The art of writing negative book reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

Death of Paul W. Meyer

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

Paul W. Meyer

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

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

You can read more at the link above.

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

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

Death of Seán Freyne

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

Eminent theologian Seán Freyne dies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond E. Brown Website

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

Raymond E. Brown, S. S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Caird Lectures Online

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

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

George B. Caird New Testament Theology Audio Lectures

Matthew also blogs on this here.

Academic Blogging: What are the benefits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic blogging: When and Why?

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

1. When and why did you start blogging?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why blog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pericopes, passages or paragraphs?

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

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

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

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

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

The joy of failed predictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s my guess, anyway.

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

Biblioblogs.com still defunct

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

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

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

Tom Boomershine Performs Mark

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

Tom Boomershine Performs Mark's Gospel



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

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?