Bob Todd of Fortress Press sent along a review copy of this new volume and it certainly is quite engaging. Even fascinating. The author is Professor of Old Testament at Marburg, and he isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, without ability. The entire review is now complete and can be accessed at the links below.
Chapters 1-8 (pdf).
Chapters 9-12 (pdf).
I got a phone call a couple of hours ago from the Obama campaign. They were seeking donations. I don’t donate to politicians. I don’t even check the little box on my tax return to give them funds. I don’t have enough money to buy one, so I don’t even try.
But Exxon has plenty of money. Billions and billions in profits each quarter- and 4 times that each year. So they can buy all the politicians they like- including the aforementioned Obama (by means of proxies of course, called employees of the company).
Obama’s made a big deal of refusing public funding. He can afford to refuse federal funds because he has lots of individual and corporate donors. Of course he once upon a time swore he would only make use of public funding- but that’s politics. Stick your finger in the wind and follow the plumes of smoke you’ve just blown.
The Democratic National Committee may be trying to get some mileage out of recent news about oil industry contributions to Republican Sen. John McCain, launching a web site spoofing the idea of McCain sharing his presidential ticket with Exxon. But they may have found an unwelcome surprise in a just-released analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. Turns out, the biggest recipient of contributions from Exxon executives and employees during this campaign is not McCain. It’s Obama. The non-partisan center writes: “Through June, Exxon employees have given Obama $42,100 to McCain’s $35,166. Chevron favors Obama $35,157 to $28,500, and Obama edges out McCain with BP $16,046 vs. $11,500.”
Now do you see why I’m so disgusted with the two parties and long for someone, a real person, who will actually take to heart the fact that he or she works for us.
God is not only a Father, but the best and most merciful of all fathers, however ungrateful, rebellious, and wicked sons we may be – provided only we throw ourselves upon his mercy! — John Calvin
I’m extra pleased to be able to brag on my friend Chris Tilling who has just been selected for the position of New Testament Tutor at St Mellitus College and St Paul’s Theological Centre, in London, the lovely United Kingdom, Europe, The World, The Universe. Here’s the official announcement:
SPTC has appointed Chris Tilling as its new tutor in New Testament Studies to teach across the whole of St Mellitus College. Chris has studied at St Andrew’s University and London School of Theology and is finishing off a doctorate under Max Turner in Pauline Christology. He is currently based in Germany, has been a regular contributor to the English-German Colloquium in New Testament in Tübingen, has written several articles on aspects of New Testament studies, and has translated many others from German into English. He is the author of a very popular theology blog site entitled Chrisendom. He is married to Anja, and enjoys golf (7 handicap), football and snooker.
On the other hand, he could have at least mentioned his San Diego SBL roomie… the git. And, by the way, his technorati ranking is WAY below mine which means I’m more popular than him. So nanny nanny poo poo! 
Seriously now, I’m so happy for him and wish him much success at his new post!
Read his take on the meeting here. Sounds like it was a lot of fun.
There’s a grand essay in The Nation by Adina Hoffman (with thanks to Chuck Jones for noticing it) titled ‘What Lies Beneath‘. Be sure to read the whole thing. Here are some fun tidbits: [originally published August 6]
Most clever of all was Elad’s decision to fix on archaeology as the key to winning the hearts and minds of the wider Israeli Jewish public. Archaeology has, of course, long been something like Israel’s national pastime, a “scientific” discipline that, in this particular cultural context, has often blurred into the realm of major-motion-picture-scale mythmaking (see under: Masada). Since the early days of the state, archaeology has provided vivid settings and props that have helped Israelis both secular and religious to dramatize the stories they like to tell themselves about their historic bond to the modern homeland.
Or in other words, archaeology has been put to purely political purposes.
Elad’s use of archaeology may be entirely cynical, driven more by the desire to establish ethnic facts on the ground than to explore what lies below ground: settlers are quick, after all, to pour foundations and erect fortresslike homes right over the relics they declare so precious to the Jewish people. Their scheme has, however, worked like a charm. After a bit of legal wrangling in 1998, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Jerusalem municipality relinquished to Elad the management of the area around the Old City walls, including the City of David archaeological park, providing the fringe group with major revenues and mainstream legitimization. Elad, in turn, hired the cash-strapped Israel Antiquities Authority to excavate the area on its behalf–funding and tightly controlling all the digging that takes place there. By various means, Elad has over the course of the past several years also managed to seize hold of many of the public spaces in Silwan–tree-filled plots and small patches of green that used to be open to the residents and have now been fenced, locked and deemed archaeological sites, off-limits to the villagers. (Again, settler home-building on the same sites often follows.)
Yes, do read it all.
UPDATE: Reporting from the just concluding meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies, Niels Peter Lemche writes on the Biblical Studies List:
ELAD, is becoming a major problem. Eric Meyers of Duke University gave a report [at EABS on the organization]. One of their projects [is a] tunnel [] to construct an underground synagogue directly under the Haram-esh-Sharif. The project has at the moment been banned by the Israeli High Court. … I suggest that subscribers will overview the activities of this organization very closely. It is immense[ly] [wealthy], including [having received funds from] Russian oligarchs. [Eric] Meyers [indicated that their] budget [is] in the [neighborhood] of $15.000.000 for the tunnel project.
Die Press reports some TC news out of Münster-
Mit einer neuen Methode wollen Wissenschafter in Münster Verfälschungen biblischer Handschriften aufdecken. Die sogenannte Kohärenzmethode ermögliche es, “die vorliegenden 5000 Handschriften des Neuen Testaments zu sortieren und zu vergleichen”, erläuterte der Direktor des Instituts für Neutestamentliche Textforschung der Uni Münster, Holger Strutwolf, zum Abschluss eines Kolloquiums am Mittwoch in Münster laut Kathpress. Das sei ein wichtiger Schritt auf dem Weg zur “Editio Critica Maior” des Neuen Testaments. Das Institut will bis 2030 den Ausgangstext der neutestamentlichen Überlieferung möglichst ursprungsnah rekonstruieren.
It’s nice to see a subject so esoteric as textual criticism getting some press. Read the entire account.
Like the ‘Talpiot Tomb’ silliness, the ‘Messiah Tablet’, which only says what it is purported to say because of a reading based entirely on a restored missing text, will not go away. It’s still being discussed in the news. Case in point- the Christian Post:
Knohl contends to The New York Times that his reading of the fragmented text of line 80 “should shake our basic view of Christianity” because it presents the resurrection of after three days as a motif developed before Jesus and not unique to Christianity. The Jewish scholar takes his loose interpretation one step farther by arguing that “what happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story,” according to The Times. But many respectable biblical scholars are rejecting Knohl’s controversial reading of the text based on the fact that most of the text is missing. Even Knohl’s colleague, Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and also a professor at Hebrew University, finds his interpretation far-reaching. “In crucial places of the text there is a lack of text. I understand Knohl’s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of the text there are a lot of missing words,” said Bar-Asher in The Times article. … Ada Yardeni, a Hebrew language specialist, who published an article on the tablet over a year ago in the Hebrew-language journal Cathedra, also agreed that line 80 was illegible.
And perhaps the best lines from the report-
Professor Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, said the text was being restored to “say something which it may or may not say.” He acknowledged that Jesus was a “victim of sensationalism all the time” since a single part of the text was being used to create a “media experience.”
How true, how true. Thanks to Antonio ‘The Vigilent’ Lombatti for the tip.
Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can “reflect the love of God” in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt. Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between men and women, and the key issue for Christians is that they are faithful and lifelong, he believes. Dr Williams is known to be personally liberal on the issue but the strength of his views, revealed in private correspondence shown to The Times, will astonish his critics.
…
As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams recommitted the Anglican Communion to its orthodox position that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture at the Lambeth Conference, which closed on Sunday. However, in an exchange of letters with an evangelical Christian, written eight years ago when he was Archbishop of Wales, he described his belief that biblical passages criticising homosexual sex were not aimed at people who were gay by nature.
The whole ‘gay by nature’ supposition is as yet unproven. There’s no ‘gay gene’ so that, in fact, there are three reasons that people ‘become’ gay. 1) personal inclination to chicness. Let’s face it- there is in point of fact the Anne Heche syndrome- the gay for glory and fame mentality. 2) Abuse. There are children who are molested or emotionally abused and who turn towards males for the attention and love they lacked as children. You may dispute it, but you can’t deny it. And 3) we just don’t know. That’s the way the facts fall out now. We just don’t know why some people are gay. But to blame it on an unproven gene is simply dishonest. It’s more honest to say ‘we don’t know’ than to try to pretend we do.
Nevertheless, Williams is wrong when he dispenses with the biblical denunciation of homosexuality (same sex sex) and says it doesn’t apply to ‘monogamous, lifelong relations’. The biblical denunciation isn’t just aimed at men cruising for sex at parks and public toilets and airport restrooms. It is aimed at a distortion of purpose. It is, I have to say in agreement with our Catholic brothers, a ‘grave moral disorder’- whether caused by personal choice, the harm caused by others, or an unknown factor. Hence, Archbishop Williams, thou dost err.
Murderer. It’s not normally the first word that springs to mind when one hears the word ‘Pastor’. But ‘murdering Pastor’ nicely describes the ‘Rev.’ Howard Douglas, who killed a man for, yes you guessed it, money.
CNN notes
Porter, 57, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder, embezzlement, elder abuse and attempted murder. By the time the verdict was read, the once-lively town debate of whether Porter was to blame for Craig’s death had become one-sided, and most people, residents said, seemed resigned to a guilty verdict. Prosecutors say Porter had staged two car wrecks — one in 2002 that left Craig unable to walk and the other in 2004 that killed him — to cover up that he was stealing money from the man he had befriended.
Take a look at the photo of the ‘Pastor’. He sort of looks like Todd Bentley’s dad. Nonetheless, the ‘Pastor’ had apparently skipped that little part of the Bible that warns against the love of money just as he ignored the ‘you shall not murder’ bit.
