Lecture by Larry Hurtado at Rice University

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We at the Religious Studies Department at Rice University are very pleased to announce that Professor Larry Hurtado will deliver the Burkitt Lecture at Rice University on Wednesday, April 10th, 7-8 p.m. in the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library on the Rice campus. The public is invited to attend.

The title of his exciting talk is

"Revelatory Experience and Religious Innovation in Earliest Christianity"

.  He will talk about how powerful religious experiences came to be a major factor in producing significant religious innovations in earliest Christian circles, with special reference to the rapid emergence of the “dyadic” devotional pattern in which Jesus was reverenced along with God.

The Burkitt Foundation Lectures have been devoted to exploring issues in Catholic thought that are of interest to the university as well as to the Houston community. Founded in 1996, they have featured such distinguished speakers as

Mary Carruthers

,

Jean-Luc Marion

,

Mark Jordan

,

David Tracy

, and

Kocku von Stuckrad

.

Professor Hurtado is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and he now writes a blog on early Christianity called

Larry Hurtado's Blog

.  He has written a number of outstanding books on the devotional practices of the early Christians and their understandings of Jesus as God, all of which can be found on Amazon for reasonable prices.

Larry W. Hurtado,

God in New Testament Theology.

Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2010.  ISBN 978-0-687-46545-3.

Larry W. Hurtado,

How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?

Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2005.  xii + 234 pp.  ISBN 0-8028-2861-2.  

Larry W. Hurtado,

Lord Jesus Christ:  Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity

.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. (xxii+746 pp.). ISBN 0-8028-6070-2. 

Larry W. Hurtado,

At the Origins of Christian Worship:  The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion

.  The 1999 Didsbury Lectures.  Carlisle:  Paternoster Press, 1999, ISBN 0-85364-992-8.  US edition, Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2000, ISBN 0-8028-4749-8.  (xiii + 138 pp.).

Larry W. Hurtado,

One God, One Lord:  Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism

.  Philadelphia:  Fortress Press, 1988. (xiv + 178 pp.).  ISBN 0-8006-2076-3.  British edition by SCM Press.  Second edition, Edinburgh:  T. & T. Clark, 1998 (xxx + 178 pp.), reprint edition, London:  T&T Clark (Continuum), 2003.

Front Row Preview

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Today on "Front Row" produced by KUHA/KUFH Houston Public Radio, a preview of "Easter in Memory of Her" will air.  There will be interviews with me, Betty Adam, and Sonja Bruzauskas about our production and two soloists present portions of their parts.  It will air twice.  Once at noon on KUHA Classical and then again at 10 pm on KUFH News.  The link to Front Row's website is

HERE

.  It will be archived on their website tomorrow.  Hope you will listen to this historic production.

Let's Remember the Biblical Women at Easter: Huffington Post

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As you know, this Easter I have worked with Reverend Betty Adam of Christ Church Cathedral here in Houston to create an Easter event for Holy Saturday that would remember the biblical women.  My idea for the production was to focus on the faithfulness and feelings of the women who followed Jesus to Jerusalem and remained with him as he died. 

As I wrote the script with Betty, I "stayed" with each woman in her story as it is recorded in the bible, and as I did so I imagined what it would be like to be that woman.  What was her relationship with Jesus?  Why was she with him at his crucifixion?  What was going through her mind and what was she feeling in her heart? 

As I wrote, I realized how different each woman's relationship with Jesus was, and how their reactions to him were very personal, just as our own are.  I realized how much of their spirituality we have lost because we have forgotten to include them in our Easter services.

So I wrote a piece called "Remember the Biblical Women At Easter" and it has just been published by Huffington Post

HERE

. 

I hope that if you can't attend our special service on Holy Saturday, that you will join us in spirit during the hour 4-5 p.m. by rereading the women's stories in the bible and remembering their faithfulness and steadfastness, and their prominence in Jesus' life and death.  How do their stories touch you?

Jung Center Lecture on The Ancient New Age

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So much is going on this week.  If you are interested, I am going to be presenting some of the work I have been busy with this year as I have been writing my book

The Ancient New Age

.  The venue will be Thursday night (yes, Maudy Thursday) at the Jung Center, Houston, Texas.  Here is a

LINK

to more information including time and registration.

You are invited to "Easter in Memory of Her"

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I am excited to invite you to a special service that will be performed at Christ Church Cathedral (Houston, Texas) on Holy Saturday (March 30th) this year.

It is a service remembering the biblical women in the life of Jesus who followed him to the cross and remained steadfast by his side as he died.  The idea for this service came when Reverend Betty Adam approached me and asked me to help create a service that would feature the women followers of Jesus.  I was so honored and excited to get involved in this project and within a couple of weeks Betty and I had written a script and asked local musicians to get involved in creating an original score for voice and harp.

The musical performance and meditation features five women in the life of Jesus who remember Jesus as they stand near the cross and look on.  We hope that this remembrance of the women can become part of the traditional cycle of Easter services performed in Christian churches across the world.  We choose Holy Saturday because it is a silent time, a time vacated and empty when churches strip their altars and when clergy only perform last rites services.  We thought that this time, from 4-5 p.m., would be an appropriate time to remember the women who have been forgotten, whose voices we seldom hear, but who remained steadfast and faithful to Jesus, even to his death.

Anthony LeDonne and a Jesus course online

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Professor LeDonne is trying out something new.  He is offering an online course he calls Portraits of Jesus.  To find out more information, click on this link HERE. 

This is the course description: In this course we will examine some of the different "Jesuses" who have emerged through the ages, including several interpretations of Jesus in historical studies, and several interpretations of Jesus from art and literature. This course will weave together three primary threads: 1) the Jesus of history; 2) ancient representations of Jesus; and 3) the various modern Jesuses who embody various symbols, ideologies, collective memories, and cultural identities. Through lecture and discussion, we will examine diverse portraits of Jesus in history, literature, art, song, and film throughout history.

Book Note: Introduction to "Gnosticism" (Denzey Lewis)

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I was delighted yesterday when Nicola Denzey's new textbook on Gnosticism arrived in my office mailbox.  I had the pleasure of reading the book while it was in preparation, and I am excited to see it finally in print.  The book covers all the main issues of the Nag Hammadi literature and will be a perfect compliment to the Nag Hammadi Library if you are considering teaching a course on this literature, or if you are studying the Nag Hammadi texts independently.  The textbook clearly is designed from Denzey's experience teaching a course on Nag Hammadi literature over many years, so it focuses around the main schools of Gnostics that are represented in the Nag Hammadi library, plus a discussion of the other Nag Hammadi texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Hermetic literature.  The book contains maps, diagrams, timelines, and photos to illustrate the text.  At the end of each chapter are "Questions to Consider", "Key Terms" and "For Further Reading."

Campus Conversations on Judas

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Last week, I had the opportunity to talk to President Leebron of Rice University about my research.  A video was produced from that conversation by our media department and was posted as part of a series of talks that President Leebron is doing with our faculty: Campus Conversations with the President.  Hope you like it.

Is Jesus is "too holy" for sex?

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Thus is the title (

"Too holy" for Sex? The problem of a married Jesus

) of Becky Bratu's just-published piece (NBC News) on public reactions to the idea of "Jesus' wife".  She too sees how communally we are struggling with the problem of a sexual Jesus and how this transgresses our commonly (and cherished) Christian view of the Holy as male and celibate. 

Whether authentic or not (yet to be determined), our discussion of the Jesus' Wife papyrus is fascinating.  It shows us the faultlines, the borders, the limits of our theological views.  It shows how they were constructed hundreds of years ago, and have become "natural" for us.  They are part of our internal selves.  God is male and celibate.  Sexual desire is sin. 

Even after the counter-cultural sexual revolution of the 1960s, these parameters still grip our religious views.

Who's afraid of the married Jesus?

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The recent announcement of a papyrus fragment in which Jesus refers to his wife has brought us face to face with the sexual Jesus again.  And there are many people who do not like this image.  Something sacred feels threatened.  Corrupted.  The married Jesus is inconceivable.  It is impossible.  Maybe the text is a fake?  Or heresy.  Yes, that is it.  We dismiss it as heresy and feel relieved. 

Why is the idea of a married and sexual Jesus so inconceivable to us? Why do we see it as a corruption of the sacred?

If it is authenticated, then we have a second piece of evidence from an ancient Christian gospel that someone in the ancient world didn't have a problem with the married Jesus.  The first piece of evidence comes from the Gospel of Philip where Mary Magdalene is identified as Jesus' spouse.  The word used in that context has definitive sexual connotations (

koinonos

).  It means his consort, the woman he is yoked to sexually, his spousal partner.  Thus he kisses Mary in the Gospel of Philip, and is said to have three Marys in his life: his mother, his sister, and his spouse.  In the new fragment, the generic word (

shime

) is used.  It means "woman, wife". 

So no doubt about it.  There is a solid tradition in the ancient world that Jesus was married.  The tradition appears to come from the Valentinian Gnostics who envisioned marriage and sex as the greatest of sacred mysteries.  Their view of God reflected this.  The Godhead consisted of aspects of God like Truth, Life, Church, etc.  These aspects existed as married partners, and it was their sexual activities that generate the divine world and life.  Human marriages were believed to reflect the pattern of the divine marriages.  In the afterlife, one's spiritual self or angelic twin would continue to live as an married entity in a blissful state of eros.  So the Valentinians remembered Jesus as a married man with a sexual life.

Now it is true that this early Christian tradition did not survive.  It was identified as heresy by the Christians who did become dominant and eventually created the orthodox catholic view of Jesus. We wouldn't even know about it had it not been for these accidental discoveries of old papyrus that survived buried in Egyptian graves. 

My question is why did the sexual Jesus become the heretical Jesus while the glorification of the celibate male become the dominant orthodox view? 

We can't seem to get away from it.  We are back to sex and gender, and the distorted picture of the female body that Christianity has maintained. 

We are confronting holy misogyny.

We are looking directly through the eyes of the ancient male who valorized the male body while vulgarizing the female.

We are facing the fact that our Christian tradition made this ancient male hatred of women and their bodies sacred.  This hatred is embedded in biblical texts starting with the Genesis story.  It continued to be the foundation for all theology built by the catholic Christians, including Augustine's ideas.  The worldview of Christianity sees the female body and sex through Augustine's distorted lens and his doctrine of original sin.

As long as the female body is viewed as substandard, subhuman, and naturally deficient as stories like Genesis reflect, as long as sexual desire is perceived to be the penalty for sin as Augustine taught, there is no way we can conceive of Jesus as married or partaking in the pleasures of sex.  Our distorted views of human sexuality and the female body will not give us permission to consider the possibility.

The truth is that the sources we have do not permit us to know whether Jesus of Nazareth was a married or celibate man.  Both views of Jesus were constructed by different groups of ancient people to reflect their understanding of God and the human condition.  It just so happens that the Christian tradition that we have inherited as our own is the one that created the glorified male celibate as its view of the ideal human and god.

Upcoming conference on historical Jesus

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Speaking of how difficult it is to recover the historical Jesus, there is a conference on October 4 and 5 put together to critique the "Third Quest of the Historical Jesus". 

Here is information about the conference and the LINK to details about registration and how to do it. 

United Theological Seminary and The University of Dayton (Dayton, OH) are co-hosting a two-day conference to critique the assumptions and methods of the so called "Third Quest of the Historical Jesus" on October 4 and 5, 2012.   The conference will be held at Southpark United Methodist Church, 140 Stonemill Road, Dayton, OH 45409.

Bringing together world-class authors and speakers, this conference will discuss "authenticity" and "criteria" as these concepts have been traditionally understood and employed in New Testament studies. 
Speakers include Dale C. Allison Jr., Mark Goodacre, Chris Keith, Anthony Le Donne, Loren Stuckenbruck, Jens Shroeter, Barry Swartz, Dagmar Winter, and Rafael Rodrígue.

It is my understanding that the conference will focus on Keith and Le Donne's newest book: Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity.  

You can read more about this on Keith and Le Donne's new blog: The Jesus Blog HERE. 

It should be a great conference.   

Did Jesus have a wife?

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Kilmore Church, Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1906

So many of you have been e-mailing me, wondering about the significance of the new gospel fragment recently published on the internet by Karen King of Harvard University.  Many are expressing amazement that there is a text that mentions Jesus' wife.  It is exciting to see the words "My wife" in bold Coptic scrawl.

But let's keep in mind that we actually already have a text that mentions Jesus' wife.  It is the

Gospel of Philip

.  We already know that there were some early Christians, in particular the Valentinian Gnostics, who taught that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' consort or wife.  They wrote about it in the

Gospel of Philip

.

The reason that their tradition remembered Mary in this way is because they believed that marriage was the sacred creative activity of God and God's manifestations or Aeons.  They also believed that their own human marriages were reflections - what they called "an image" - of the eternal marriages of the Aeons.  Jesus' human marriage to Mary Magdalene was believed to reflect the sacred marriage of the Aeons Jesus and Sophia.   Furthermore, the Aeons Jesus and Sophia were the spiritual twins or angelic dopplegangers of the human Jesus and Mary.  If you are interested in learning more about this practice and its sexual implications, I have written a chapter about it in

Holy Misogyny

, called "Is Marriage Salvation?" along with a chapter on Mary, called "How do we solve a problem like Maria?"

The new gospel fragment supports this Valentinian picture.  If it turns out to be an authentic gospel fragment from antiquity, it likely came from a page of yet another Valentinian gospel that contained sayings of Jesus.  Valentinian Christians were very prolific and they preserved an entire sayings tradition of counter-memories that supported their creative metaphysical outlook and Gnostic spirituality.

But does this mean that Jesus had a wife?  It depends on who you ask.  If you asked a Valentinian Christian, the answer would have been a definitive "yes".  If you asked an early Catholic Christian, the answer would have been "no".  If you ask a scholar today, depending on the methods they use to reconstruct the historical Jesus, you will get "yeses" and "noes'.

What do I think?  I think that it is next to impossible to reconstruct the historical Jesus from the theological portraits of him in any of the gospels, the New Testament included.  Aside from a few broad strokes, the historical Jesus remains shrouded in theology, including his sex life and marital status.  I continue to emphasize how necessary it is for us to think critically about these old texts and not take their statements as simple statements of historical facts, at least without first reasoning carefully through them.

Was Jesus married?  I like to think so.  But this has more to do with my own view of the blessedness of marriage than it does with any historical argument I might make.