In Our Time tackles Prophecy

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

In Our Time: Prophecy

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Allison appointed at Princeton Theological Seminary

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

World-Class New Testament Scholar Joins Princeton Theological Seminary Faculty

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

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

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

More at the link above.  Great news for PTS.

Blogging Mark: Input Requested Please

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Was Jesus? (BBC, 1977)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Gospel of Thomas Goodies

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

Review of Thomas and the Gospels
Tucker Ferda

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

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



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

David Parker on the Digital Bible at the Hay Festival

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

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

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

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

HT: Rachel Kevern

The Synopsis, the Exploding Helicopter and Pictures or Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Caird's New Testament Theology lectures online

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

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

I have uploaded the files to this location:

George B. Caird: New Testament Theology Lectures

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

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

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

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

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