Nestle-Aland 28 announced

This is certainly a significant announcement:

The long awaited 28th edition of Nestle-Aland's Novum Testamentum Graece will likely appear some time later this year. It has been preliminary announced by various booksellers. Thus, CBD gives the publication date 26/12 2012, whereas Amazon has 31/12 2012.

Anyone looking for a random act of kindness to perform between now and the (very!) end of the Mayan calendar can send one to Johnson University, marked "Attn: Rafael Rodríguez." Thank you very much.

HT: Johnson Thomaskutty

Forgering Ahead: Bart Ehrman and NT Pseudepigraphy

As I mentioned previously, Bart Ehrman graced our fair city and gave the inaugural David L. Dungan Memorial Lecture, "Does the New Testament Contain Forgeries? The Surprising Claim of Modern Scholars." Ehrman's point was, in a word, Yes, the New Testament does contain forgeries. This doesn't strike me as one of modern scholarship's "surprising claims"; it is, after all, well over two hundred years old. But Ehrman's point—and he may be right here—is that the results of the work of "modern scholars" has not been as widely diffused as we might like. Of course, Ehrman presents the results of modern scholarship in rather tendentious terms (I don't think you have to be a fundamentalist or even conservative Christian to agree with this); it would be "surprising" if NT scholars began calling pseudepigraphal (falsely inscribed) texts "forgeries."

At any rate, Ehrman's lecture is available on the University of Tennessee's website; see here for the video (including the Q&A that followed), which is linked with Ehrman's PowerPoint. An even dozen of my institution's faculty, staff, and students attended the lecture on Thursday, 27 January, and last night (9 February) we met—along with some interested students who weren't able to attend the lecture—to discuss Ehrman's claims. I think a helpful and encouraging discussion followed, and on top of that we got to eat dinner together. Score!

I prepared written notes for last night's discussion. First I tried to summarize Ehrman's lecture to remind us what we heard (or to catch up any students who weren't able to hear Ehrman in person); then I responded to two aspects of the lecture ([i] his use of the term, forgery, and [ii] his tabulation of NT documents). Of course, there were other things to respond to, but I limited my prepared remarks to these two. You're welcome to look over my comments; if you have any additional insights, any questions, or if I misrepresent Ehrman or respond inappropriately to him, please feel free to leave a comment here.

Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman

Bart Ehrman in Knoxville

The University of Tennessee has created a new lectureship, the David L. Dungan Memorial Lecture. The inaugural lecture, "Does The New Testament Contain Forgeries? The Surprising Claims of Modern Scholars," will be presented by Bart D. Ehrman at the University Center auditorium at 5.00 pm on Thursday, 27 January 2011. The UT press release is available here.

SECSOR: Day One

The 2010 meeting of the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion (SECSOR) began tonight. Attendance appears to be down quite a bit from last year, if memory serves. This time last year wasn't exactly plush, economically speaking, so I'm not sure the economy is the main factor at play here. But maybe it is. Or maybe tomorrow will be different. I dunno.

Anyway, I attended tonight's "New Testament I" session, which featured three rather interesting papers (the fourth, "Gossiping Jesus Into Being: The Oral Processing of a Social Personage in the Gospels" [John Daniels, Flagler College] was, unfortunately cancelled).

• The first paper, "Eschatology and Soteriology in 1 Peter" (Alexander Stewart, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary), examined the "now" and "not yet" aspects of the language of salvation in 1 Peter. The paper doesn't exactly break new ground; Stewart acknowledged that he was taking aim at a more popular-level conception of salvation in "the American church." And his focus, as is often the case in discussions of "now" and "not yet," was on the relation between the present and the future. As I mentioned to him in a conversation after the session, however, the question that interests me is the relation (and the distinction!) between the present and the past! That is, if the "new age" is supposed to be different from the "present age"—with its suffering, injustice, etc.—and if early Christians believed that Jesus' death and resurrection inaugurated the new age, what's changed? I still don't think Stewart has addressed the question, though he emphasized conversion (and, I think, the inclusion of gentiles among God's chosen people) as the difference. Something still seems missing to me, but I enjoyed the way Stewart's paper framed the question for me (albeit indirectly).


• The second paper, "Neglected Considerations in Understanding the Structure of the Book of Revelation" (Kevin Larsen, Mid-Atlantic Christian University), raised questions about Revelation's structure (sequential or cyclical) and, relatedly, its genre. Larsen—whose training is in the gospels and who acknowledged at the start his novice status among the apocalypses—reads Revelation salvation-historically, with Jesus and his climactic role in the story of salvation not figuring into Revelation's narrative until chapter 12. There were a number of interesting observations, I thought, but then again I, too, know very little about John's apocalypse. What I appreciated most, however, was Larsen's insistence that Revelation, as a text, spoke to and was written for real first-century CE people. This is a truism among NT scholars, but with Revelation in particular the temptation to read the text as written for (and about!) later Christians too easily leads interpretation astray.


• The third paper, "One Saturday in Capernaum: Mark's Gentile Appropriation of the Sabbath" (Ricky Shinall, Vanderbilt University), discussed gentile [mis]understandings of Jewish Sabbath observances and then read Mark's portrayal of Jesus healing and teaching in the Capernaum synagogue on the Sabbath. In Shinall's reading, Mark has little knowledge of or use for Jewish Sabbath observance, except that Sabbath does present a useful occasion for teaching and healing. So, unlike the superstitious Jews (in Mark's perspective, not Shinall's), Jesus is uninhibited in his Sabbath observance and, just as importantly, isn't lazy. Shinall closed by suggesting Mark's misunderstanding of Jewish Sabbath observance supports a Roman rather than Palestinian provenance for the gospel. Unfortunately, there were too many other ways to read the evidence (e.g., whereas gentiles mistakenly thought Jews fasted on the Sabbath, Mark has Simon's mother-in-law serve Jesus and his companions after Jesus healed her fever [Mark 1.31]), though presumably, outside the confines of a 25-minute paper, Shinall addresses this (I would prefer to locate the Sabbath controversies within an inter-Jewish framework; Shinall cited E. P. Sanders and J. P. Meier to explain his preference for a gentile framework).

I missed the presidential addresses, which was too bad given that Jodi Magness presented what I presume was an interesting paper: "Truth and Fiction: The Talpiyot Tomb in Context." The reception afterward (which I did not miss, of course) was perhaps the best-supplied SBL reception I've ever seen. I had the pineapple and some grapes, but there was sushi, various dips, and many other selections. I was thoroughly impressed.

That's it for Day One. I'm looking forward to tomorrow; I'll let you know how it goes. If you'd like to see the program, it's available online on SECSOR's website.

SECSOR—day 3 (pt. II)

The last session—New Testament V—was, well, the last session. As I said in my previous post, this was poorly attended, comparatively speaking, but that's par for the course for these types of things. It was too bad, too, because all four papers were interesting and well worth the twenty-five minutes it took to listen to each of them.

The first paper, "Blood, Life, and Purification: Reassessing Hebrews' Christological Appropriation of Yom Kippur," presented by David Moffitt (Duke University), questioned the traditional reading of Hebrews in which Jesus' death, rather than his resurrection (or his life) provides the greatest moment of atonement. This reading depends on the view that Jesus' resurrection doesn't figure (or figures very marginally) in Hebrews and by the analogy of "two great redemptive moments" of Yom Kippur: the slaughter of the sacrifice and the sprinkling of the sacrificial, atoning blood. Moffitt rebuts the first claim, noting a number of instances when the resurrection is actually present or can be inferred in the text. He also emphasizes that blood in the Hebrew Bible and in Hebrews means life, not death; he then offers some ways in which his reading solves some interpretive problems throughout Hebrews.

The second paper, "Anti-Imperialism and Historiography in the Temple Cleansing of the Gospel of John (John 2:13–22)," presented by Janelle Peters (Emory University), suggests that John's account of the Temple Incident takes aim at Roman imperialism and presence in the land. Unfortunately, while Peters was reading her paper, my phone began to vibrate and I had to leave the room momentarily, and so my recollection of her paper is significantly flawed. In addition, I am not at home among Johannine scholarship. But I do vaguely (and so unhelpfully) remember thinking that her thesis was interesting and worth pursuing. I hope to hear her work presented in a future meeting, preferably one in which I can devote my attention with fewer distractions.

The third paper, "'Where the body is, there also the eagles will be gathered': Eschatology and the Arrest of Jesus in Luke's 'Little Apocalypse' and Passion Narrative," presented by T. J. Lang (Duke University), offered a reading of Luke 17.37 hinted at in the paper's title. Lang reads ἀετός ["eagle" or "vulture" (BDAG; s.v.)] as "eagle" and suggests that the Lukan Jesus is incorporating Rome in the saying regarding the circumstances of Jesus' parousia (Lang properly notes that Matthew, not Luke, mentions the parousia). His argument doesn't rely so much on the eagle as a Roman symbol (cf. Ant. 17.151ff.; War 1.650ff.) but rather on ἀετός as an imperial symbol in the LXX. This reading offers some intriguing possibilities for the Lukan gospel, especially the links between the Passion narrative and the travel narrative and for other things besides.

The fourth paper, "Matthew 26:64 and the Enthronement of Jesus," presented by Nathan Eubank (Duke University), read the Romans' parody of Jesus' enthronement (purple garment, crown of thorns, reed for a scepter, etc.) and Matthew's parody of the Romans' parody. I liked the the point that in Matthew's account the parodic has become ironic. A lot of good stuff in this paper, but unfortunately it was the last of the session and so my mind was halfway out the door.

So many good things said about New Testament themes, but at such an unfortunate time. For those of us who were unable (or unwilling) to attend this final session in order to get a head start on the journey home missed some good stuff. And so I'm not too sorry that I can't provide more information on these papers; if you were really that interested, you should have been there! And yet I am disappointed in myself that I can't remember these papers better than I can (though Moffitt distributed copies of his paper, so his is *ahem* crystal clear in my mind . . . at least, it could be if I need it to be).

I'll wrap up some loose ends on SECSOR in one more post. Since the conference ended, now, three days ago, things are fading the grey in my inexorably aging memory. But for those of you so inclined and living in or near the American Southeast, I heartily recommend next year's SECSOR meeting (Atlanta, 5–7 March 2010).