Jew or Christian?

Some comments on those who posted their opinions in my last entry.

1. Jared said:

This should not deny, however, 1) local variations and 2) temporal variations in the Second Temple Period, even as they revolve around some core issues of Temple, Torah, exclusive worship of YHWH, etc.

Absolutely. This is one of those "givens" for me. I'm glad that Jared articulated it. I had a paragraph written to this effect, but deleted it before I posted the last entry because I felt that it was getting too long-winded.

2. Rebecca said:

I agree with those who argue that the parting of the ways was only a very gradual process (Annette Reed's book on the Fallen Angels brilliantly discusses this issue among others) - but that doesn't mean that Judaism didn't exist until the third century. To say that there is a continuum does not mean the phenomenon under discussion doesn't exist.

This is an absolutely essential point that many people unfortunately seem to miss. I hope Rebecca plans to publish something on this.

3. Deane said:

More to the topic of conversation--and it is an interesting one, too. I really think that the debate about the self-understanding of first-century Israelites (which is, I think, the concern of the debate) are very much more close in viewpoint to your own wider positions, than those of their opponents. In Annette Yoshiko Reed and Adam H. Becker’s collection (The Ways that Never Parted), the writers show how the assumptions underlying the early “Parting of the Ways” model, which posited a definitive break between Christianity and Judaism from the first or second century AD, cannot now be sustained.

I want to make something clear which I think is fuzzy. Long before Reed and Becker put out this collection, my doktorvater Jarl Fossum and my adopted doktorvater Alan Segal argued that Christianity was a Jewish movement long after the first century. I have been a loud advocate for this position myself both in my writing and in my classroom. You will always hear me talk about the NT literature as Jewish literature. I am not arguing that Christianity or Judaism in the first century or the second century were not multiform. Nor am I of the opinion that Christianity quickly became distinct from Judaism.

Now, having said this, at the same time I do not sustain the opinion that there was no separation between Judaism and Christianity in the first century. The creation of two separate religions from one was gradual, but it happened at different "moments" for different communities of believers within the traditions. For instance, for communities dominated by Gentiles, this separation happened more quickly than it did for communities maintaining their Jewishness. It also happened for different reasons, as complex as they are, including social identity formation alongside the most argued reasons which are usually christological or torah-related or the framing of orthodoxy.

As for the model of Boyarin, Reed, and Becker, who argue for a very late separation (if any at all), this model is not embraced by all nor has it become standard. If you haven't had a chance to read Giorgio Jossa's work yet, I highly recommend it. His important Italian book on this subject has just been translated into English: Jews or Christians?. He puts the brakes on all of this, and reassesses how the arguments for pluriformity are being (mis) used. He takes us back to Paul and the gospels, and asks us to look again from the perspective of a sociologist. Although I quibble with him over various interpretative points, I truly appreciate his candor and his willingness to reassess the current trends in biblical scholarship. Most interesting is his last chapter on Roman perspectives of Jews and Christians, and how early (60s) that they began making clear distinctions between these groups, treating them very differently from each other.

Enough for today. Must get to my writing.

Book Note: From Apocalypticism to Merkavah Mysticism (Andrei Orlov)

If you are interested in early Jewish mysticism and haven't seen this spectacular book yet, you should take a look even if it is at the library. It is a Brill volume, and a hefty one at that (483 pages). It is every bit as good as Orlov's first, The Metatron Enoch Tradition (Mohr Siebeck, 2005).

From Apocalypticism to Merkavah Mysticism is a collection of previously published essays from Orlov's pen that examine Slavonic pseudepigrapha (2 Enoch, Apocalypse of Adam, Ladder of Jacob, 3 Baruch) in terms of their importance for the development of theophanic and angelological imagery crucial to early Jewish mysticism. He examines the traditions of exalted patriarchs: Enoch, Adam, Noah, Jacob, and Moses. These texts are normally not touched by scholars of Jewish mysticism, most likely because of the language barrier - how many knew or know Slavonic? So Orlov, whose scholarly love is mysticism, has overcome that barrier and brings his extensive knowledge of the mystical traditions into his analyses of the Slavonic materials.

But that is not all. If you are looking for a comprehensive bibliography on the Slavonic pseudepigrapha, you will find it here. It occupies the entire first part of Orlov's book, the first 100 pages.

Book Note: The Great Stem of Souls. Reconstructing Mandaean History (Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley)

Gorgias Press released in 2005 a book by Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandaean History. For those of you interested in Mandaeism and Gnosticism, this is a must-have reference book. It is a modern reconstruction of Mandaean history.

How did Buckley achieve this? By studying the colophons in manuscript editions of the Ginza, Canonical Prayerbook, Book of John, and other sources including Lady Drower's personal papers and letters given to Buckley by Drower's daughter. Colophons are lists of scribes and the scribal postscripts that are appended to most Mandaean manuscripts. The list of scribes extends from the current copyist all the way back to the first scribe recorded to have copied the manuscript. They present the name of the scribe and his lineage. It is quite genius I think to work through these lists as a way to resurrect Mandaean history.

I find it extremely interesting that some of the names recovered are names of women priests who were initiated into the religion by their biological fathers who were priests. This view is against the dominant one in scholarship, that there weren't ever women Mandaean priests. Buckley says this is wrong, and quotes several present-day Mandaeans who remember their ancestors talking about women priests in the past. Buckley has detected 24 women priests in the Mandaean colophons. The dates for the women she detected: ca. 200, 700, 750-800, 1300, 15th c. to early 16th c., 17th c. to mid-19th c. (pp. 181-182).

In the end, Buckley postulates that the Mandaeans are at least as old as 30 CE, that they left Palestine via the Wadi Hauran route and went to Media. Although they may have initially been a Jewish group connected to John the Baptist, they turned against Judaism in much the same way that the Jewish-Christians polemicized against Paul and pro-Gentile Christianity. She thinks that their Gnostic religiosity is very old, that they may be our oldest example of mid-first-century Gnostics. By 200 CE they were well-established in Media and lived along the trade routes tied to the Silk Road. It is in Media, she suggests, that their traditions absorbed Zoroastrian and maybe Christian ideas. She suggests that "we view the Mandaeans as the earliest example of a wide-ranging group - possible moving from Palestine to Media - creating our first evidence for Gnostic religiosity" (p. 341).

Book Note: Coptic in 20 Lessons (Bentley Layton)

My desk copy of Bentley Layton's grammar has arrived, and I must say that I am surprised - pleasantly so!

I was worried that his introductory grammar would be written so that the language was inaccessible for undergraduates. I expected something similar to his extraordinary grammar, A Coptic Grammar, a book not for the linguistically-challenged!

Not only are my worries set aside, but I have decided to embrace Coptic in 20 Lessons and use it this fall as my introductory grammar instead of Lambdin, even though this does mean that I will have to work through all the vocabulary and exercises anew, and replace my old ways of talking about grammatical points with Layton's verbage.

The grammar is laid out well with complete paradigms in each lesson. The exercises (once you get going) are taken from the literature (yeah!), so no nonsense sentences to deal with. And the best part of the book is that all those little things that you encounter and try to figure out once you start reading, are explained by Layton as he goes. So he talks about things like reading from a manuscript and scribal practices - where superlinear strokes are placed, when scribes don't write certain letters, and so forth. So the book is a nice combination between seasoned information and beginning grammar.

It looks like students will only be able to get through one chapter a week though. So if you are used to getting through Lambdin's grammar in a semester, I don't think that is going to happen with Layton's grammar, unless there are a few chapters that can be doubled up in a week. The last part of the book contains three chapters from Coptic Mark. Layton suggests that students can finish the grammar and read the entire Gospel of Mark in two semesters.

So here I go, changing my book order, and hoping I don't live to regret it!

Book Note: The Bible in the Syriac Tradition (Sebastian Brock)

I don't know how many of you are aware of Gorgias Press, but it is worth knowing about if you don't already. They started up four years ago to feature publications on subjects pertaining to Near East-Middle East. They publish both new titles and reprints of rare books in the areas of Arabic and Islamic studies, archaeology, classics, history, religion, languages and linguistic, Jewish studies, Syriac studies, and more.

An example of their excellent publications in areas that other publishers do not touch is Sebastian Brock's Gorgias Handbook, The Bible in Syriac Tradition. Gorgias published it last year (2006). It is a compilation of two earlier separate studies published by Brock: a small booklet he called The Bible in Syriac Tradition (SEERI, 1988); and the last chapter in volume 3: The Hidden Pearl: The Syrian Orthodox Church and its Ancient Aramaic Heritage (Rome, 2001).

This book is extremely valuable because it lays out the biblical traditions of the Syrian Christians, traditions that are not so familiar to many biblical scholars who are trained in Greek and Hebrew and who study traditions west of Edessa. So the book covers everything from the Peshitta to the Syro-Hexapla to the Diatessaron to Philoxenian and Harclean. The use of the Syriac Bible in preaching, liturgy, and Syriac spirituality are also discussed.

Brock presents us here with a handy overview of what the Syrian Christians were reading, and how it is different from other bibles in the ancient world. He includes a fantastic bibliography on the Syriac Bible, so all the resources are listed out by category (e.g., Jacob of Edessa, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Old Syriac Gospels, Peshitta, etc.).

And the cost? Only $38. For more information about the book and ordering from Gorgias, click here.

The Religion of No Religion: An Interview with Jeffery Kripal

The California Literary Review has just posted an excellent interview with Jeff Kripal about his new book: Esalen. I blogged on his book earlier this summer here. Jeff is my department chair at Rice. His book is written on a contemporary movement (the human potential movement), about "religion" that many in our society would consider "forbidden" or "heretical" or "no religion at all." So I post the interview link here, for those of you interested in reading Jeff's interview about a contemporary form of forbidden religion.

Top Ten Recommendations for Books on Biblical Orality-Scribality

Many of you have been writing to ask me for a reading list for studies in orality-scribality in biblical literature. So here are my top ten picks in alphabetical order:

1. Samuel Byrskog, Story as History, History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
2. David M. Carr. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
3. William A. Graham. Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
4. Richard A. Horsley with Jonathan A. Draper. Whoever Hears YOU Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999.
5. Richard A. Horsley, Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley (eds.). Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.
6. Martin S. Jaffee. Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
7. Werner Kelber, The Oral and Written Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.
8. Terence C. Mournet, Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency. WUNT 2:105, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005.
9. Susan Niditch. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature, Library of Ancient Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.
10. D. C. Parker. The Living Text of the Gospels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Composition in an Oral-Literate Culture and a Book Note: A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Amin Sweeney)

What does a book about contemporary literacy in Malay have to do with biblical studies? Quite a bit actually. As I continue to prepare my paper "Memory and the Sayings of Jesus: Contemporary Experimental Exercises in the Transmission of Jesus Traditions," I find myself drawn to all kinds of studies on orality and literacy. Sweeney's book, A Full Hearing, is particularly interesting to me because it examines a society dominated by orality but encountering literacy. Fascinating is Chapter 9, "Oral Orientation in Written Composition," in which Sweeney describes the shape of Malay literature, a literature preserving orality. He writes on pp. 307-308:

"The introduction of print literacy - which brought with it the possibilities already realized in the 'donor' cultures - did not cause a clean break with the past. Even those highly literate in a Western language who rejected the old modes of expression found themselves in a battle with the past when they wrote in Malay, for the language brought with it the past, a past of radically oral manuscript culture...The introduction of print literacy did not cause an immediate change in the general state of mind. The natural tendency was to perceive the new in terms of familiar schemata. The result was that even the educated sector of the populace continued to favor a paratactic, formulaic, copious, repetitive, narrative, and concrete mode of expression. Such a mode was necessary for effective communication in an oral or aurally consuming society; in a print culture, it is not: what became redundant in print now strikes us as mere verbosity."

When we think about the oral-scribal culture of the ancient world, and the type of literature that we are dealing with by and large, we see a similar oral mode of expression dominating the writing. What our early Christian literature is, is literature produced within orality, often as a support for oral performance behaviors, including reading which was an oral-aural enterprise.

I am more and more convinced as I continue to immerse myself in these studies, that our old way of framing the Synoptic Problem (and the Thomas Problem) just is not correct. We don't seem to have a good enough handle on how the ancient peoples actually composed literature, and for what purposes. We must push head on in the direction of orality-scribality if we are ever to have a chance to work out these issues fully, and we must leave behind the cut-and-paste literary redaction model, which may work for our world of composition, but has little to do with oral consciousness and composition of works within that type of environment.

Book Note: Ancient Gnosticism (Birger Pearson)

A great book! Finally we have a user-friendly introduction to Gnosticism, written by the preeminent scholar of Gnosticism, Professor Birger Pearson. This book is a gold mine, containing the ideas and ruminations of someone who has been in the forefront of scholarship on the Nag Hammadi texts since the beginning. Professor Pearson has written some of the first (and latest!) articles, translations, and commentaries on many of the Nag Hammadi documents.

Now he gives us a textbook about the subject, written with the student audience in mind. It is broken down into the following chapters: What is Gnosticism?; Heresiological Reports on Early Gnostic Teachers and Systems; Sethian or Classical Gnosticism; Gnostic Biblical Interpretation: The Gnostic Genesis; Basilides and Basilidian Gnosis; Valentinus and Valentinian Gnosis; Three-Principle Systems; Coptic Gnostic Writings of Uncertain Affiliation; Thomas Christianity; Hermes Trismegistus and Hermetic Gnosis; Mani and Manichaeism; The Mandaeans: A Surviving Relic of Ancient Gnosis.

This is the book that I have always wanted to write, and wish I would have written. It completely integrates the gnostic literature with the gnostic testimonies and witnesses from patristic sources. Each section references various primary readings, so students can read that literature in conjunction with the textbook.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested to learn more about Gnosis. I plan to replace my older book choices for my Gnostic Gospels course with Pearson's, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Because it is new, it is on sale at Amazon for $16.50!

Book Note: Jared Calaway's Review of Peter Schaefer's Book, Jesus in the Talmud

If you haven't seen it yet, it is worth reading. On Antiquitopia, Jared Calaway has a very detailed review of Peter Schaefer's newest, Jesus in the Talmud. I haven't read the book myself yet, but it has been on my list (along with a huge stack sitting here in my office - gosh there have been some good books released lately!). Thanks Jared for an insightful review.

As for who the counternarrative might be directed to, maybe it isn't. Perhaps the narrative is not counternarrative or polemic with an opponent, but simply represents a formulation of the Jesus traditions within rabbinism for rabbinism?

The Laughing Jesus in the Gospel of Judas

On Jim Davila's JUDAS WATCH, he has tracked two recent reviews of Pagels-King, Reading Judas. On June 24, Stephen Prothero's review appeared in the New York Times here. On June 27, Bruce Chilton reviewed their book in the New York Sun here. Neither reviewer appears very convinced that this new take on Judas - the good Judas - is going to take us anywhere or go anywhere. And Stephen Prothero's review is particularly insightful, when he questions how meaningful Judas' Jesus is when he laughs so much at the disciples.

Although Pagels and King attend with care to the ironies of a text that both attacks Christian martyrdom and sets Judas up as the first Christian martyr, they are less effective in dealing with the most disturbing feature of this gospel: Jesus’ sarcastic laughter. In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs no fewer than four times. He laughs not with his disciples but at them — for worshiping incorrectly and for misunderstanding his teachings. “Teacher, why are you laughing at us?” Judas asks. Good question. Pagels and King devote scant attention to it, responding simply that this laughter is intended to spur Jesus’ disciples on to “higher spiritual vision.” To me, however, it just sounds mean-spirited, turning Jesus into the sort of person you wouldn’t like, much less worship.

My response to Prothero's concern is that Jesus' laugh is mean-spirited, directed at the disciples, including Judas, who are trapped in a fate they can't escape. They all worship Ialdabaoth, including Judas, who is as evil as ever. We must keep in mind that this gospel is not a historical representation of what happened between Jesus and his disciples, but is a historical representation of the opinion of the Sethian Gnostics about the apostolic Christians whom they associated with the twelve disciples and a demonic cursed Judas. The Sethian Gnostics are laughing at the apostolic Christians whom they think are ignorant. Why is it shocking to us, so disturbing? Because we are used to hearing only the mean-spirited voices of the apostolic Christians like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius who say equally nasty things about the Gnostics. What this text does for us is engage the other side from the perspective of the other side. This is invaluable as we try to sort out how the normative traditions emerged as they did!

At any rate, these issues I take up in much detail in The Thirteenth Apostle which will be released in Europe in October and the States at SBL in November.

The specific issue of Jesus' laughter is one that I am discussing in a presentation that I will be delivering at the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego. Here is a synopsis of my talk.

The Subversive Gospel of Judas and Sethian Humor
to be presented by April DeConick
Society of Biblical Literature
Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism Session
San Diego 2007

This paper will explore the subversive textures of the Gospel of Judas, particularly in terms of its employment of reverse exegesis to critique mainstream Christianity. Traditional genres and stories are subverted in order to expose their hidden meanings, meanings that support Sethian perspectives while berating the mainstream Christian, in particular the confession of the Church, its tradition of apostolic authority, and its coveted atonement theology. The result is Sethian humor that mocks the "ignorance" of mainstream Christianity in, what I think, are frighteningly profound ways. In the end, I will attempt to expose a Sethian reading of this gospel, whose “hero” Judas is really an “anti-hero,” an evil man associated with the demon Ialdabaoth. His tragedy is used to comment on the ignorance of mainstream Christians, who do nothing more than worship Ialdabaoth and curse the very man who made possible their atonement. The Sethian author(s) argues very logically and profoundly given his premises, if Judas was a demon working for the demons that rule this world, than the evil sacrifice he made of Jesus’ body was to the archons who rule this world, not the supreme God. This means that the eucharist is ineffective in terms of redemption, because it serves only to worship and give power to the god of this world who has entrapped us, not the supreme God who liberates us. Everything in this gospel, from the traditional confession story to the traditional betrayal story, is turned upside down and inside out to poke fun at those who do not share Gnosis.

Book Note: Not by Paul Alone (David Nienhuis)

You wouldn't guess it from the title, but a new book on James has just been released by Baylor University Press. It is written by David R. Nienhuis (Assistant Professor at Seattle Pacific University), Not By Paul Alone: The Formation of the Catholic Epistle Collection and the Christian Canon (2007). The book is about the Catholic Epistles - James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, and Jude - as a canonical collection, rather than as individual letters or tracts. The hope is that by studying them as a collection, we can learn something about when the epistle of James was written and for what purpose(s).

Thus the book includes hefty and informative coverage of the patristic literature in reference to the history of the catholic epistles, including some very helpful charts organizing the reception history of the epistles within the patristic literature of the Syrian church, the Eastern church, the Western church, and the manuscript traditions through the fifth century.

The rest of the book takes up the problem of James - as a letter and as the leader of the Jerusalem church - and describes the first and second century references to him even in gnostic sources. It is too bad that Nienhuis did not know about the Tchacos Codex which contains another version of the 1 Apocalypse of James with significant variations from the Nag Hammadi version. One such variation is the story of James' martyrdom, which is rehearsed at the end of the Tchacos version. This is not preserved in the NH version. Another is an explanation for his epithet "the Just", an epithet which was given to him because he was serving the Demiurge, God the Just, before Jesus intervened and brought him gnosis.

Nienhuis finds it odd that no trace, allusion, or reference to the epistle of James can be located in any of these materials. This leads him to consider the letter of James to be pseudonymous and late. So then he must find a reason for its writing. This reason he thinks can be found in the collection itself - that the author of the collection was creating a "Pillars" of the church collection. Because we would expect "some kind of deliberate engagement with the Pauline witness," one that represented the "Catholic" position, James was written (pp. 160-161).

Excerpt: "The letter of James was probably written sometime in the middle of the second century, possibly by someone associated with the church in Jerusalem, given that church's keen interest in maintaining James' authority...The letter was born out of the same broader anti-Marcionite logic that fueled the composition of 2 Peter and the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian. It was written to forge together a Jerusalem Pillars letter collection to balance the emphases of the Pauline collection, defend the authority of the Jewish scriptures, and uphold the continuation of the covenants - in short, to protect against the theological distortions that tended to arise whenever readers championed Paul alone."

If you are interested in issues of canon development or the study of James, this book offers a lot for you. If you are a scholar who thinks that the letter of James is old and written by James, this thesis has much to answer to (if it doesn't persuade you to Nienhuis' position). It did occur to me when reading the book that the reasons that Nienhuis outlines for its pseudonymous creation, may in fact be reasons that an old letter that no longer supported the apostolic church doctrinally (especially its position on the Torah and its disinterest in christology) was dug out of the archives and refreshed, taking on new relevance at a new time in the church's history.

RBL Review of Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas

It was very nice to come into my office this morning and open my e-mail to find the newest installment of RBL, and on it a review praising my book.

Professor Eric Noffke (Facoltà Valdese di Teologia, Rome, Italy) has written and published a very complimentary review of my book Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas. It can be accessed at RBL here. I am very flattered that he sees it as a "great book" that "sets the stage for a new chapter in this field of research."

Perhaps the most meaningful part of his review to me personally though is that he felt in my writing my conviction that the Gospel of Thomas is one of our most significant early Christian texts, not because it is a sensational thing to say, but because this is where my "serious scientific research" has led me. He writes:

To date, the Gospel of Thomas has been valued mainly by those scholars who wished to picture the historical Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and self-consciously a popular preacher, a wise man whose image was changed by his disciples after his death into that of an apocalyptic prophet of judgment and doom. A well known and effective popular writer of this line of scholarship is, for instance, Elaine Pagels. But many other scholars reject this approach both because it forces the historical data we have on Jesus and because it is founded on a debatable interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas that, above all, decontextualizes the historical Jesus. That is why most scholars see this apocryphal Gospel as suspect but also with the uneasy feeling that somehow "something good" is hiding in it. DeConick's book will free the Gospel of Thomas from these suspicions and bring it back to the center of the research on the historical Jesus and of Christian origins.

Book Note: The Judas Brief (Greenberg)

There are a number of tradebooks on Judas that are now appearing, and I will try to keep track of them (in addition to the academic books and articles) on my blog. If you hear of any appearing that you don't see me posting about, please let me know so that I can add them to my blog. Thanks in advance.

One tradebook that I have just heard about is Mr. Greenberg's book on Judas in the gospels and whether or not he really betrayed Jesus. Mr. Greenberg says no. His book has just been released and is called The Judas Brief. Mr. Greenberg is an attorney in NY city, but also a popular author who has written several controversial books on biblical topics. In his newest book on Judas and who really killed Jesus, he argues that "the Jewish authorities did not seek to have Jesus put to death and furthermore acted to save him and his followers and other innocent Jews from a crushing military assault by Roman soldiers. The true villain in all of this," says Greenberg, "was Herod Antipas, the Roman ruler of Galilee."

On his blog, he has posted his own reviews of Pagels-King and Kasser-Meyer-Wurst here and has a posting on the Gospel of Judas and its relationship with the Gospel of Mark here. He rightly notes that the Gospel of Judas is somehow connected to Mark.

I also discuss the connection between the Gospel of Judas and Mark in The Thirteenth Apostle. It is clear to me that the author of the Gospel of Judas knew and used the storyline from the Gospel of Mark as his basic story, particularly in terms of Mark's portrayal of the disciples of Jesus.

Book Note: Reinventing Jesus

If you haven't seen it already, Tony has a very detailed posting reviewing the book Reinventing Jesus. I haven't read the book, so I can't comment except to say that Tony's analysis places it squarely in that camp of books that tries to use bits and pieces of scholarship to support an apology for the historicity of the canonical materials and the inauthenticity of the apocryphal materials. I must say this rhetoric is getting tiresome to me, although at the same time it is disconcerting how selective reading of scholarship and theories is producing this sort of apologetic work with an edge. Thanks to Tony for posting on this.

Breaking News about the Critical Edition for Judas

Gregor Wurst kindly e-mailed me this afternoon, to tell me that (hooray!) the critical edition of the Tchacos Codex is published. Here is the link to Amazon if you want to purchase it as a very discounted price. The book is called The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos. Finally the photos are published.

Book Description from Amazon

For the first time in a single volume, discover the complete text of Codex Tchacos—the remarkable ancient papyrus book that contains the Gospel of Judas. Hidden for 1,600 years in an Egyptian cave, only to be found, traded, and all but destroyed before its restoration began in 2001, Codex Tchacos contains four texts that shed important light on the ancient world and the emergence of Christianity.

Featuring beautifully rendered, full-color photographs of the original papyrus pages alongside the Coptic text and its English translation, this critical edition provides everything needed for a full examination of the Codex. The Letter of Peter to Philip provides a mystical, Gnostic picture of Jesus; the text entitled James presents Jesus discussing the meaning of life and death with his brother James; the Gospel of Judas casts a new light on Judas' betrayal; and the previously unknown book of Allogenes, though fragmentary, portrays Jesus as a stranger who brings light to a world of darkness. Ideal for the scholar and layperson alike, these texts are published here by an international team of scholars and supplemented by insightful introductions, indices, and other revealing, explanatory essays.

Book Note: The Gnostics: Identifying an Early Christian Cult (Alastair Logan)

A student of mine has just returned Alastair Logan's book, The Gnostics, to my library. She had borrowed it from me a while ago when I had first received it in the mail, and before I had a chance to read it. So now I am doing so with great pleasure.

I highly recommend Logan's book, which in part is a response to many North American scholars who have been attempting to purge the Academy of the Gnostics, at least as a category.

Although I think that the North Americans have made a good point - that Gnosticism was not a religion, but is a modern category - I have chosen myself to continue to talk about Gnostics and their diversity. As I explain in several of my articles, and again in my book The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says, the Valentinian Gnostics were a group that was within the apostolic church system. Although they met privately in some type of lodge or school setting, they also attended the apostolic churches, joined in their rituals, and interpreted scriptures in similar fashion. The Sethian Gnostics (who wrote the Gospel of Judas among many other books that we have preserved at Nag Hammadi), however, defined themselves outside and even against the apostolic churches. They met privately, had their own rituals, and engaged in reverse exegesis, reading scripture in opposite ways of the apostolic Christians.

So for me, Gnostic is a very useful term, as long as we don't lump everyone in the same pot. This means that I am really glad to now be reading Logan's take, which appears to have many overlaps with my own.

Logan uses sociological theories to distinguish between cults and sects, and argues that the Valentinians were a schismatic movement or a sectarian movement within Christianity, while the Gnostics (=Sethians?) were a cult functioning outside the Christian Church. I am not convinced that the origins of the Gnostics (=Sethians?) was in Antioch at the end of the first century. Against this proposal of Logan, I would trace their origins even earlier and to Alexandria. The last chapter is very intriguing, since Logan wonders aloud whether or not the Hypogeum of the Aurelii in Rome is a Gnostic burial site.

If you haven't seen this book, but are interested in all things Gnostic (as I am), this is a must-read summer book for your list. It is short - only 150 pages - but engaging in so many of the right ways.

Update 6-17-07: Judy Redman posts on Thomas and Gnosticism in relation to Logan

Hector Avalos on the End of Biblical Studies

Professor Avalos is publishing a new book due out in July, The End of Biblical Studies. I have already pre-ordered Professor Avalos' book. I will post a report on it after I have had a chance to read it and digest his opinions.

The description of it appears to follow his tough critique of our society and biblical studies in general. There are many points on which I agree with him (and am very glad to hear him voicing these points in the SBL open forum), and some which I do not (i.e., I do not see our work as necessarily elitist, completely irrelevant, nor do I think that none of us in the discipline is concerned for the poor - my husband in fact is a poverty lawyer).

The one point that continues to resound for me, however, is his statement,

"The fact is that biblical studies is still functioning as a handmaiden to theology and faith communities rather than as a discipline relevant to those outside of faith communities."

This is a point that I myself have been very concerned about in the past, and continue to be so. I am not sure how the field of biblical studies can ever be a serious field of historical study as long as it remains tied to and controlled by faith communities and their needs.

I think that the first step in the creation and survival of the discipline as a historical discipline in the humanities is to develop an uncompromising and unapologetic historical methodology (see sidebar for past posts on this topic). I don't think we have successfully done this yet because too many in our field are too concerned about the theological consequences of our findings. But theology has to be separated from historical studies. These are two separate disciplines, period.

The second thing we have to do is change the name of our discipline. We should not be a discipline that studies Biblical Literature. We should be a discipline that studies Religion in Antiquity (subsets including: Ancient Israel, Early Judaism, Early Christianity, and so on). We have been chained to the canon, and its preservation, because of faith concerns, not historical ones. It is time to make the change.

How different would our association look if we were to rename ourselves the Society for the Study of Religion in Antiquity or some comparable name? If so named, we would have to take seriously critical historical scholarship, and stop worrying about being caretakers of the Bible and the contemporary faith traditions that rely on it.

Book Note: The Earliest Christian Artifacts (Larry Hurtado)

Professor Larry Hurtado has written a helpful guide to the manuscript tradition in early Christianity. The book is called The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. He gives an outline of our earliest manuscripts in chapter one. Then he discusses the rise of the Codex and its desirability among Christians. He asks why the Codex became an early Christian convention. He suggests that one of the main reasons was its portability, that modest-sized codices may have been attractive and serviceable for itinerant Christian teachers and evangelists, perhaps even as early as the first century. But that this factor becomes less of an issue in the second and third centuries when Hurtado argues that books were being prepared for Christians in residence (p. 67). He includes chapters on the Nomina Sacra and the Staurogram, subjects which he has explored in earlier publications and presentations. His final chapter describes other scribal features such as Codex size, use of columns, margins, lines per page, reader's aids, and corrections.

His work is highly interpretative, since one of the main goals of the work appears to me to understand why the Christian scribes used the Codex, why they used the abbreviations they did, what the size of the manuscript means, and so forth. His conclusions suggest that these can tell us something significant about their faith and its performance, that the specific nature of the manuscript is an artifact of early Christian usage and religious life (p. 189).

Expository Times producing an important series of books

Paul Foster just mentioned to me that last year's articles on the apostolic fathers published in Expository Times 117, have been put into a book. It is available for under $30 from Continuum. This is fantastic, especially for purposes of teaching.

He also mentioned that it is possible that the other gospel articles from Expository Times 118 (I mentioned them in yesterday's post) will be collected into a similar volume with a few extra entries. What a great idea!

Here is the table of contents for the apostolic fathers edition:

Apostolic Fathers and the Struggle for Christian Identity (Helmut Koester)
The Didache (Jonathon Draper)
1 Clement (Andrew Gregory)
2 Clement (Paul Parvis)
Fragments of Papias (Charles Hill)
The Apology of Quadratus (Paul Foster)
The Shepherd of Hermas (Joseph Verheyden)
The Epistle of Barnabas (James Carleton Paget)
The Epistles of Ignatius (Paul Foster)
The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (Michael Holmes)
The Martyrdom of Polycarp (Sara Parvis)
The Epistle to Diognetus (Paul Foster)