Biblical Studies Carnival: Call for Submissions

Kevin’s issued the call and the deadline looms.  Let me say, just as a personal observation, that as biblioblogdom (and Edgecomb be darned with his desire to change things)  ;-)   grows, it will be more and more important for folk to submit suggestions.  When I last hosted the Carnival I got 2 useful suggestions and maybe 5 idiotic ones for stupid non-biblical (UFO type) sites.  And that was a long time ago.  So, make recommendations!

The Passion- Of Christ, That Is — UK Style

Mark Goodacre, who has jetted across the Atlantic to his homeland, announces that the BBC’s “Passion” website has gone live. Mark has contributed to the project so you can rest assured of two things: 1- it will be way better than Gibson’s gruesome and historically inept rendering and 2- it will be way better than anything ever produced by the Discovery Channel about anything related to the Bible.

An Interlude

I got this funny bit a while ago and post it here for your enjoyment:

These are actual comments made on students’ report cards by teachers in the New York City public school system. All the teachers were reprimanded but, boy, are these funny!!!

1 Since my last report, your child has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.
2. I would not allow this student to breed.
3. Your child has delusions of adequacy.
4. Your son is depriving a village some where of an ‘idiot’.
5. Your son sets low personal standards, and then consistently fails to achieve them.
6. The student has a “full six-pack” but lacks the plastic thing to hold it all together.
7. This child has been working with glue too much.
8. When your daughter’s IQ reaches 50, she should sell.
9. The gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn’t coming.
10. If this student were any more stupid, he’d have to be watered twice a week.
11. It’s impossible to believe the sperm that created this child, beat out 1,000,000 others.
12. The wheel is turning, but the hamster is definitely dead.

I’ve known many fitting each of the categories above during my nearly 48 years.

Sign Your Work: 8th C. Bullae and Seals

Joseph Lauer directs our attention to an IAA press release which opines, in part,

Finds recovered from the excavations in the City of David reveal an interesting development in the ancient world: whereas during the 9th century BCE letters and goods were dispatched on behalf of their senders without names, by the 8th century BCE the clerks and merchants had already begun to add their names to the seals.

And concludes

According to the researchers, Eli Shukron and Professor Ronny Reich, “In contrast with the large cluster of bullae that was found two years ago, in which all of its items contain graphic symbols (such as a boat or different animals – fish, lizards and birds) but are of an earlier date (end of the 9th-beginning of the 8th century BCE), the new items indicate that during the 8th century BCE the practice had changed and the clerks who used the seals began to add their names to them.”

I wonder why the shift to the addition of names? Maybe there were already forgeries at hand and names were added for verification. Ancient forgeries, now that’s an interesting possibility. It makes one wonder if modern artifacts might themselves be ancient forgeries… And perhaps our modern forgeries will themselves one day be ancient forgeries.

By the by, Ha’aretz also has a bit on this.

UPDATE: There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this seal on the ANE-2 list, some of the more interesting remarks are available here, and here.

Do NOT Miss This Post

Not this one- this one. And Ben is 100,000% on target in his final sentence. Perfectly put (and so it’s no wonder that this gifted Ben Myers is the featured blogger for March on Biblioblogs.com) (interview forthcoming).

If You’re Surprised, Raise Your Hand

Reuters reports today

Republican presidential candidate John McCain won the endorsement of Texas evangelical leader John Hagee on Wednesday, which could boost his standing among religious conservatives who have been reluctant to embrace the likely nominee.

Actually I hope it has the opposite effect. Anyone Hagee the Heretic endorses should surely be viewed with a great deal of skepticism (or scepticism, for our British readers).  Evangelicals, Mainliners, and other intelligent persons who take the advice of Hagee have abandoned rationality and probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote, drive a car, become a parent, or live outside of an asylum.

Come on Martin, Pay Attention

On the 28th of February, 1527, Huldrych Zwingli wrote one of his longest books. The Amica Exegesis, id est: expositio eucharistiae negocii ad Martinum Lutherum was aimed, as the title suggests, at being an encouragement to Luther- wishfully imagining that Luther would be swayed by the truth and abandon his stubbornness regarding the Lord’s Supper.

The argument of the book is quite tight and - being written in Latin - quite academic. But smack in the middle Zwingli reminds Luther - Adparet vos omnes, qui ex adverso statis, gladiatorio animo perrumpere. Luther, of course, couldn’t have cared less and responded in his own well known vociferous way.

Someone once suggested that the Reformers paid too much attention to the question of the Eucharist. What that suggestion fails to apprehend is that the Eucharist stood at the very center of 16th century European theology. It wasn’t ‘a’ question or ‘a’ significant issue- it was ‘the’ central question as it has to do with how redemption works.

The fact that it is no longer the central focus of Christian theology demonstrates how far the Church has strayed from its core. Our anthropocentric ‘man-ology’ has replaced Zwingli’s (and Paul’s for that matter) utterly theocentric ‘the-ology’.

 

(Zwingli’s study at his home in Zurich)(Photo by Jim West)(Stop stealing my photos, people…)

Popular Quackery and Scholarly Esotericism

This delightful phrase is used by Antonio Lombatti in a posting today in which he takes to task BAR’s latest entry in the Talpiot Tomb fiasco.  He is 100% right when he suggests that most archaeological discoveries find themselves described and published either in venues of popular quackery or in dusty and inaccessible tomes of scholarly esotericism.  This needs to change or the quackery and esoteriscism will blind the masses to the authentic facts.

This is why, by the way, I think Eric Cline and Aren Maeir - among a few others - are doing such important work.  Eric addresses the problem of quackery and Aren publishes (on the Safi blog) reliable and important archaeological facts and both are widely accessible.  May their tribe increase!

Give Antonio’s post a read.  Well worth it for the above phrase alone and other good insights.

Athens and Jerusalem: Why The Question Can’t Matter To Us

April’s asked us to offer our opinion of the relationship of the Academy to the Church based in the famous sentence of Tertullian.  My answer isn’t as long as any of the others which have so far been proffered because in my estimation the question doesn’t and can’t matter to us.  Tertullian is long dead and rightly so.  His utterly false dichotomy - which served in his time and for too many of his followers into the present time- to drive a wedge between intellect and inspiration, between reason and revelation, has caused more problems than it has solved and frustrated the search for truth both theological and secular in inestimable ways.

Had Tertullian’s hatred of the flesh (his own in particular) not gotten the upper hand, he would have realized that Church and Academy, Athens and Jerusalem, are one and the same.  Hence, the question can’t, and shouldn’t matter to us.  When it does, we simply demonstrate that we understand neither Church nor Academy and we adopt, albeit unwittingly, the same false dichotomy which drove Tertullian insane and into the arms of the spiritualists.

Joppa, Jaffa, Yafo: No Matter How You Spell It, It’s A Beautiful Site

And Aaron Burke has announced that the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project is now up and running. As we say down here in the South, ‘I’m fixin’ to add a link’ to the Archaeology Page of Biblical Studies Resources to it as well.

The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP) is an interdisciplinary cultural heritage project that addresses the history and archaeology of Jaffa. The project was initiated in January 2007 by its co-directors, Martin Peilstöcker (Israel Antiquities Authority) and Aaron A. Burke (University of California, Los Angeles). It is a collaborative effort between a number of participating institutions including its senior partners, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and other partners including Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany, and The Old Jaffa Development Company.

The activities of the JCHP consist of four major initiatives: research, publication, conservation, and outreach. Archaeological research at Jaffa includes the integration of marine and terrestrial archaeological excavations, environmental analyses, and GIS mapping. Historical research of the site in all periods is equally instrumental to properly understanding the cultural and environmental evolution of Jaffa through the ages. Like historical research, the study of Jaffa’s changing environment provides a better understanding of the factors that governed the site’s selection as both a settlement and major port along the coast of the southern Levant.

Take a look at the rest of the page.