Archive for the 'biblical studies' Category

Mark Goodacre is an English New Testament scholar currently teaching at Duke University in the US and his NT Blog and his companion sites NT Pod and NT Gateway are all very worth a visit.

Mark  has pointed out on his blog that it is now possible to watch the entire PBS series From Jesus to Christ on line. Mark says about the series:

Back in 1998, there was a lot of talk among American e-listers about the PBS series From Jesus to Christ, a four-part exploration of the origins of Christianity that was generally thought to be a well produced documentary. The programme made a bit of an impact overseas too, partly because of a fantastic website and partly because it was repackaged and sold abroad. In the UK, we had it on Channel 5, with Terry Waite providing extra linking materials. I have always been a fan of the website, and I continue to recommend parts of it to my students to this day.

The blurb about the series says: “From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians” tells the epic story of the rise of Christianity. The four hours explore the life and death of Jesus, and the men and women whose belief, conviction, and martyrdom created the religion we now know as Christianity. Well-known scholars discuss Christian origins and there are visuals of the areas in which the events took place. As well as looking at orthodox Christianity, it also explores the origins of other strands. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents is dealt with in Part Two, Chapter 7, Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries.  Mark also links to a Youtube clip of somewhat dodgy quality that talks about the discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents with footage of the Egyptian farmer who made the discovery and several of the important early scholars of the Nag Hammadi texts – James Robinson, Gilles Quispel and Elaine Pagels.

NT Blog contains posts about issues that Mark finds interesting, so some of them are probably of limited interest to those who are not engaged in the academic study of New Testament/Christian origins. I read it regularly, though.

NT Pod contains podcasts (not surprisingly) that Mark describes as “ Condensed comment from an academic perspective for everyone interested in historical approaches to the New Testament.” They don’t require an academic background but they do give you an understanding of what academic scholars think and know about the New Testament.

NT Gateway is “an award winning web directory of internet resources on the New Testament.” It enables you to both browse and search annotated links on “everything connected with the academic study of the New Testament and Christian Origins.”

Julia M O’Brien is an Old Testament scholar whose blog looks at the Bible and culture. She has a series on why one should bother reading the Old Testament. She says reading it will give you background about Christianity and lots of themes in art, music and literature and different ways of thinking about God, access to some big ideas and great stories.  There are lots of other things on her blog as well.  Another place worth visiting on the internet.

I have just finished reading the book How Did Christainity begin? A believer and non-believer examine the evidence by Michael F Bird and James G Crossley (with contributions from Scot McKinght and Maurice Casey).  I’ve done a reasonably comprehensive review of it on my personal blog, so don’t see any point in replicating it here. However, as the title suggests, it presents evidence of how Christianity came into being from the perspective of a Christian evangelical biblical scholar (Bird) and a secular biblical scholar (Crossley).  As well as providing their own statements, they engage with the other’s in a very helpful way.

I am not sure how the average “person in the pew” or “person on the street” would cope with the level of technicality of some of the argument, but it’s certainly something I’d recommend to anyone asking thoughtful questions about how to understand the origins of Christianity, and to those Christian professionals to whom they bring their questions.

The Uniting Church Assembly has just put up the World Environment Day “issue” of its Transit Lounge website. The site presents a faith perspective on the theme which allows you to read articles, discuss issues with other people and think about how to put faith into action. Why not visit and see for yourself?

There is a very active community of people who are involved in discussing biblical scholarship on line. Some of these people are professional academic biblical and religious scholars and/or theologians, while others are students and ministers/pastors. They come from a wide cross-section of theological positions and usually offer informed comment on a range of interesting things. If you are interested in finding out more, I would suggest that you start at biblioblogs, a blogsite which provides “an aggregate of blogs geared towards biblical studies” and explore the links.

Some of the blogs are very serious and focussed only on the research of the blogger, while others are more wide-ranging and include more personal reflection and humour as well. Probably the most popular New Testament site is Mark Goodacre’s NT Gateway Weblog. Mark is an Englishman who is currently teaching at Duke University in the US and a very active blogger. If you are interested in non-canonical early Christian writings, you might like April DeConick’s The Forbidden Gospels Blog. I have also been blogging about my research on the Gospel of Thomas at Judy’s research blog.

Once you’ve found blogs that interest you, you can subscribe to them using a feedreader service and then you’ll be notified whenever a new post appears. UNE has a feedreader for Windows computers that can be downloaded from here but I didn’t find it particularly good to use and I now subscribe to all my feeds using Bloglines.

In his blog, Crossings, Bruce Fisk, Associate Professor of New Testament, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, USA, provides a significant commentary on the Talpiot Tomb, also referred to as the “Jesus Family tomb”, with useful links. Also keep going back to Mark Goodacre’s New Testament Gateway blog and, of course, James Tabor’s Jesus Dynasty blog

Over the last couple of days, much has been made in some parts of the media about the possibility that Jesus’ family tomb has been found in Jerusalem. The reports that I have heard in the media have not been particularly helpful, but there is a lot of information out on the web in biblioblogs (ie weblogs provided by biblical scholars about biblical issues). While I am not suggesting that simply having tertiary qualifications makes you an immediate expert, this information is more reliable than that circulating in the secular press because the authors are operating in areas where they’ve done considerable work, rather than scrambling frantically to get up to speed as the journalists are.

If you are interested in following the discussion in an informed way, I would recommend the following:
First, the official material that goes with the book and documentary that have cause the interest can be found in two places:

• There is information about it on the Discovery Channel website.
• The website for the actual film is very slick, very professional, very commercial.

If you are interested in some more information, you might also like to visit James Tabor’s “The Jesus Dynasty” blog Tabor is one of the scholars involved in the discovery. You can also read an excerpt from his book The Jesus Dynasty on the Biblical Archaeology Society website. This excerpt deals with the discovery of a tomb, but not the tomb under discussion, which was found in the 1980s.

Tyler Williams’ Codex Blogspot has several postings that provide links to a range of other blogs whose authors have made assessments of the information in circulation. Today’s post and yesterday’s post contain good coverages of who is saying what. See also the post on Paleojudaica which contains some updated comment from Richard Bauckham from St Andrew’s University.

I must admit to being somewhat skeptical. It seems to me that claims that can stand on their own two feet do not need the full “Hollywood treatment” that this is getting, but maybe this is because I am Australian and therefore much more into understatement.