NT Gateway Weblog

A thread has begun on the Johannine Literature e-list on the question of the dating and priority of John. Paul Anderson draws attention to this paper from lister Mark Matson:

Current Approaches to Johannine Priority (PDF)

The paper was apparently read at the Stone-Campbell Journal Conference in St. Louis in March, 2003 and should appear in the Journal in the future; it appears on Matson's homepage.

---

I've mentioned Kevin Bush's N. T. Wright Page here before. There are some useful new links there:

Transforming the Culture
This article was "delivered as a main address at the AFFIRM conference at Waikanae in July 1999"; it is hosted by the Latimer Fellowship and the focus is on Paul.

New Perspectives on Paul (PDF)
This is a paper given at the 10th Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, Rutherford House, Edinburgh, 25-28 August 2003. It is hosted on the N. T. Wright page itself and looks like a copy produced by Wright himself (though whoever produced it really ought to think about double spacing).

Finally, Tom Wright has apparently agreed to answer questions posed by an email list called Wrightsaid -- What N. T. Wright Really Said and his first batch of answers, for January 2004, are reproduced on the N. T. Wright page here:

Tom Wright answers "Wrightsaid" questions

The latter includes his comments on the future projected for the six volume Christian Origins and the Question of God.

Many thanks to Sean D for drawing my attention to these additions.

---

Thanks to Jim West on Xtalk for a link to an excellent and comprehensive site from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

Ancient World Mapping Center

This centre "exists to promote cartography and geographic information science as essential disciplines within the field of ancient studies". Many useful, high resolution, well documented reproductions of maps from print resources in the AWMC Map Room including maps of the Expansion of the Empire in the Age of Augustus, Greece, the Aegean and Western Asia Minor and Roman Empire in AD 69. That's just a selection -- there are lots more. The main page has one of those annoying designs that only works properly in 1024x768 but the map room looks fine in 800x600.

The message forwarded by Jim was by Tom Elliott and reads as follows:

These maps were prepared to accompany the new book by Mary T.
Boatwright, Daniel J. Gargola and Richard J.A. Talbert, The Romans
from Village to Empire: A History of Ancient Rome from Earliest Times to Constantine, Oxford University Press, 2004 (ISBN: 0-19-511875-8).
Publisher's information on the book is available.

Please visit our homepage or jump directly to the map room for
more information.

Please feel free to forward this message to other lists where it may be of interest.

I've added the site to the NT Gateway: Maps page.

---

I've added Dieter Mitternacht's Homepage to Scholars: M. Mitternacht is a Senior Research Fellow at Lund University, Sweden. His homepage includes the tiniest little link to a huge file that would be a shame to miss -- his Master of Theology dissertation:

By Works of the Law No One Shall Be Justified (PDF)

I've added the link to the Paul: Books, Articles and Reviews page.

---

Both Stephen Carlson on Hyptoposeis and Jim Davila on Paleojudaica have blogged on a topic arising from the Corpus Paulinum email list. Jeffrey Gibson began the thread asking what you would ask Paul if you were able to go back to the sixties of the first century and somehow find a way of communicting with him. There have been some great suggestions on the Corpus Paul list; some highlights:

Paul, what was it that you and the pillars talked about when you spent your fortnight with them?

How many letters did you write and in what order?

What do you mean by PISTIS CHRISTOU?

Paul, how many other letters did you write that we don't have now? Were any of the other letters as tough as Galatians or 2 Cor 10-13?

Paul, what did Peter say after you confronted him in Antioch?

Since your about to die and all, have you changed your opinion about how quickly Jesus is going to return?

Could you explain just how many letters you actually wrote to the church in Corinth, and then give me a run-down on what they contained and when they were written?

Do you believe that homosexuality is as bad as temple prostitution and pederastry?

Fess up -- the collection which you so altruistically maintain that you were "eager" to take up actually galled and chafed you at first, didn't it? The pillars were stongarming you, no?

Why and where did you persecute fellow Jews who owned Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and Lord, and who else was involved in this persecution?

How do you regard Jews who have not accepted Jesus as God's Messiah?

Was your letter to the Galatians a success? Did you receive a reply?

Do you keep copies of your own letters? Can we have a look at them?

When you said in (what we call) 1 Corinthians "I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh", could you explain what that means?

They are just some highlights. Visit the list archive to read them all, along with some attempts at answers; begin from 3 January 2004 and keep going.

Jim Davila adds a note on "a midterm question I used to ask my undergraduates back when I taught Introduction to the New Testament at another institution":

Imagine a meeting between a leader of the Q people, the Apostle Paul, and an Essene leader from Qumran in the year C.E. 58. Write your essay from the perspective of the Q person and explain how and where you (the Q person) agree and disagree with the other two leaders on observance of Torah law, proper religious lifestyle, relations with the gentiles (including proselytizing), the correct celebration of the communal meal, and the end of the world."

Nice idea; I'd be interested to hear a conversation between John Kloppenborg, Paul and a Qumran person!

---

I posted recently on two articles, "The First Battle for the Bible" by Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J., and "The Habits of Highly Effective Bible Readers", a conversation with Christopher A. Hall. I mistakenly said that these appeared in "the Fall 2003 issue (80) of Christianity Today". I am grateful to Dwight Peterson for pointing out to me that they actually appear in the Fall 2003 issue of Christian History, not Christianity Today.

---

Stephen Carlson points to a very interesting parallel between Matthew 3.11 and Acts 19.4, both of which juxtapose the themes of repentance and the "coming one" in John the Baptist's preaching. This is in contrast with Mark, Luke's Gospel and John. Given that, on the standard Two-Source Theory, Luke-Acts is independent of Matthew, this is striking. So how could it be explained? Stephen lays out the evidence and then asks:

Of the four gospels, only Matt 3:11 juxtaposes, as does Acts 19:4, the motifs of a baptism of repentance (John) with the one coming after (Jesus). According to the Critical Edition of Q (p. 14, at Q 3:16b, which aggressively adds Jesus's baptism to Q because of too many minor agreements), the phrase "for repentance" is Matthew's redaction of Q's baptism. In other words, the author of Luke at Acts 19:4 knows Matthew, or, if the editors of CEQ are wrong, Q is more like Matthew than we thought.

As a defender myself of the theory that Luke (the author) did know Matthew, what I like to do on such occasions is to try to get into the Q theorist's shoes. How would I answer this if I were persuaded of Q? (I always try to test my own arguments by trying to find the best possible arguments against them. This is not because of some kind of schizophrenia but because it can help one to sharpen up one's arguments or, sometimes, to drop them before it's too late). What I think I
would say here would be that there is a third option:

(1) It is not that Luke knows Matthew -- we know that that is not possible for a variety of reasons, chief among which are (a) Luke's eccentric editorializing that would be implied by that theory & (b) the phenomenon of alternating primitivity in double tradition. (My hypothetical Q theorist has not, unfortunately, read The Case Against Q or, if s/he has, s/he is -- God forbid! -- unpersuaded by it).

(2) And it cannot be that Q is more like Matthew than we previously thought. If Q had featured repentance here, Luke would have carried it over so producing the same juxtaposition of repentance + coming one in Luke 3. After all, we know that Luke has no aversion to repentance -- it is a favourite in his Gospel (e.g. Luke 5.32R, 15.7 QD, 24.47). On the other hand, repentance is something Matthew might have added in Matt. 3 (e.g. cf. the prominence the theme is given in Matt. 3.2). So Q did not have repentance here.

(3) So where did Luke get it from in Acts 19? It was probably his memory of these two features, both of them congenial, from Mark and Q. John's baptism of repentance is a key feature of Mark 1; the announcement of the coming one is a key feature of Q 3 and Q 7. So he juxtaposes them himself in Acts 19 in the same way that Matthew juxtaposed them himself in Matt. 3. So there is nothing here that cannot be explained by independent redaction.

---

I was sent this by Ori Trend from Israel. There's a useful new book price comparison site available on the net. I've played around with it a bit and it seems to come up with some useful results. There's a North American version and a British version, though from my searches it is still often cheaper to go to the American version and order from there with international shipping:

Fetchbook.Info

Fetchbook.co.uk

---

I posted a note on Torrey Seland's new Philo blog last week. If you haven't visited yet, don't forget to do so; new additions include a report on Philo at the SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta in November 2003. Torrey Seland has also made some major additions to his Resource Pages for Biblical Studies, dropping the discussion board, adding links to the NT Gateway, the NT Gateway blog (thanks!) and Jim Davila's Paleojudaica blog on the main page, and also adding a good number of features of interest listed here:

Resource Pages for Biblical Studies, January 2004 additions

One of the links new to me is Quotation Finder from the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung at Münster. This is designed to work with the TLG CD ROM. It looks useful, though I've not been able to spend enough time with it myself to figure it all out, and I don't have TLG installed so don't know how useful it would be for me. I'd be interested to hear if anyone does have any experiences with this.

---

The Fall 2003 issue (80) of Christianity Today is entitled "The First Bible Teachers" and has a focus on Patristic interpretation of the Bible. Most of the articles are not available on-line but two that may be of interest are:

The First Battle for the Bible
How the church was forced to choose its treatment of the Jewish Scriptures
Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J.

The Habits of Highly Effective Bible Readers
What we can learn from the church fathers that will enrich our own Bible study.
A conversation with Christopher A. Hall

---

The new version of Kalos (2.11) has been released today after some bugs were fixed in the previous release. This is an enjoyable, free resource for conjugating your Greek verbs:

Kalos Computer Programme

There is also a new much simplified URL and I've made the change on my Greek NT Gateway: Computer Software page.

---

I noted the appearance of the October 2003 edition of the Journal of Theological Studies back in November and also the lack of on-line availability to subscribers or those with institutional subscriptions. Now the edition is available on-line to those who are able to access it. Unfortunately, the free abstracts are largely absent. Here's the link:

Journal of Theological Studies 54/2 (October 2003)

---

I have previously mentioned Wieland Willker's On-line Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. He has now produced a major second edition. According to Wieland, "Compared to the 1st edition it has about 300 more pages (now 1731) and 67 variants added (now 1223)":

TCG 2004: An On-line Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament

---

The Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) describes itself in the following terms: "an organization of evangelical Christian scholars with specialties in Old and New Testament and in ancillary disciplines. Its vision is to foster excellence in the pursuit of Biblical Studies within a faith environment." Its web site is here:

Institute for Biblical Research

The institute plans to have certain sub-groups, the first one of which is the IBR Jesus Group started by Darrell Bock and Robert Webb. This is clearly in some ways intended as a reaction to the Jesus Seminar, though its approach is different (e.g. no voting). The web site features two major essays which are part of this project:

Robert Webb, "Jesus' Baptism: Its Historicity and Implications"

Scot McKnight, "Jesus and the Twelve"

Thanks to Michael Pahl for drawing this to my attention. I've added the main link to my Societies page. I'll add the articles to the Historical Jesus pages later.

---

I usually mention the latest Explorator on a Sunday because there are always items of interest there:

Explorator 6.36

---

My previous entry sent me looking around for other bits and bobs in the Christian Century and here's an older article on Wright that may be of interest -- an interview focusing on the resurrection but also dealing with other things:

Resurrection faith: N.T. Wright talks about history and belief

This is from the Christian Century December 18 2002.

---

Religion-online have an article excerpted from N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God:

On the Third Day: God's Promise Fulfilled (Religion-Online)

The article itself originally appeared in The Christian Century (April 5 2003): 32-36 and is also available via the Find Articles site here:

On the third day: God's promise fulfilled (Find Articles)

---

Carl Conrad, guru of the b-greek email list and professor emeritus of Classics at Washington University, has published on on-line commentary on Mark, with his own translation in the top frame and commentary on the text in a bottom frame. A very useful new resource:

A Brief Commentary on the Gospel of Mark

I've added a link on my Gospel of Mark page.

---