The blog should do what you say it's going to do. You want people to come back, to become regular readers, so you need to live up to whatever you promise. If you've set up a tech blog, your readers might be surprised if you start writing long accounts of why your marriage/team/country is going down the drain. Of course, in the process you might pick up some new readers and decide to relaunch the blog." — Now, this I find very relevant! One of the things that turn me off is the fact that otherwise good and useful Biblical Studies weblogs begin to talk about things that have nothing to do, whatsoever, with the stated purpose of the blog. Don't get me wrong. I think it is a perfectly legitimate thing to hold certain political views, sports interests, and what have you. However, I do believe they belong elsewhere, and since it is so easy to set up a personal weblog and vent our opinions there, I think it would be in everybody's interest if we could somehow keep focused. This is not to say, of course, that I don't like personal touches here and there. I, for one, love to know some details about any Tom, Dick and Harry "Blogger", see pictures of them, and so on. We're dealing with people here. And you'll agree with me that Stephen is more important than Hypotyposeis, Mark than NT Gateway, or Jim than Paleojudaica, to name just three of them (forgive me the rest of you!). But the fact remains that I feel I cannot add certain blogs to my blogroll simply because they mix "apples with oranges," and that is kind of frustrating.

I entirely agree with these comments. There is a balance here. For the "professional blog", to use Rubén's term, has a specific, stated academic focus. In the case of this blog, it is the academic study of the New testament. I work on the assumption that the reason that people read this blog is that they are in some way interested in the academic study of the New Testament. I do not assume that readers will be interested in my marriage, my family, my hobbies, my leisure time, my political affiliations and so on. And if they are interested in these things, tough -- they're not going to learn about them, not from here at least! And yet at the same time, it is the case that a blog, even one with a stated professional focus, is a personal product, and, to speak for myself, I don't want this blog to be pompous or dry or over-intense, or any of the other things that academics can lend themselves to. There needs to be a sense of fun, some personal investment, something distinctive and interesting; but my aim, at least, is to avoid letting that descend into self-indulgence. (If you read this blog regularly, you might sometimes spot a post or an element in a post that gets deleted later the same day after I have thought better of it). Anyway, thanks, Rubén, for some interesting thoughts.

BMCR Review of Witherington on Revelation

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.09.14 features the following enthusiastic review:

Ben Witherington III, Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Reviewed by Susan F. Mathews