NT Blog

In Our Time tackles Prophecy

2013-06-14T10:17:00.002-04:00

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

2013-06-13T15:57:00.001-04:00

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

2013-06-12T12:40:00.000-04:00

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)

2013-06-11T20:42:00.005-04:00

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)

2013-06-11T11:24:00.000-04:00

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

2013-06-01T19:02:00.000-04:00

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

2013-05-30T10:54:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-30T10:20:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-24T09:29:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-23T11:23:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-22T11:44:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-21T12:29:00.003-04:00

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

2013-05-16T21:04:00.000-04:00

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

2013-05-16T11:32:00.000-04:00

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

2013-05-15T19:57:00.000-04:00

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

2013-05-15T15:05:00.003-04:00

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

2013-05-15T09:52:00.000-04:00

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

2013-05-14T11:33:00.003-04:00

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

2013-05-14T10:54:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-13T20:27:00.001-04:00

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

2013-05-13T16:15:00.002-04:00

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

2013-05-10T14:41:00.002-04:00

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"

2013-05-10T06:21:00.000-04:00

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

2013-05-08T14:04:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He will be greatly missed.

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

2013-04-30T10:39:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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