Bible Giveaway

Nick’s giving away a free ‘Mosaic NLT’ – it looks very interesting, presenting perspectives from across the world and across the centuries.  Check it out and put in a bid!

Book Review: In the Footsteps of Paul

In the Footsteps of Paul is a photographic gift-book that follows the story of Acts, illustrating its locations alongside parts of its text.  I noticed that James K gave it a positive review on his blog, so was looking forward to it when Thomas Nelson sent me a copy.  Overall, I like the book – and I’ll try to sum up why that is, as well as mention a couple of shortcomings.

There are two things that really work well about this book:

Firstly, the photographs are excellent.  I’d heard of Ken Duncan before, but I don’t think I’d particularly taken notice of his photography.  He really does have an eye for a good picture – and the multitude of good photos in this book make it perfect to leave on the coffee table and flip through when you have time to sit down.  Some of the photos are of scenery, some are of archaeological sites, some are of early Christian artwork in the relevant locations… all attempt to find something in the location that draws attention to the action in the book of Acts in some illuminating way.

Secondly, I like the idea of pursuing the storyline of Acts – it gives direction and continuity to the masses of pictures, and means that it can be read through from beginning to end in a way that makes good sense.  The book makes me interested in the locations and interested in the text of Acts – so for those reasons alone, I’m glad to have it.

I think there are also a couple of shortcomings – one about the genre and one about the explanations/quotations:

Firstly, the genre of the book is a somewhat awkward one: It attempts to provide both an illumination of Paul’s world, and a Christian pilgrimage that celebrates the legacy of Paul…  But can those things be combined?  If one is trying to celebrate Paul’s Christian legacy, one will inevitably be looking for direct links to Paul himself – and so the most common words in the book are “Paul would have” – Paul would have gone here, or seen this, or passed through this passage, or sat in this seat…  This made me a little bit uncomfortable, as I would personally have been happier with a simple illumination of the world that Acts describes, without being bothered about the buzz of thinking that Paul himself might have actually touched/seen/walked in that exact location.  At times, this search for a “Paul buzz” results in some comments that are really pushing it: So on p49 we see a picture of a stone seat, with the claim: “Peter and Paul both would have sat in this chair, which was Saint Peter’s chair.”  Hmmmm…

Secondly, I felt that the quotations from famous Christians didn’t really add much – in fact I found they distracted me from following the movement of Acts itself.  And some of the explanations were a bit off.  For example, we are told on p113 that the temple of Apollo in Corinth was built in the fourth century BC.  I’ve never heard this dating before – as far as I’m aware, it was built in the 6th century BCE – so this slip up made me wonder if any other facts were off too.

But in the end, this is a photo-book, and as such, it really does excell.  It’s a great book to have on the coffee table, and to inspire you to come back again to the book of Acts, and hear it afresh.

Codexmania hits London

…But why is it on at the same time as the ‘Tyndale Trienniel Conference???

To celebrate the virtual re-unification of all extant leaves of Codex Sinaiticus, on 6-7 July 2009, the British Library is hosting an academic conference on topics relating to Codex Sinaiticus. A number of leading experts have been approached to give presentations on the history, text, conservation, paleography and codicology, among other topics, of Codex Sinaiticus. Selected conference papers will be edited and published as a collection of articles.

Programme

Keynote speaker

Eldon Jay Epp

Harkness Professor of Biblical Literature, emeritus

Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, emeritus, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

Visiting Professor of New Testament, Harvard Divinity School

Other speakers include:

Christfried Böttrich

Harry Gamble

Ekaterina Krushelnitskaya

René Larsen

Scot McKendrick

David Parker

Emanuel Tov

David Trobisch

Klaus Wachtel

Find out more here

DVD Review: Read and Share Bible

I was given a DVD to review by the good folks at Thomas Nelson:

It’s part of a series of DVDs that aims to engage pre-schoolers with stories from the Bible.  Overall I’m impressed with this volume, which covers Genesis, up until the point that Jacob wrestles with God; and then episodes from the Gospels. 

The animation, as you can gather from the cover, is simple and representative, while quite warm and engaging.  I like the funny noses… somehow the obvious cartoonish-ness of the animation draws attention to the fact that this is not supposed to be taken as a painstaking re-creation of the historical events, but rather a pathway into the drama of the Bible’s stories.  In this vein, there are ways in which the stories are especially directed toward the young viewers, with the creation account mentioning puppies, the Noah’s ark sequence involving a monkey riding on a deer’s back, and other gently humourous or expanded elements.  Having said that, I think the DVD as a whole does well in being faithful to the stories it tells.  There are no moralising interpretations added onto the stories – they are simply allowed to speak for themselves, which is a good thing from my perspective.

The background instrumental music is non-intrusive and quite fitting.  Different vignettes are narrated by one of two different narrators.  The male narrator has what I would guess is a Boston accent – very clear and understandable for those of us who live in the UK!  The female narrator’s voice is also quite clear and accessible to children.

I have not watched every bit of the bonus features, but this is because our 4yo daughter and 2yo son didn’t like those parts.  They involved material that was largely aimed at parents, showing how the animation was done.  Older children might find this interesting, but it didn’t seem entirely necessary.

One of the drawbacks of simplifying the Bible for children is that inevitably certain things are skipped over, and certain things are crystallised in a way that may need to be unlearned later on in life.  For example, the story of the prodigal son finishes with the return of the prodigal (missing out the climactic interchange with the older brother); and the angels are shown as winged creatures (rather than appearing human) with Gregorian-style singing voices.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this issue: Will my children now picture winged creatures when they hear about angels in the Bible – not realising that the New Testament itself never indicates that this is how they are to be understood?  Will they, in future years, assume that the only point of the “Prodigal Son” parable is that the father welcomed the prodigal?  I think these sorts of things are always going to be issues when we attempt to put something literary into a visual form: There is a loss that occurs when the Bible is made into a DVD… but that doesn’t mean that it’s a worthless enterprise; it simply means that we need to be aware of these drawbacks.

My two children really enjoy watching this DVD, sometimes watching the whole thing (I guess about 40 minutes) twice in one sitting!  So I’m happy to recommend it to people with pre-school age children, and we’ll be looking out for subsequent volumes in the series.

Paul as Letter Writer

Over the last 15 years, there has been a refreshed interest in Pauline Studies on the nature of letter-writing.  Of course, over the last century, there has been a lot of scholarly discussion about epistolary forms and conventions – but the newer direction in Pauline Studies involves the consideration of the practicalities of first century letter-writing – tools, locations, editing, drafts, secretaries, copies, etc… and the implications of these things for our understanding of “authorship” and the production of Paul’s letters in particular.  This new direction is important, and will become more prominent in the coming few years.  Here are a few resources that you might like to follow up if you’re interested in this topic…

Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation, by Michael Trapp

 

This is a useful collection of ancient letters in the original greek & latin, along with a discussion of issues related to the production of the letters.  For example, Trapp states, in relation to the use of secretaries: “[W]e can make at least some headway with the question of who did the writing: the presence of particularly skilful hands, and of changes of hand between the main body of the letter and the final salutation, suggest just how often the bulk of the work, or all of it, was done by secretaries (for the affluent) and (for the less well-off) professional letter-writers.” (p8)

 

Paul the Letter-Writer: His World, His Options, His Skills, by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor.

This book explores three areas: Practical issues related to writing a letter; Theoretical issues related to creating the content of a letter; and issues related to the collecting of ancient letters.  Unfortunately his consideration of the ‘content’ of letters relies too much on Rhetorical Criticism, but this is a great little book.  He notes, for example, that secretaries/professional letter-writers (as mentioned by Trapp above) would generally have been employed not only to write the letter to be dispatched, but also to write a copy for the sender to keep, “both for control and perhaps future use” or perhaps because one’s letters “were shared with friends” (p13)

Books and Readers in the Early Church, by Harry Y. Gamble

Gamble argues for the collection of Paul’s Epistles as canon, a canon sufficiently long that it needed to be kept together using the format of the Codex – explaining the early Christian preference for the codex over the roll.  He covers a number of interesting issues along the way.  For example, he applies the insight that ancient letter-writers kept copies of their letters (as mentioned by Murphy-O’Connor above) to Paul: “A dossier of Paul’s letters would surely have been useful to Paul and his coworkers: it can hardly be supposed that each letter immediately had its intended effect, required no further clarification, and generated no new issues.  The letters themselves are proof to the contrary.  The tangled correspondence of Paul with the Corinthians, if not typical, certainly indicates that Paul needed to and did keep track of what he had written.” (p101)

Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection, by E. Randolph Richards

This is a great overview of the issues in the title.  For example, Richards considers ancient letter writers’ use of secretarial copies of their letters (as mentioned by Gamble above), and writes: “From the evidence we can infer that material was recycled from one letter to another in two common scenarios.  First, if a writer had written a lengthy account and then later wanted to send the information to another recipient….  A second common reason for reusing material in another letter was when the writer wanted to send a well-written passage to another.”  (p160)  Obviously, this sort of insight might be fruitfully examined in relation to the letters of Paul – perhaps in terms of a possible relationship between Ephesians and Colossians… perhaps in terms of a possible relationship between 1 Thessalonians & 1 Corinthians…

I Never Ask Questions

Today I went to an event in Cambridge, on ‘the other gospels’.  The speakers were Dirk Jongkind and Simon Gathercole.  Both of these people blog at http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/ - and they had some interesting things to say about the text and canon of the New Testament.  I am amazed at the misinformation that passes as “news” in the media on these topics – even the bbc!

One thing I realised today is that I pretty much never ask questions at conferences or seminars during question time, and I think it’s chiefly for three reasons:

1. I can never think of intelligent or worthwhile things to ask
2. I have this feeling that a lot of questions that occur during question-time don’t have any point and could effectively be translated: “Hey – look at me!  I’M ASKING A QUESTION!!!”
3. I’m usually too busy thinking to myself, “Hey – I could get everyone to look at me, SIMPLY BY ASKING A QUESTION!!!” – and by the time I snap out of this daydream, we’re already halfway through post-seminar drinks

Theology & Scripture

Department of Theology and

 Religious Studies

Dialog Postgraduate Research

 Seminar

 

‘Theology and Scripture’

 Monday, October 13^th, 2008

 4:30pm – 6:00pm

 Trent Graduate Centre Seminar Room

 Matthew Malcolm

‘Paul: Letter-writer and Theologian’

and

Jeffrey Olsen Biebighauser

‘Genesis, Ontology and the Platonic Tradition’

My talk above will be related to the exploration of 1 Thessalonians & 1 Corinthians that I had a post about recently.  I’m not sure what Jeff will be speaking about, but he has a quite ground-breaking inquiry into the Messianic aspirations of Gumby here…  I’m hoping for more on this topic next Monday.

 

CD Giveaway

I have mentioned in the past how valuable I think it is for Christian worship to involve participating in the singing of psalms.  One of my favourite bands is Sons of Korah, whose work exclusively involves putting the psalms to music.  They have a style that is largely accoustic, draws on ethnically diverse influences, and ranges from reflective to intense… I find their interpretations of the psalms gripping.  So… I am going to give away two brand new Sons of Korah CDs: Both of them are excellent albums – Redemption Songs and Resurrection.  Both albums will go to the one winner of a simple little competition: You just need to tell me what your favourite psalm is… and the person whose fave coincides with my own fave psalm will win the CDs!  If you don’t have a favourite psalm, I’ll slap ya.  Go and choose one… now! 

Oh – and my opinion on which psalm is my fave might be open to persuasion…

I’ll contact the winner via email to find out their postal address.

I crave juice

“When the LORD your God has enlarged your territory as he promised you, and you crave meat and say, “I would like some meat,” then you may eat as much of it as you want.” Deuteronomy 12:20

I was reminded of this verse yesterday – I was at uni at about 3pm, and suddenly I thought to myself: “I crave juice” and I followed that thought up with the comment, “I would like some juice.”  So I decided to head home and take the family out for some juice at the local fresh-juice-squeezing-station.  After that we went to the park and ran around, and looked for shapes in the clouds, and played on the swings, and finally made our way home.  It was just a fun time with my wife and two little ones, and it made me think: Sometimes we can get so caught up with tasks and hardships and strivings and being anti-prosperity-gospel that we can forget that God is a cheerful giver…

Codexmania

Last week, I went to the British Library with Peter, another PhD student at Nottingham Uni.  We went there to view Codex Sinaiticus – an amazingly well kept Greek language Bible from the mid-300s C.E.  It was incredible to see something in such good condition, from such an early date.  At the time I commented to Peter that I wanted a copy of it… and I wanted it NOW.  Quick as a flash (or “Schnell wie der Blitz” for the benefit of all my German readership) we went to the British Library shop to see if they sold facsimile copies of it.  We were bitterly disappointed – but it appears someone was eavesdropping, because today, Peter got a newspaper and it mentioned that a new Codex Sinaiticus website was about to go online, showing the manuscripts with transcriptions and translations.  Schnell wie der Blitz, I got onto the website, but again there was bitter disappointment: It was not yet up.  I bravely brushed away a tear and decided to get back to work… but then, a teensy tiny spark of hope somehow generated itself deep within me… I decided to press refresh… and… IT WAS UP!!!  I was the first to see it in the whole wide universe!!  Well apart from the people who put it together I suppose… and the people who had previews.  Anyway, here it is – check it out: http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/