NT Gateway Weblog

Another article has been placed on line by Christian History, who release their print articles incrementally over the weeks:

Opponents of Allegory
The scholars at Antioch rejected allegory in favor of history. But their interpretive method led some into heresy
by Steven Gertz

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Roberta Allen has sent over a link to this on-line book of c. 100,000 words in PDF files on John's Gospel. The author received a First Class honours degree in Theology from Westminster College, Oxford. I have not had the chance to read the book yet and in linking to it here I am going on initial impressions that it is worth looking at. So by all means send me any feedback on this:

Interpreting the Interpreter: Intertextual Midrash in John's Gospel 1- 4
Roberta Allen

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Jeff Peterson sent over this delightful piece from the Catholic World News

Post-It notes from the papal kitchen

It focuses on the pope's alleged opinion of some soup he had for dinner one night, in a series of emails beginning with "The boss said the soup was good. Nice work" through "Still hearing from all sides about your famous bouillabaise. You should chisel the word "Good!" on the plinth above your stove" to "The claim that he would have intended the word "good" in a positive sense is preposterous prima facie and does not merit credibility. A memorandum indicating the contrary that purports to have been issued from my office is a transparent forgery" and so on. Well worth a read.

This parodies the debate of a week or so ago of whether the pope did or did not say "It is as it was" about The Passion of the Christ. That story and the surrounding issues still have not gone away. One of the latest and most thorough pieces is here in yesterday's National Catholic Reporter which brings us up to date on the controversy:

Pope on Gibson movie: Was it as it was?
Sifting through spin and Vatican speak
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

It explains the situation from the beginning to now in the best way I've seen yet and it has the following conclusion which resonates with British readers in the week of Hutton:

Where does all this leave us?

No one can have ironclad certainty about what the pope said. Based on Navarro’s Jan. 22 statement, it is possible that the pope said something like “It is as it was,” but intended this as a private reaction. My original source continues to insist this is the case. On the other hand, there is no clear confirmation of the remark.

No one comes out of this mess looking good.

The makers of the film have been widely accused of either lying about the pope’s comment, or abusing John Paul’s confidence by publicizing a private remark. If either of those charges is true it would be reprehensible, but if not, their reputation has been done a serious injustice.

Reporters, myself certainly included, look like naifs who have been spun every which way, or worse yet, like willing partners in someone’s dishonesty. If nothing else, it’s a wake-up call about the dangers of reliance on anonymous sources, a fact of reporting life in the Vatican. Officials here rarely speak on the record, so those of us who cover the Vatican are constantly dealing with unnamed sources. This incident undoubtedly has raised the bar on caution for all of us.

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I've scrapped the previous blog email address since it is getting so furiously spammed that there have been occasions when I have accidentally missed the odd authentic email. I'm trying something different, a bloglines email address that one can repeatedly change so as to run away from the spam. The only unfortunate thing is that it is unmemorable, so you'll have to go to "Click here to send email" which appears on the main page at the top, or in the header information if you are reading in an aggregator.

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Since Blogger began to provide xml site feeds to enable their blogs to be read in an aggregator / blog reader, I have been looking for a good blog reader (see previous blog entry). Newsmonster I still cannot even persuade to install and Bottom Feeder has problems with the Blogger xml feeds and messes up any entry featuring links, especially adjacent links. My next attempt has been with Macromedia Central which features a nice looking Blog Reader. At first I thought that this was my solution. It looks good and it has no trouble representing the blogger xml site feeds neatly. But it seems that there are problems with this too. There's lots of other rubbish packaged in with it -- movie finders, weather finders etc., and all USA-based. It's very patchy in what it seems able to fetch from the blogs I want to read and it's "refresh" button doesn't appear to do anything. It's also not versatile enough. What I like about Bottom Feeder, if only it rendered the xml feeds intelligibly, is its versatility within given blogs and blog entries. My guess is that most of my readers simply read on the web since I've not had any feedback on this topic.

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There's a fine article in today's New York Times on Jesus films, triggered of course by The Passion of the Christ:

Enraged Filmgoers: The Wages of Faith?
By A. O. SCOTT

The obvious thing to say about the skirmishes over "Passion," which will either subside or intensify once the movie opens nationally on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25, is that, since those earlier dust-ups, the sides have reversed. The conservative Christians who were so vocal in their condemnation of Mr. Godard, Mr. Smith and, especially, Mr. Scorsese, are now equally vocal in their defense of Mr. Gibson. An ugly undercurrent of anti-Semitism ran through some of the attacks on those supposedly sacrilegious movies, directed not at the filmmakers, none of whom were Jewish, but at the producers and studio heads who have periodically served as convenient targets for conspiracy-minded demagogues. Similar insinuations bubble beneath the surface of some of the defenses of Mr. Gibson's reportedly pious picture, which is itself accused of fomenting anti-Semitism by placing the blame for Jesus' death on the Jews.

This reversal is testimony both to the endlessness of the culture wars and to the changed landscape of battle. Those Catholics and evangelical Protestants who felt alienated from much of American commercial culture and who informed the earlier protests, have not only a powerful and glamorous Hollywood ally in Mr. Gibson but also a growing sense of cultural and political confidence. More and more it seems that religious expression — in the form of best-selling thrillers, pop music, movies and television programs — is entering the mainstream.

The article discusses Ben Hur, The Robe, King of Kings and how about this for a characterisation of The Greatest Story Ever Told?

In that film, Jesus, played by the young Max von Sydow, wanders through a Holy Land that resembles nothing so much as an endless showbiz talk show, populated by the likes of Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas and John Wayne, temporarily exchanging his cavalry badge for centurion's armor.

The article focuses specially on Last Temptation of Christ and Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, both of which the author obviously admires.

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Rochelle Altman on Ioudaios points to a really scathing article on The Passion of the Christ in Salon.com:

Inside Mel Gibson's "Passion"
A clergyman infiltrates the grass-roots campaign for Gibson's new Gospel film to catch a screening and reports that Jews, Arabs -- and Christians -- should be worried.
By Cintra Wilson

The author has interviewed Rev. Mark Stanger, "canon precentor and associate pastor of San Francisco's premier mainstream Episcopalian church" who has seen the film and clearly hated everything about it. Much of the article is patently absurd, e.g. the claim that it is somehow anti-Arab on the grounds that Aramaic sounds a bit like Arabic:

Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim. Some of those words in Aramaic sound a little bit like Arabic -- Arabic is a Semitic language too. [In the film, it came off like] nasty foreigners were doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus. So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out.

I'm sure I don't need to point out the weaknesses in this! Much of the rest of the article is in the same vein and is pretty useless. But there were two elements of interest to me. One was a link to a site all about The Passion Outreach which features a short interview with James Caviezel (two and a half minutes). The other was the dismaying news that it seems Mel Gibson is still caricaturing Biblical scholarship:

Mel Gibson in his remarks after the film took a potshot at contemporary biblical scholarship -- he called scholars "revisionists" who think the gospel writers had agendas.

We need to add the rider that this is only a reported impression in an often silly article, but if it is accurate I think it a shame that this line is still being taken. The idea that opposition to this film comes from contemporary liberal Biblical scholars who do not want the Bible story retold is nonsense, especially in the light of The Gospel of John, which used several Biblical scholars of "liberal" leaning and otherwise, including Christians and Jews, and which is a literal word-for-word retelling of the Gospel of John, of all the Gospels the one most open to charges about anti-Judaism. It may well turn out that there is nothing to worry about over The Passion of the Christ, but if there is it will not be because it is somehow too close to the Passion Narratives of any or all of the canonical Gospels.

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It turns out that not only were Foxman and Bretton-Granatoor present at the Global Pastors' Network preview screening of The Passion of the Christ last week, but so too was John Dominic Crossan. Crossan does not comment on the content of the film, but is critical of the secrecy surrounding it in this article on BeliefNet:

'Something Between Cover-up and Censorship'
A leading Bible scholar reacts to the secrecy surrounding an advance screening of 'The Passion'
John Dominic Crossan

Also included is a scan of the confidentiality agreement they had to sign.

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David Meadows comments on the inter-blog discussion about megasites between Torrey Seland, Jim Davila, Stephen Carlson and me (what he calls the "biblioblogs"):

Maybe a Rant ... Megasites, Blogs, and Classics

There are some useful reflections here from the overlapping but different perspective in Classics. I haven't time to comment at the moment but will return to this later.

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I mentioned recently that there is now a site feed available for this blog. Let me fill in a little more detail if you are unfamiliar with this. If you are in the habit of reading this blog and several others, you can access them from one place using an "aggregator" or "newsreader". Up until recently blogger, which powers this blog, did not provide the site feeds that are necessary to make reading in an aggregator possible. But that has now changed. Now blogger automatically generate a site feed in XML so that you can use the aggregators, newsreaders and so on and pick them up. The name given to this site feed is "Atom". Read more about atom here:

What is Atom?

I've only recently got into this game myself and so far with only mixed results. First, what newsreader or aggregator does one use? Newsmonster comes highly recommended but I can't get past first base on this -- I've downloaded the programme but it will not install. If anyone has any suggestions on that, I'd be grateful. Several of the others require one to part with money; one that doesn't is BottomFeeder. I found this straightforward to download, install and begin to use, but there's a problem with it -- the site feeds from blogger based sites don't represent properly in the content window (mine, Paleojudaica, Hypotyposeis, etc.). It seems especially not to like links. So while one can monitor the appearance of new posts in one's favourite blogs, one still has to open in one's browser. On the other hand, non-blogger based feeds seem to work fine, e.g. AKMA's. So if anyone has any bright ideas on how this could be fixed, I'd be interested to hear them.

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If you've been following the news stories surrounding The Passion of the Christ, you will be familiar with the name Abraham Foxman, one of the critics of the early script of the film and at the centre of the anti-Semitic charge. Up until the weekend he had not been able to get to see the film and finally sneaked in to see it with a group of Christian pastors in Florida. There are lots of stories on the net about this, but this article in PalmBeachPost.com is written by Foxman (along with Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor) and gives their current thinking:

'Passion' relies on theme of anti-Semitism

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This article by Steve Gertig in The Gateway (The University of Nebraska at Omaha's Student Newspaper) advertises an academic symposium on issues arising from The Passion of the Christ:

UNO, Creighton to host Mel Gibson's Passion symposium

UNO and Creighton University will host a symposium on the movie The Passion of the Christ, to discuss the movie's meaning Thursday . . . . Bill Blizek, a professor of philosophy at UNO and editor of the Journal of Religion and Film, is the organizer of the event. He said that UNO and Creighton felt the need to have the forum because it is a "powerful movie" and has a famous director. Blizek said "Mel Gibson felt moved to make the movie."

There is also news that "If you can't make it, UNO's Journal of Religion and Film and Creighton's Journal of Religion and Society will have transcripts on their respective Web sites. Indeed if you hop over to the Journal of Religion and Film, it has a full programme in PDF:

Exploring Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ'

There are some very interesting looking papers.

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The EWTN site has now added an archived version of Raymond Arroyo's "new exclusive second interview regarding 'The Passion of the Christ'" which was first broadcast over the weekend:

The World Over

In the interview, Gibson breaks his silence, speaking for the first time about charges that his film, The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic. He talks about his bold vision for the project and his motivation for making the film. Gibson tells Arroyo, “It reflects my beliefs-I’ve never done that before.” He also candidly comments on the controversy surrounding the movie, his resistance to altering the film, and his personal commitment to press forward: “I don’t know if I will ever work again. I’ve said that this is a career killer and it could well be, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t care,” Gibson says in the interview. Based on biblical accounts, the movie, "The Passion of the Christ," depicts the last 12 hours of Christ’s life on earth and will be released in the U.S. on Ash Wednesday, February 25th. EWTNews Director, Raymond Arroyo was on set, in Italy during the filming of “The Passion of the Christ” last year, and is the only broadcast journalist to conduct an extended interview with Mel Gibson about the project.

Thanks also to Helenann Francis for this news item from the BBC:

Flak for Jesus film 'to worsen'

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Interesting little Passion-related story on the Always On Network / Blog, Davo's Dispatch #2:

Speaking of events of Biblical proportion, one of my dearest Davos friends, musician and social activist Peter Gabriel, told me a story about "The Passion of the Christ." The controversial new film depicts the last 12 hours of Christ’s life on earth, and it turns out that the movie’s Website had incorporated some of Peter’s songs without permission. This fact set in motion a dialogue between Real World (Peter’s entertainment company) lawyers and those of the movie producer, Mel Gibson.

As Peter explained it, Mr. Gibson called him immediately to apologize and ended up making a donation to Peter’s non-profit organization, Witness, for his penance. He also agreed to send a tape of the movie to Peter for his private viewing. "I watched it and wept," Peter recounted. He says it is a very violent movie, but well directed with amazing cinematography.

And the controversy that the film is anti-Semetic [sic], painting Jews as "the killers of Jesus"? Peter points out, "Well, the Pharisees certainly didn’t look too good, but neither did the Romans."

I'm not quite sure where the "some of Peter's songs" is coming from; an earlier version of the teaser trailer used a Peter Gabriel track and that may have been on the official web site -- I can't recall. I do remember clearly that there were a bunch of samples of Peter Gabriel's songs on the site that describes itself as "the premier international fan site", which has been around for some time; and that site did remove the Peter Gabriel songs pretty quickly after they'd arrived.

Incidentally, the official site now does have John Debney listed as the one who has scored the film, with a little bio.

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Stephen Carlson makes some useful comments on the discussion we've been having on the future of the "megasites" or "supersites". I particularly like his focus on the question of the role of the "editorial judgement of their [the sites'] builders". He also reflects on my comments on the way that specialized areas interact with the supersite model:

The way I see it, there are still plenty of opportunities to carve out a niche for yourself specializing in a segment you feel most passionate about (that passion will sustain your motivation during the tedious parts like keeping links up-to date). If could be anything, such as "Anything you wanted to know about Philemon but were afraid to ask" as long as you have the passage and the editorial work is good. If the specialized site is good enough, some of the burden undertaken by the megasite maintainers can be eased.

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Latest additions to the Review of Biblical Literature on the NT side are:

Berger, Klaus
Translated by Charles Muenchow
Identity and Experience in the New Testament
Reviewed by Douglas Geyer

Das, A. Andrew
Paul, the Law, and the Covenant
Reviewed by Jerry L. Sumney

Dubis, Mark
Messianic Woes in First Peter: Suffering and Eschatology in 1 Peter 4:12-19
Reviewed by Eric J. Greaux

Jones, F. Stanley
Which Mary?: The Marys of Early Christian Tradition
Reviewed by Stephen W. Felder

Reiner, Andy M.
Miracle and Magic: A Study in the Acts of the Apostles and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana
Reviewed by Kimberley Stratton

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My DVDs of the new Visual Bible Gospel of John film arrived today. Unfortunately I have too much marking, teaching preparation and admin. to do to find time to watch it all so I'm taking it in segments. I've enjoyed it very much so far. It's nice to have a Jesus film in which Jesus appears from pretty early on. As Christopher Plummer narrates the Prologue, there are nature scenes, sunsets etc., John the Baptist comes in and gradually you see Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus walking -- but his face only finally revealed at the end of the Prologue. Cusick has a warm smile and seems rather engaging.

The film does have that typical Bible-film look about it. John the Baptist looks like an actor with a false beard and lanky long hair. Nothing has ever quite got the blood and dirt in the way that The Last Temptation of Christ managed, though I suppose The Passion of the Christ looks like it is going to be far more graphic in its violence than anything we've seen before.

I was intrigued to see how they would depict John the Baptist's speech about the dove descending on Jesus -- would they make it a baptism scene, i.e. would they allow themselves to be influenced by the Synoptic context? In fact they don't show Jesus getting baptized by John but they do show him arising up out of the water -- in flashback -- as John tells the crowd about Jesus.

The Wedding at Cana has Jesus' mother dressed in traditional blue so that she is instantly recognisable. In some ways this is a bold decision given that so few Jesus films do dress her in icon blue. The words of the Good News Bible, "Madam . . .", along with Jesus' smile, tend to make his words to her less harsh than they might otherwise have been.

The Temple scene is pretty interesting -- Jesus is quite animated -- far more so than in the older films like The Greatest Story Ever Told (Max von Sydow as Jesus making a carefully choreographed token effort at causing a scene) but it does not compare to the Scorsese (Last Temptation of Christ) temple scene -- one of the finest moments in Jesus film history. The scene did remind me of the Scorsese temple scene, though; the way that the Jewish leaders come down the steps to see what is causing the commotion and find themselves confronting Jesus directly -- this was very similar to Last Temptation even if it looked like a rather pale reflection of it.

Though I'm only up to the end of John 2, it's already clear to me that the production values are a bit higher than they were with the previous Visual Bible outing, Matthew, but it is only a bit. It does have a very similar feel to it, Christopher Plummer's narration relentlessly marching on just as Richard Kiley's did in Matthew. A nice feature of that film is missing in the new one. In Matthew, we sometimes see the aged apostle dictating to his scribe and it created a feeling of distance between the text and the events being narrated. But in Gospel of John the narrator is unseen. One improvement with Gospel of John is that we don't have the Bible verse ticking away in the corner as we did with Matthew. More reflections as I watch my way through it.

Incidentally, getting hold of it is not easy if you are outside the U.S.A. or Canada. It's not been shown in any British cinemas to my knowledge and there is no video or DVD release here. You can't order it from the official site because it will not ship to the UK or elsewhere. But there is a way round it if, like me, you are desperate to see it -- new copies are appearing every day or two on ebay. And if you are lucky (I was), you can even get it just a touch cheaper than it is on the official site, though the price gets pushed right up to the limit and sometimes over it. Also, it's useless if you haven't got a multi-regional DVD player because the ones on sale in the U.S. are all Region 1.

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Carl Conrad announced on b-greek today that he has now has the following ready in PDF format:

Robert W. Funk, A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek² (Missoula, Montana: 1977) Volume I, pp. xxv-xxxii, 1-30

Conrad explains it like this: "an extract from Robert W. Funk's 3-volume textbook of Koine greek, first published in 1973 and long out of print. The materials here extracted set forth the rationale of Funk's method and sketch the linguistic framework on which the textbook and teaching program are organized. I have long thought that these are the principles that ought to govern the teaching and learning of ancient Greek at any level, whether Homeric, Classical Attic, or Koine."

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There is now an RSS feed available for this blog so that you can read it in an aggregator alongside your other favourite blogs. This is the link for the site feed:

Site feed

And it is in the column on the left (scroll down a bit). Some readers have asked about this but others may have no idea what I am talking about, so I'll explain a little more later.

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Thanks to Jim West for this link:

European Association of Biblical Studies

This is a new society "created in order to promote biblical and related studies in Europe". The web site provides information about officers, the constitution, forthcoming conference, links and so on.

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Jim Davila and Torrey Seland comment further on the megasite question. I like Jim's comment that "There's plenty of room for experimenting in cyberspace". One thing is clear to me and that is that I would not enjoy the role of a kind of general editor of a megasite; I'm not too keen on anything that would take the fun (for me) out of the work on the web.

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The latest Explorator has been posted:

Explorator 6.39

It includes a link to an article on the James ossuary from the Toledo Blade. It is by David Yonke and is all about James Harrell's views:

Debate continues over authenticity
UT professor says Israeli study flawed

. . . . "What I think happened is that they threw this committee together very quickly. It's like a road accident: The first people on the scene are not always the best to help. That's exactly what happened. I think there will be another, better-qualified committee to study it and issue a new report."

Dr. Harrell said Dr. Shanks has asked him if he would consider organizing such a blue-ribbon panel.

"I sort of welcome the opportunity, and in a way I don't," Dr. Harrell said. "It's such a controversial issue. You can get caught up with it. Not everybody's going to be happy with what you do, no matter what your conclusion."

Also included is a link to this New York Times article explaining the bizarre events of this week surrounding the Vatican and The Passion of the Christ:

Mystery Drama, With the Pope Cast as a Movie Critic
FRANK BRUNI

It doesn't add much to what we already know, but it's clear and full.

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