Circumcision controversy in NYC

THE CONTROVERSY over metzizah b’peh has resurfaced recently with a ruling in New York City which requires parents to sign a consent form before the procedure, which is mentioned in the Talmud, can be done. That ruling is now being challenged in court:

Jewish groups sue New York City over circumcision rule

JOSEPH AX, REUTERS

Thursday, October 11, 2012 2:23:24 MDT PM

NEW YORK - Orthodox Jewish groups sued New York City on Thursday to try to block a new rule requiring parental consent for a circumcision ritual in which the circumciser uses his mouth to draw blood from the baby’s penis.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, says the regulation is unconstitutional and violates religious freedom by targeting a Jewish ritual.

[...]

Under the rule, parents must sign a consent form that says the health department advises that “direct oral suction should not be performed” because of the risk of contracting herpes.

[...]

The controversy has been around for a while. Earlier posts on it are here, here, here, and here. Efforts to ban or regulate circumcision tend to generate strong reactions, as Germany also recently has learned.

More problems with the Gospel of Jesus' Wife

IT JUST KEEPS COMING: Jesus' Wife Fragment: Further Evidence of Modern Forgery (Mark Goodacre).

Background on the GJW is here and follow the links.

UPDATE: James McGrath: Jesus’ Wife: Internet Plagiarist?

Ephrem in context

EPHREM THE SYRIAN: A very brief introduction in the context of Syriac and modern Syria. Follow the first link too.

Orthodox women and Talmud

The female talmudists

By SAM SOKOL (Jerusalem Post)
10/07/2012 11:16

A small but growing number of women’s schools in Israel are providing talmudic education to their students.

Only several decades ago it would have been unthinkable for women to learn Talmud within Orthodox circles. The prevailing notion, which still holds sway over considerable portions of the haredi community, is that women have no place within the halls of Torah study and that their place is in the home. However, over the last few decades, and especially since the gains made by the feminist movement in bringing women into the workplace and academia on equal standing with men, Jewish women, both observant and not, have begun to study Torah on their own terms.

[...]

Related issues are noted in the posts here, here, here, and here.

Josephus and Jeremiah

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Titus Flavius Josephus and the Prophet Jeremiah: Avishai Margalit contrasts the legacies of a historian and a prophet. You can read a summary of the BAR article at the link, but the full article is behind a paywall.

New fragments of Codex Tchacos

ALIN SUCIU has identified some additional fragments from Codex Tchacos—the codex that contains the Coptic Gospel of Judas—in a collection at Lafayette College: Newly Found Fragments of Codex Tchacos. The fragments from the text that followed the Gospel of Judas in the manuscript; its title is Allogenes and it is also known from the Nag Hammadi Library of Coptic Gnostic texts.

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

Background on the Codex Tchacos and the Gospel of Judas is here and here.

Afghan "geniza" update

SAMUEL THORPE, a specialist in medieval Persian, reflect on the importance of the recently recovered Jewish manuscript hoard in Afghanistan: The Afghan Geniza.

In this light, the significance of this new find in Afghanistan is not only historical. For scholars of Persian—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—the documents help fill in the missing links in the development of the language from ancient times to the present.

I hope some of the manuscripts are published soon.

Via the Talmud Blog on Facebook. Background here and links.

Is Christopher Rollston being "disciplined" for a HuffPo essay?

THIS CONTROVERSY has been roiling in the biblioblogosphere for a couple of weeks. I have been following it and now seems like a good time to comment. The short version of the story is that there is rumor that Dr. Christopher Rollston, a fine Northwest Semitic epigrapher to whom I have linked often on this blog, is being "disciplined" by Emmanuel Christian Seminary, the institution where he works and where he is tenured, for a recently published essay at the Huffington Post: The Marginalization of Women: A Biblical Value We Don't Like to Talk About. The essay is completely uncontroversial: it simply points out that the cultural framework of the entire Bible in relationship to women is consistently (although not entirely unexceptionally) patriarchal and that this framework goes very much against the values of the twenty-first century.

There have been endless online posts etc. on the controversy (about Rollston being disciplined, not about patriarchy in the Bible; the latter, as I said, is uncontroversial). The following are some of the most informative ones:

Thom Stark: The Affair of Dr. Blowers and the Blog of the Three Young Men: A Response to Christopher Rollston’s Cultured Despisers

Thomas Verenna: On Academic Integrity and the Future of Biblical Studies in Confessional Institutions (Bible and Interpretation)

Paul Blowers: Academic Integrity within a Confessional Institution: An “Insider’s” Response to Thomas Verenna (Bible and Interpretation)

(The comments following the two Bible and Interpretation essays are also informative.)

There is good commentary and thorough linkage in the following:

Mark Goodacre: In Support of Christopher Rollston and Academic Integrity

James McGrath: In Support of Christopher Rollston

To return to the story, the rumor is well enough based to be very disquieting. A professor at Emmauel named Paul Blowers reportedly stated publicly on Facebook (in what he evidently thought was a private post) to someone (Thom Stark says "a former student") that he had drawn the attention of the institutional hierarchy to the essay and criticisms of it and that "We are looking at disciplinary action in the next few days." The post has since been deleted, but in the subsequent lengthy interchanges he admitted the post went up and has taken responsibility for it and apologized for posting it.

The real issues, which I have not yet seen either Professor Blowers or Emmanuel Christian Seminary address, are that, first, an academic at this institution has apparently violated fundamental confidentiality principles by disclosing an ongoing disciplinary case against a colleague to someone not involved in the case and, indeed, apparently someone not at the institution at all. That the improper disclosure went public through a misunderstanding of how Facebook works only exacerbates the breach of confidentiality and illustrates why rules of confidentiality exist in the first place. This is arguably an internal matter for the institution, but given that the issue has gone public, it can hardly be kept quiet now. (If Professor Blowers or Emmanuel College have commented substantively on this and I have missed it, I would be grateful for the link.  Apologizing for accidentally making the breach of confidentiality even more public is not addressing it substantively.)

The second issue is even more disturbing. Is the institution really contemplating disciplining Dr. Rollston for publishing a popular essay that simply presents some uncontroversial points about how women are viewed in the Bible and how this clashes with the values of our society? I frequently bring up many of the points that Chris raised when I teach my own classes at the University of St. Andrews. So do pretty much all other biblical scholars in other academic institutions. Is this a matter for discipline at Emmanuel? Is Christopher Rollston to be reprimanded, punished, or even fired for it?

Now there is much that we don't know here and we should not jump to conclusions. There have obviously been some mistakes made, and there is the danger of these reflecting badly on Emmanuel Christian Seminary. I hope this does not happen. The simplest way to settle matters is for the Seminary to make a public statement to the effect that there is a misunderstanding that Dr. Rollston is being disciplined for a recent essay that he published, but in fact this is not the case; that the institution fully respects his right to express his scholarly views in his areas of expertise in public venues; and that he is not being investigated or censured, nor is his position at the institution in any way compromised or in danger.

Problem solved.

I look forward to a statement from Emmanuel and I hope they produce it sooner rather than later. This controversy is not going to go away or get any better until the air is cleared.

UPDATE (15 October): Today Libby A. Nelson takes up the story at Inside Higher Ed, confirming that a disciplinary procedure is in progress and placing it a larger context: Tenure vs. Donors. Excerpt:

The article led to a very public disagreement with another member of Emmanuel’s faculty and a letter of rebuke from the seminary’s president, Michael Sweeney, who issued a less-than-veiled threat to Rollston: stop taking liberal positions that alienate donors and prospective students, or find another place to work.

Rollston has tenure, but Emmanuel professors can be dismissed for cause if they exhibit “behavior demonstrating that [they are] no longer in sympathy with the purposes and goals of the school,” according to the seminary’s faculty handbook. In an undated letter to Rollston, forwarded to Inside Higher Ed by a person who does not work at Emmanuel, Sweeney writes that the professor’s teaching style and the effect he has on his students “have demonstrably exacerbated our current financial problems. That, along with your recent blog, puts you at odds with the purpose and goals of the school... If you feel that you are unwilling or unable to change any of this, and, frankly, I am not even sure it is possible for you to do so at this stage, I strongly suggest you increase your efforts at finding a position in a university where people are not studying for the ministry."

The article has additional details and it quotes from and links to this PaleoJudaica post.

Ms. Nelson reports that she has communicated with President Sweeny by e-mail, so it appears that the letter is genuine:

Sweeney declined to comment because “at this stage no decisions have been made and we are handling things through our protocols,” he wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. Both Sweeney and Rollston’s lawyer, Stephen Rush, to whom Rollston referred all questions, said that the professor is still employed and tenured at Emmanuel, although disciplinary proceedings are ongoing.

It appears that Emmanuel Christian Seminary finds itself in a difficult position. Naturally, they want a good relationship with trustees, affiliated institutions, and donors. But at the same time, dismissing someone from a tenured academic post is no small matter. The larger academic world is watching, and whatever decision they make could have an effect on their wider academic reputation and their future efforts to recruit high-quality academic staff.

UPDATE (17 October): In this post and the update on 15 October I mistakenly associated Inside Higher Ed with The Chronicle of Higher Education. Apologies for the error.

Magness to lecture at U of Iowa

LECTURE: Dr. Jodi Magness to Give E.P. Adler Lecture at the University of Iowa as part of National Archaeology Day (XKV8R).

Syriac Christianity Postdoc

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, Princeton University:

Position Summary: The Department of History invites applications for a postdoctoral research associate position in the history of the medieval Middle East. The successful candidate will conduct research under the direction of Prof. Peter Brown as part of a project entitled "Topography and Hagiography in the World of Syriac Christianity." The candidate will assist in the preparation of a digital database of monasteries, centers of learning, production of manuscripts, activities of holy persons and cults in the Syriac world from ancient into early modern times, with a particular focus on the Syriac communities of the Church of the East.

This is a one-year post, with the possibility of a one-year renewal. The application deadline is 7 November. Follow the link for further particulars.

Columbus post

BELATEDLY FOR COLUMBUS DAY—this 2011 post seems worth revisiting: Columbus, the size of the earth, and 4 Ezra.

Samson, Joshua, and the sun

INTERESTING ARTICLE by Elchanan Reiner in Haaretz, arguing for the conflation of the Samson and Joshua traditions around sites in the Galilee which pick up their associations with the sun:

Samson follows the sun to Galilee
Local archaeologists have unearthed some seemingly out-of-place depictions of the sun god Helios in the mosaic floors of ancient synagogues. Can this be attributed to a link between the pagan god, the biblical hero Samson, and Joshua, who led the Israelites into the Promised Land?

The thesis really needs to be argued in a professional journal, but as it stands in this article it is worth a read. A couple of excerpts:

It appears that the figure of Samson should be viewed as part of the local culture of Galilee, whether as a whole or in part. So what led the inhabitants of the villages of the lower Galilee, at the foot of the Arbel and a bit north of there, in Huqoq − and perhaps in other places waiting to be discovered − to put a portrait of Samson in their synagogue, the community’s central building, despite the ostensible inappropriateness of the biblical story. To get to the bottom of this, we must try to interpret the place of Samson and similar figures in the Jewish culture of Galilee in the first centuries of the Common Era and try to understand the thinking of those who placed him in such a key position.

[...]

In this way, too, the grave of Joshua, the conqueror and settler of the land, was identified as overlooking the Arbel Valley. Joshua is the primary hero of the myth, of the constitutive story with which we are dealing. Hundreds of years later, Petahya of Regensburg, a 12th-century pilgrim, cites the early Galilean tradition thus: "And a very high volcano ... and far from it Nitai Ha’arbeli in the Arbel ... and in the middle of the mountain Joshua Bin Nun is buried."

Joshua’s burial is mentioned twice in the Bible, at the end of the Book of Joshua and again at the beginning of the Book of Judges. It’s the same description, word for word, with one exception. The name of the place where he is buried in Judges is Timnath-heres, whereas in Joshua the consonants are reversed: Timnath-serah, and with good reason. Whoever reversed the letters knew very well what he was doing and why he did so. However, the first part of the place name, Timnath, is the same in both formulations. The identification of Joshua’s grave in the Galilee, in the Arbel Valley, means the identification of Timnath in that same place, in the very area of the two early synagogues that located the figure of another biblical hero in its midst, the figure of Samson.

And thus the mythical-geographical space in which Samson acted was created. And thus Timnath, Joshua’s Galilean Timnath-heres, becomes the same Timnath where Samson carried out one of his most famous acts of heroism: "Then went Samson down, and his father and his mother, to Timnath, and came to the vineyards of Timnath: and, behold, a young lion roared against him. And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand: but he told not his father or his mother what he had done" ‏(Judges 14:5-6‏). Here the figure of Joshua in Timnath comes close to the figure of Samson. They almost became one. Heres is a synonym of the more common Hebrew word shemesh and means "sun," as in Job 9:7: "Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not." Thus Timnath-heres is Timnath-sun.

More on the Samson depiction in the Huqoq synagogue etc. here and links. And more on the Helios symbolism in ancient synagogues here. Note that the Talmudic-era magical treatise Sepher HaRazim includes a Hebrew transliteration of a pagan Greek invocation of Helios as part of a rite of the Fourth Firmament to give the practitioner a vision of the sun at night. There is no mention of Samson or Joshua, though. Here's the passage, in what is still a draft of my translation of Sepher HaRazim to go into volume two of the texts for the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project. The italicized section is the transliterated Greek:

As you finish speaking you will hear the sound of thunder from the far north and you will see something like lightning going out and the earth shall glisten in front of you. And after you see this, prostrate yourself and fall on your face to the earth and pray this prayer:

"Hallowed east-rising Helios, good sailor, faithful guardian, trusty leader, who long ago established the mighty orb, holy director, very powerful, Lord, bright guide, absolute ruler, star-organizer, I, so-and-so son of so-and-so place my supplication before (Jer 38:26) you that you appear to me without dread and you be revealed to me without awe and that you not hide from me any matter (Jer 38:14) and that you tell me in truth all that I seek."

Stand on your feet and you shall see it in the north wind going eastward (cf. 1 En 72:5). Afterward turn your hands behind you and bow your head downward and ask everything that you wish.

Another recent archaeological discovery that has been connected to Samson (but I'm skeptical) is noted here.

New book: Lewis, Introduction to "Gnosticism"

FORTHCOMING IN NOVEMBER: Nicola Denzey Lewis Introduction to "Gnosticism": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds (OUP)

Discovered in Egypt in 1945, the fascinating and challenging Nag Hammadi writings forever changed our understanding of early Christianity. State-of-the-art and the only volume of its kind, Introduction to "Gnosticism": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds guides students through the most significant of the Nag Hammadi texts. Employing an exceptionally lucid and accessible writing style, Nicola Denzey Lewis groups the texts by theme and genre, places them in the broader context of the ancient world, and reveals their most inscrutable mysteries.

Ideal for use in courses in Early Christianity/Origins of Christianity, Christianity to 1500, Gnostic Gospels, Gnosticism, Early Christian Writings, Orthodoxy and Heresy, and New Testament Studies, Introduction to "Gnosticism" is enhanced by numerous pedagogical features, including images of the manuscripts, study and discussion questions, annotated bibliographies, tables, diagrams, and a glossary.

Review of Vermes, Christian Beginnings

GEZA VERMES'S LATEST BOOK is reviewed by Eric Ormsby in Standpoint magazine, along with one by Peter Brown of less direct relevance to PaleoJudaica:

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
By Peter Brown
Princeton University Press, 806pp, £27.95

Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea AD 30-325
By Geza Vermes
Allen Lane, 288pp, £25/ebook £14.99

Excerpt on Vermes, Christian Beginnings:

Vermes states that his book, his twelfth on the subject (beginning with Jesus the Jew of 1973), is "an attempt to sketch the historical continuity between Jesus portrayed in his Galilean charismatic setting and the first ecumenical council held at Nicaea in AD 325, which solemnly proclaimed his divinity as a dogma of Christianity." It is thus an account of the slow but steady transformation of "Jesus the Jew" to "the Christ deified at the Council of Nicaea"; that is, from an "itinerant spiritual healer, exorcist and preacher", a type well known and well documented in the Palestine of his day, to a divine figure, the second person of the Trinity, and in the Greek formulation of the Council — amid uproarious controversy — as homoousios or "of one substance with the Father."

Review of Orlov, Dark Mirrors

H-JUDAIC BOOK REVIEW:

Andrei A. Orlov. Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. xv + 201 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-3951-8.

Reviewed by Archie Wright (Regent University)
Published on H-Judaic (October, 2012)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Reflecting on Opposites

Andrei A. Orlov is a specialist in Jewish apocalypticism and mysticism, Second Temple Judaism, and Old Testament pseudepigrapha. Within the fascinating field of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature, Orlov is considered among the leading experts in the field of Slavonic texts related to Jewish mysticism and Enochic traditions. This volume, Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology, demonstrates his expertise. The book furthers the ongoing discussion in Second Temple Period (2TP) demonology; in particular, it is focused on two of the leading figures, the so-called demonic beings Azazel and Satanael. Orlov explores the mediating role of these paradigmatic celestial rebels in the development of Jewish demonological traditions from Second Temple apocalypticism to later Jewish mysticism. Throughout his discussion, he makes use of lesser-known Jewish pseudepigraphical materials in Slavonic.

[...]

I am not entirely persuaded that Satanael is a figure in "early Jewish Demonology," since he does not appear in any demonstrably early Jewish text. (Azazel and Satan, of course, do.) The Slavonic book of 2 Enoch did exist in a Byzantine Greek form, as is demonstrated by the recently discovered Coptic fragments of it, but an earlier date and Jewish provenance are still debatable. I do think that at least parts of it are probably early and Jewish, but the edited form of even the short recension may still contain substantial Christian (or other?) Byzantine-era material. But that is an aside. This sounds like an interesting and important book that I am going to need to read.

Free Talmudic books

FOR YOU, SPECIAL DEAL:  Seven Free Talmudic Books in Honor of Sukkot - Friday October 5 to Sunday October 7 (Tzvee Zahavy).

Allegro video

BLAST FROM THE PAST: “Jesus was a mushroom” – Interview with John Allegro.

More on John Allegro and his theories here.

Papyrology and the GJW

PETER HEAD raises some papyrological concerns at ETC about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment: More questions on Jesus' Wife Fragment. He does not find the papyrological arguments in favor of its authenticity persuasive.

Background on the GJW is here and links.

Hermetic and Kabbalistic influences on Joseph Smith?

VARIOUS ESOTERICA, ancient, medieval, and modern, are invoked in this Haaretz article by Tomer Persico as influences on Joseph Smith: How kabbala shaped Mormon faith. In his effort to establish 'Zion on American soil,' the founder of Mormonism was deeply influenced by the seminal Jewish mystical work, not to mention the polygamy practiced by the Patriarchs.

The most interesting section for PaleoJudaica is here:

Where did Smith derive his inspiration? He was undoubtedly an exceptional person, with a vivid imagination and enormous creativity. But every creative spirit needs raw material. Smith found his in the esoteric literature of his era, which led him to the kabbala.

As a curious teenager, Joseph Smith was able to read a fair share of Western esoteric literature at his neighbor's homes or in different public libraries.

The esoteric literature of the period included the legacy of the Renaissance, Hermetism, the kabbala, Neoplatonism, alchemy, astrology and Magianism.

Hermitism was an esoteric practice based on ancient texts that were apparently written by a god/king/prophet/ master sorcerer named Hermes Trismegistus. This Hermes was, apparently, a contemporary of Moses and revealed to humanity the secrets of the universe at the exact same time that Moses gave the Torah to the Israelites. The historical source for the more ancient parts of the hermetic corpus is found in the early centuries of the Common Era, in Greco-Egyptian Alexandria, and therefore contains a mixture of Greek and Egyptian myths.

In contrast to many Western tracts, the Hermetica emphasized the greatness of man and the ability for the complete synthesis of spirit and matter. Based on this doctrine, the soul is a refined type of matter, and therefore this materialist and sordid life is not a thing unto itself; there is even the possibility of achieving divinity without separating from life.

"You are the light and the life, as God the Father from which man was born," states Hermes, echoing similarities with Mormon theology.

Kabbala for Christians

With respect to the kabbala mentioned here, this wasn't the same Kabbala diligently pored over by the students of the Vilna Gaon or the Lubavitch Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad Hasidism, during this time period, but rather the kabbala translated into the vernacular for a Christian readership. In the eyes of the Christians who were interested in it, the kabbala was thought to be the secret Torah that Moses gave to Joshua, and from him to the elders of Israel, and from them to the prophets. But unlike traditional rabbinic Judaism, the Christians believed that the kabbala was also given to the Israelite priests. The inclusion of the ancient Israelite priests was likely due to every story about the Temple in Jerusalem being seen by Christians as having some esoteric and mystical value (this was also true for the Freemasons, another movement that flowered around the same time). The Christian kabbala included different translations of the Hebrew texts into vernacular with additional commentary that presented it as a universal bible that in practice was philosophically Perennialist (meaning, that it stands at the base of all human knowledge).

Smith’s interest in the Hermetica and the kabbala alone are enough to shed light on the sentence found at the beginning of the Mormon cannon [sic], in the Book of Nephi, the first volume of the Book of Mormon. After the first verse in which the narrator presents himself, the second verse states: “I will make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.” The Jews were a muse to Joseph Smith. The use of “the language of the Egyptians” ties the Book of Mormon to the Hermetica.

I don't recall any direct echoes of Hermetica or Kabbalah in the Book of Mormon, but it's been quite a while since I read it.  Indirect theological influence sounds plausible enough, although Latter Day Saints would probably reply that Smith's interests in such esoterica as a young man simply helped prepare him for his later revelatory role.  John Dee, the English Renaissance scholar whose Enochian angelic revelations were transmitted in strikingly similar ways to Mormon revelations, was also immersed in ancient and medieval esoterica.

“Our model is actually the Talmud”

RAP GENIUS: "“Our model is actually the Talmud,” said Horowitz. He believes Rap Genius could expand to make any important text that’s too dense or confusing into something comprehensible, the way the Talmud did for the Torah."

GJW in the CHE

KAREN KING is interviewed by Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Lessons of Jesus’ Wife. Excerpts:

King told the magazine that, while there was a chance that ink testing might prove that the fragment was a forgery, she thought it was more likely to be “cherry on the cake.”

Now she, like everyone else, is waiting for the results of that test, which should be available late this month. The test could prove that the ink has modern elements, which would mean that it is a forgery. If it comes back negative for such elements, the debate will go on. If it is positive, not having waited for that test will look like a mistake.

But how do you roll out a potential blockbuster discovery like this? King said she’s been asking colleagues how they would have handled it differently, and they’ve reassured her that they would have done what she did. And while she’s been dinged by some for jumping the gun, others would have attacked her for keeping it to herself. “The longer I held back, the more criticism there would have been,” she said.

Agreed, except she should have resisted the temptation to cooperate with a television documentary before all tests were completed, mighty though that temptation must have been.

One thing she would change? The title of the fragment. Calling it “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” seemed natural. And for scholars like King, one of the authors of a book about The Gospel of Judas, alternative accounts of the Jesus story are not shocking. She misjudged just how inflammatory that title would turn out to be. She’s been asking around for ideas on a new, less exciting name.

I agree here too, but I think it's too late now to change the name.

Background here and links.

Aramaic-speaking pirates and a woman ruler at ed-Dur?

ARAMAIC WATCH:

Was ed-Dur ruled by a woman?

Rym Ghazal (The National)
Oct 2, 2012

Images on a coin can tell the story of place and time.

But for some of the coins found at ed-Dur, it is a name that is causing the greatest debate.

“It is a real mystery,” says Dr Ernie Haerinck. “The coins minted locally have a name added to them in Aramaic. It is ‘Abi’el’, the daughter of so and so.

“Perhaps ed-Dur was a kingdom run by a woman?”

The name was added to “imitations of imitations” of common coins, attributed to the first century AD.

[...]

“One of the biggest problems we have is that a lot of the pre-Islamic rituals and histories have not been noted down anywhere, and the fact that we have less and less specialists around who can read Aramaic and its different ancient dialects,” says Dr Haerinck.

Besides locally minted coins, which offer proof of autonomy and political and economic independence, there are many unexplained discoveries at ed-Dur, one that led Dr Haerinck to say: “Maybe there were pirates here?

“For the vastness of what has been found here could be explained through one theory and texts by Romans about this area, that just maybe some ed-Dur pirates brought back lots of plunder and treasures from across the world.”

The site of ed-Dur where the coins were excavated is in the UAE. There are plenty of specialists in different Aramaic dialects; they need to look around a little more. But, granted, pirate Aramaic might prove to be a challenge.

Ahmadinejad and Haman

BIBLE IN MODERN POLITICS WATCH:

Peres likens Ahmadinejad to ‘modern-day Haman’
President stresses preference for non-military means to remove Iranian threat

By Asher Zeiger October 2, 2012, 10:32 pm 0 (The Times of Israel)

President Shimon Peres described Iran’s president as “a modern-day Haman,” during a meeting with Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef on Tuesday.

Despite comparing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the ancient Persian official who sought to eradicate all the Jews in the empire in the fifth century BCE, Peres said that “we would be happy to be rid of him through non-military means.”

[...]

Cyrus the Great was also invoked:

Peres said that the speech was proof of the Iranian leader’s “profound historical ignorance” and that Ahmadinejad needs to be taught a history lesson about the ancient Persian king Koresh, who “more than 2,500 years ago allowed the Jews … to return to Israel and rebuild their home.”

See the Book of Esther for Haman, who was gotten rid of through military means (chapter 7), and Ezra 1:1-4 and Isaiah 45:1-4 for Cyrus/Koresh.

The use of the Book of Esther (e.g., here), Haman (e.g., here), and Cyrus (e.g., here with many links) for political purposes is not new.

Church vandalism in Jerusalem

VANDALISM AT THE CHURCH OF THE DORMITION: Vandals strike 1 of Jerusalem’s most famous churches; Jewish extremists suspected (AP). The church is built on the traditional site of the death (dormition—"falling asleep") of the Virgin Mary.

High-Tech Magic

HIGH-TECH MAGIC (in the sense of Clarke's third law) is illustrated at the HMML Digitial Collections and Imaging blog with a 1960s image of a cuneiform tablet.  (HT Adam McCollum on Facebook.)

For those interested, Clarke's three laws, all of them relevant to various discussions on PaleoJudaica, are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

GJW: Goodacre sums up

THE CURRENT STATE OF PLAY regarding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is aptly summarized by Mark Goodacre: The Gospel of Jesus' Wife Latest. He concludes:

As I see it, there are two options here. Either the author of the Jesus fragment got hold of Codex II before it went into the jar in Nag Hammadi in the late fourth century to be buried for 1500 years, or s/he got hold of it after it came out of the jar in 1945. While we cannot rule out the possibility that s/he got hold of Codex II before it went into the jar, it is much more likely that the author got hold of it in the modern period with its multiple reproductions, in print and internet, of that one witness.

And therefore the GJW is a modern fake.

I'm sure the discussion will continue in the blogosphere and perhaps sporadically in the media, but most or all of this will probably amount to wheel spinning until we get some new information, most probably the results on the test(s) of the composition of the ink used to write the text. I myself am not an expert on materials science of ancient manuscripts and I do not know how definitive the results of such tests would be in principle. Is it possible to fake the composition of ancient ink? Can ancient ink recovered, say, in an excavated ancient inkwell be rehydrated and used undetectably to create a modern forgery? I don't know. If the ink turns out to be modern, that should settle the discussion in favor of the GJW being a modern fake, which seems to be the most widely held view at present. If the ink appears to be ancient, the questions above will have to be asked and the probabilities weighed.

As I've said from the beginning, I am very skeptical about its authenticity. But we'll see where new information leads us when we get it.

Background here and links.

Qumran month

ASOR BLOG: Qumran Month Comes to a Close.

I linked to some, but not all of the Qumran posts during September. But this final post links to all of them.

Carnival at Sansblogue

BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL: September: Spring comes to Biblical Blogaria.

Ancient Judaism lecture

AT HARVARD: Professor Speaks on Greco-Roman Influence on Ancient Rabbis.

Discussing the relationship between Greco-Roman folklore and ancient rabbinic texts, [Galit] Hasan-Rokem talked about the interdependence of the cultures, emphasizing the influence of a specific figure from Greco-Roman folklore: the sirens.

The sirens and other Greco-Roman tropes, Hasan-Rokem said, influenced the rabbinic view of women as alluring and punishable. She noted that the oral transmission of information in rabbinic culture facilitated the incorporation of new voices and ideas.

Mapping Israel

HAARETZ: Mapping Israel one foot at a time. The Israel Antiquities Authority seeks to precisely map every historical and archaeological site west of the Jordan. The project, which began in 1964, is due to end - if at all - in a few decades. The results are now being published online.

Happy Sukkot

SUKKOT, the festival of Booths or Tabernacles, began last night at sundown. Best wishes to all those celebrating

Smithsonian GJW documentary on hold

THIS IS PROBABLY A GOOD THING:

Smithsonian delays 'Jesus wife' film as doubts mount

3:40 PM, Sep 28, 2012 |

USA Today
by Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY

The Smithsonian Channel has postponed plans to broadcast a documentary on the discovery of a "Jesus wife" papyrus that a Vatican newspaper declares is a probable fake.

A promo for the documentary The Gospel of Jesus's Wife on the channel's website refers to the "damaged and fragile" ancient papyrus as "one of the most significant discoveries of all time."

While the website still carries the description of the program, a small note to the right says it is "not currently airing."

A spokesman says the broadcast has been postponed "until the text undergoes further tests," according to The Washington Post.

[...]

Events have clearly overtaken whatever the documentary said when it was filmed, and I should think it would sound very out of date if it were aired as is. A documentary should not have been planned at all before the authentication process was fully completed, one way or another.

Background on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is here with many links.

Paananen on Watson on GJW

OKAY, OKAY, I thought I was going to be able to ignore this subject today, but it seems not.  Have a look at James McGrath: Timo S. Paananen on Methods of Forgery Detection and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, a rebuttal of Francis Watson's case against the authenticity of the GJW.

I agree that Watson's case does not in itself demonstrate that the text is inauthentic. But the combination of a highly suspicious coherence with the immediate Zeitgeist, plus physical irregularities that bother papyrologists, plus pretty clear dependence on the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, including (granted, possibly coincidental) hints of dependence on the same Coptic Gospel of Thomas manuscript that we have, cumulatively cast considerable doubt on the authenticity of the GJW.

Background here and links.

New book: Klawans, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism

NEW BOOK:

Jonathan Klawans, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (OUP)

(HT Carla Sulzbach on Facebook.)

GJW latest

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE is still getting lots of attention in the media and the blogosphere, but I think that for now we're entering a period of diminishing returns in terms of new information.  Nevertheless, here are some blog posts that are interesting or entertaining or both.

Mark Goodacre: Revised versions of Francis Watson's Articles on the Jesus Wife Fragment.

Christian Askeland: Was Mrs Jesus Pimped?

James McGrath: The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife at SBL in Chicago? I'll come to the session if it fits my schedule.

James McGrath: Erwin Schrödinger Cat and Karen King’s Article. There's something really comforting about quantum physics.

And, tangentially related, congratulations to Mark Goodacre: My new book has arrived!

UPDATE: Background on the GJW is here and links.

New JSIJ articles

JEWISH STUDIES, AN INTERNET JOURNAL has published some new articles, two of which are of PaleoJudaic interest. Click on the links below to download a pdf version of the whole article.

Rabin Shushtri, "Two Geniza Documents from Chapter Lulav Hagazul: A Testament to the Antiquity of the Western Text" (Heb.)

The analysis of different textual traditions is one of the foundations of academic Talmudic studies in general and of research on the Babylonian Talmud in particular. Analysis of the manuscripts of Tractate Sukka in the Babylonian Talmud shows clearly that there are two main branches of the text of this tractate: the vulgate branch and the Yemenite branch. One of the main methods for evaluating a manuscript is comparison to indirect text-witnesses. In this paper I have compared the version of the talmudic text attested by Maimonides’ writings to that found in extant manuscripts and secondary text-witnesses. There are seventeen places where Maimonides’ rulings depend upon a specific version of a sugya. My analysis shows that in fifteen of them Maimonides conforms to the Yemenite version. As for the other two instances, in one Maimonides’ version is secondary, and in the other the Yemenite branch is secondary. Thus, we conclude that Maimonides and the scribes of the Yemenite branch had a common source. Moreover, in the vast majority of places this common tradition appears to reflect the original version of the Talmud, before it was edited. This is a reflection of the high quality of the Yemenite tradition, which was hardly affected by later intervention. It is unlikely that scholars changed the text of the Talmud to make it conform with Maimonidean rulings, and indeed a study of the aforementioned passages shows this to be impossible. This tradition persisted, reaching the greatest halachic authority of Medieval times, Maimonides, and therefore when we analyse his rulings, which often do not suit the conclusion of the sugya in the text of the Talmud known to us, we must take into account the possibility that his ruling was based on a different version of the talmudic text.

Tzvi Novick, "Din and Debate: Some Dialectical Patterns in Tannaitic Texts"

The paper examines a set of technical terms employed in tannaitic literature in connection with the analysis of a din, or logical inference. I demonstrate that anonymous Akivan midrash transforms rhetorical terms that occur in debates between named parties into punctuation that structures the argumentation. In analogous contexts in Ishmaelian midrash, such punctuation does not occur. The first appendix addresses the relationship between the dialectical patterns examined in the body of the article and a collection of baraitot marked as illogical by the Bavli. The second appendix, building on one of the technical terms examined in the body of the article that employs the rhetoric of surprise, addresses the expression of surprise in homiletical contexts.

GJW discussed on Alin Suciu's blog

JUST IN: On the So-Called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Some Preliminary Thoughts by Hugo Lundhaug and Alin Suciu. "In conclusion, both the physical appearance of the fragment, in particular its paleographical features, and its text give reasons for serious doubts concerning its authenticity."

Background here and links.

UPDATE:  James McGrath: Are Reports of the Death of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Greatly Exaggerated?

HTR rejects King's GJW article?

RUMOR at the First Things blog: Harvard Theological Review Rejects “Jesus’ Wife.” The report is that the information comes from Helmut Koester via Gesine Robinson, but I have seen no direct verification.

Background on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is here and links.

UPDATE:  Daniel Burke at Religion News Service reports Harvard Theological Review: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife NOT rejected.  But the acceptance is still conditional.  This on the authority of an e-mail from Harvard Divinity School spokesman Jonathan Beasley.  (HT David Meadows.)

Talmudic "Chaucerian verve"

DAF YOMI COLUMN: This week Adam Kirsch writes on Talmudic Pride and Prejudice in The Tablet.

For me, one of the powerful lessons of reading Berachot, the tractate on prayers, has been to see just how ancient and continuous the Jewish tradition really is. The Shema, the Amidah, the Birkat—we still recite all these prayers today, in almost or exactly the same form as the Tannaim, the rabbis of the Mishna, did 2,000 years ago. What has changed, as suggested by this week’s reading—which is largely focused on the prayer after meals, the Birkat Hamazon—is our attitude toward precedence and rank.

For the rabbis of the Talmud, as for the elite of any premodern society, gradations of prestige and authority were part of the nature of things. At many moments in this week’s Daf Yomi, we see that they could be as touchy about these distinctions as any courtier at Versailles. The difference is that, in post-Temple Judaism, the lack of traditional power structures—a royal court, an army, a functioning priesthood—meant that new forms of hierarchy had to be created; and they were based, in a way that came to seem essentially Jewish, less on birth or wealth than on learning.

[...]

Includes some interesting discussion of the am haaretz—the "people of the land."

More on Thomas and GJW

MARK GOODACRE: Gospel of Jesus' Wife: the last line is also from Thomas.  Oh oh.

Background on the GJW is here and links.

The name of God in Judaism and Islam

ROBERT WRIGHT brings Arabic and Syriac philology to The Atlantic, which you don't see very often: Allah = God.

On prostitution

TALI ARTMAN-PARTOCK: Of prostitutes and prophets. A long discussion in Haaretz of prostitution as a theme in late antique Christian and Jewish literature. Excerpts:

Feminine monasticism and following in the footsteps of Jesus enabled women in Christianity to have freedoms that life in a family framework would have denied them. They became leaders, miracle workers, independent; they gained recognition as significant active subjects, and even as saints. Yet this "liberation" exacted a price: It required the woman to forfeit a family life, which also perpetuated the view that a woman is defined by her sexual function. The monastic option transforms the woman into a "non-woman," and therefore into a person capable of carrying out masculine tasks and climbing to the heights of thought and belief. The woman can become a saint only when she is essentially a man.

The moral of the story is obvious: Even a prostitute, who serves the devil, can repent, particularly in light of her special skills. The monastic lesson is, of course, that we should learn humility, and that only he who is capable of seeing beyond the flesh, like Nonnus, is a true saint.

[...]

The discussion of prostitution and monasticism, then, is not merely a debate held at the upper and lower margins of society, but one that is at its very foundations - its understanding of what closeness to God is and what femininity is.

The Christian model, which views femininity as an obstacle to holiness, since it alone is the embodiment of sexuality, converts the prostitute into a nun.

The Jewish model is different. In it, sexuality does not possess the same negative value, and the desire to sin is located in the man. The Talmudic story has no need for either a female or a male monasticism, because holiness is found everywhere, even in sex, which is embodied here in the ultimate form of the harlot. The process of consciousness, which maintains that sin - like salvation - is found deep in the soul, and is not dependent on any institution or any encounter with a saintly figure, is another conclusion to be drawn from the Talmudic story, which symbolizes the widening gap between the two religions in late antiquity.

Yom Kippur

YOM KIPPUR, the Day of Atonement, begins this evening at sundown.  An easy fast to all those observing it.

Gospel of Jesus' Wife update

JAMES MCGRATH has a roundup on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife which covers recent media and blogospheric activity, while cautioning wisely that the jury is still out regarding the fragment's authenticity: Jesus – Married too Soon?

Background here and links.

Carnivalesque 89

CARNIVALESQUE is still around—I haven't heard about it for some time—and is being hosted this time by Judith Weingarten at Zenobia: Empress of the East: The 89th Carnival of Ancient and Medieval History Blogging. PaleoJudaica appears a number of times in this issue.

Gospel of Jesus' Wife latest

MORE DEVELOPMENTS on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife: This is the weekend and I have other things to do than blog, but a few things of interest have come up.

Mark Goodacre has published two more essays by Francis Watson.

The Daily Mail has taken up Watson's rejection of the authenticity of the GJW.

Harvard Theological Review may not publish King's article after all according to the AP.

Background here and links.

UPDATE:  At Rogue Classicism, David Meadows has a thorough roundup of the story from beginning to the present. He also has some observations about the relatively neglected other side of the fragment.

CRASIS

AT GRONINGEN: C R A S I S : Culture, Religion and Society in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

CRASIS is a research institute dedicated to the study of Graeco-Roman Antiquity at the University of Groningen. It aims to advance interdisciplinary studies in the Culture, Religion and Society of the Graeco-Roman world. It focuses not only on the Greek and Latin cultures of Antiquity, but also on Ancient Judaism, Early Christianity, and other minority cultures that were part of Graeco-Roman Antiquity.

Follow the link for details, and note particularly the call for papers for the Annual Meeting in January.

Gospel of Jesus' Wife: a documentary? Noooo!

THE STORY ON THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE continues to develop rapidly.  James McGrath has another invaluable roundup of blog posts and media coverage, along with a fill-in-the-blank caption contest.  And Mark Goodacre has a good summary post on the latest developments:  The Gospel of Jesus' Wife: The Story is Moving Fast! As you can tell from my post title above, I share his disappointment that a television documentary is already in the works and evidently has been for months.  We simply do not yet know enough about the fragment to warrant that kind of television coverage.

Background here and links.

As usual, watch this space.

UPDATE:  Mark Goodacre publishes a brief but quite significant essay by Professor Francis Watson of Durham University:  The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed, by Francis Watson. Summary:

Six of the eight incomplete lines of GJW recto are so closely related to the Coptic GTh, especially to Sayings 101 and 114, as to make dependence virtually certain. A further line is derived from Matthew; just one is left unaccounted for. The author has used a “collage” or “patchwork” compositional technique, and this level of dependence on extant pieces of Coptic text is more plausibly attributed to a modern author, with limited facility in Coptic, than to an ancient one. Indeed, the GJW fragment may be designedly incomplete, its lacunae built into it from the outset. It does not seem possible to fill these lacunae with GTh material contiguous to the fragments cited. The impression of modernity is reinforced by the case in line 1 of dependence on the line-division of the one surviving Coptic manuscript, easily accessible in modern printed editions. Unless this impression of modernity is countered by further investigations and fresh considerations, it seems unlikely that GJW will establish itself as a “genuine” product of early gospel writing.

Plus, in relation to the Secret Gospel of Mark:

The Jesus of the Secret Gospel likes to consort naked with young men at night, while seeming hostile to women. By contrast, the new gospel fragment has Jesus speak disconcertingly of “my wife”. Has this new heterosexual Jesus been created to complement [Morton] Smith’s homosexual one?

UPDATE: James McGrath is not persuaded by Watson's arguments: Is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife a Fake?

UPDATE:  Lots of interesting comments at Mark's post above.  This one by Richard Bauckham strikes me as quite important:

It occurs to me we've missed something that Watson's argument really does demonstrate: that the text of this fragment (whether ancient or modern) was composed in Coptic, not translated from Greek. The Nag Hammadi Gospels and related texts were translated from Greek. So this is at best a late, not an early 'Gnostic" text, dependent on the Coptic version of Thomas. Not, therefore late 2nd century, as Karen King suggests.

Richard also offers some support for my Zeitgeist argument here.

Also, over at Hypotyposes Steven Carlson avers that Roger Bagnall should have a higher opinion of the ingenuity of forgers:  Brief Thoughts on the New Coptic Fragment.

Gabriel Revelation essay

ON THE GABRIEL REVELATION STONE:  Claude Cohen-Matlofsky, Hazon Gabriel: A Social Historian’s Point of View (Bible and Interpretation).

It seems that the “Hazon Gabriel” constitutes documentary evidence of the practice of teaching from a text copied on a plastered stone following a tradition found in the Old Testament.

I am surprised that the essay has no reference to the Balaam Text from Tell Deir ‘Allā.

(By the way, have I mentioned that volume one of the texts translated for the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project is in press and should be out in the next few months? This volume includes a translation of the Balaam Text by Edward Cook.)

Background on the Gabriel Revelation (Vision of Gabriel) is here and here and links.

UPDATE: Bad links now fixed. Sorry!

On the ArtScroll Talmud

BACKGROUND: Behind The Name On The Cover: Jerome Schottenstein And His Sponsorship Of The ArtScroll Talmud (The Jewish Press).

More background on the ArtScroll/Schottenstein Talmud is here and here and links.

Reviews of the Enoch Seminar

ENOCH SEMINAR NEWS:

The Enoch Seminar, an academic association of specialists in the field of Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins since 2001, has developed its website into an online Journal, Enoch Seminar Online (ESO), where subscribers have complete access to all papers presented at the meetings of the Enoch Seminar. A new open access feature has now been added, an online book review service, Reviews of the Enoch Seminar (RES). The primary aim of RES is to publish timely book reviews of current scholarship on Jews and Christians in antiquity, with a particular interest in Jewish and Christian history, literature, and culture between the Babylonian Exile and the Bar-Kokhba revolt. The advantage of our digital, online format includes the capacity to streamline reviews quickly from composition to publication, providing timely access to reviews of some of the latest, cutting-edge research in the field. The comment feature has the added potential of transforming the typically static book review into a stimulant for ongoing intellectual conversation. We warmly invite you to browse our web page at the above links, peruse the current reviews posted, and to consider contributing to this exciting new intellectual venture. You may also find the initial batch of published e-reviews at the following links:

Rebecca Denova on J. Harold Ellens, The Son of Man in the Gospel of John

Isaac Oliver on Albert I. Baumgarten (et al.), eds., Halakhah in Light of Epigraphy

Jonathan Henry on Steven Fraade, Legal Fictions: Studies in Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages

Jason von Ehrenkrook on Catherine Hezser, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine

Reviews Editor: Jason von Ehrenkrook, University of Pittsburgh
Reviews Associate Editor: Isaac W. Oliver, University of Michigan

Founding Director of Enoch Seminar Online: Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan

Gospel of Jesus' Wife update

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE is getting endless attention in the media and the blogosphere, but I don't see very much today which adds anything new.  As far as I know, no papyrologist has come out in favor of its authenticity or even pointed to another ancient papyrus fragment that shares its odd features.  So it looks to me as though we have a small fragment that really, really fortunately preserves just the words that say exactly what we really, really would like to have an ancient gospel fragment say about Jesus.  Coincidentally, the physical features of the fragment are also highly unusual or even unprecedented.  So we've won the lottery twice.  Either that or it's a fake.

James McGrath has produced an excellent roundup of media and blog coverage:  2 Jesus’ Wife.

A couple of specific new items are worth flagging.  First, as I have said, no papyrologist (with the possible exception of the two who originally studied the fragment, although they themselves have not released any statements) argues that the fragment is genuine.  And so far I have only been able to find one specialist in any related area who defends its authenticity.  At the CNN blog, Eric Marrapodi has 5 questions and answers about Jesus' 'wife', which reports the following:

Elaine Pagels, a professor from Princeton University who is an expert on gnostic writings such as this one, noted to CNN, "You can find boxes filled with Coptic fragments." But what makes this one significant is for the first time, it explicitly has Jesus referring to "my wife."

[...]

Some experts in the field, including Pagels, suggest the fragment contains too little to be faked, suggesting that a forger would have included much more in the document to try and raise the value.

I have not seen the exact wording of anything Professor Pagels may have said, so I don't know how accurately her views are being related. But the argument, whoever is making it, is very weak.  The forger, if it is forged, produced just enough to accomplish the objective (fake an ancient gospel with Mary of Magdalene as Jesus' wife and disciple).  Why include more text?  If it were accepted as genuine as it stands now, it would already be fantastically valuable in terms of the antiquities market, and each new line of forged text would make it increasingly likely that the forger would make a slip and be detected.

Second, April DeConick has a blog post is which she says that the Gospel of Philip, another fourth-century Coptic text that we already knew, also says that Mary was Jesus' wife:

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.

Unless the Coptic word translated as "companion" in Gospel of Philip 59.6-10 and 63.30-32 has the specific connotation of "wife" or "consort" (in which case, why is it not so translated in the Robinson, Meyers, or Layton translations?) the new fragment makes explicit what is at most implied in the Gospel of Philip. I have put this point to April in the comments, so you can see what she has to say when she answers. [Update: Link now added. Sorry about that!]

So my current judgement, which seems to be what most people are thinking, is that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is very likely a fake. If it is genuine, it tells us what one late apocryphal tradition speculated about Jesus, but nothing about the historical Jesus.

I will continue reporting as new discussion of interest comes up.

UPDATE: Tom Verenna has had some of his doubts about the physical characteristics of the fragment assuaged: Two Days Later: Another Evaluation of the ‘Jesus Wife’ Papyrus.

UPDATE: Dirk Jongkind notes that if the fragment is genuine, it appears to have been deliberately cut out of a larger context in modern times, presumably by the dealer. What, he wonders, if that was done because the larger context would have ruined the sensational effect the fragment now has? That would take a very clever (and lucky) dealer indeed, but who knows?

Qumran fellowship at Göttingen

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP IN QUMRAN STUDIES:

Centrum Orbis Orientalis et Occidentalis (CORO) Platz der Göttinger Sieben 2 Hausbriefkasten 5 37073 Göttingen Tel.: 0551-39-7146 E-Mail: coro@gwdg.de

The Faculty of Theology of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen invites applications for the position as

Research Fellow/Academic Fellow in Qumran Studies (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin/wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter)

with 75% of the regular weekly working time (currently 29.85 hours per week) commencing January 1st, 2013. The position is limited to two years and may be extended by a third year after successful evaluation. Payment will be according to pay grade 13 TV-L.

The appointee to the position will be responsible for the acquisition of external-funding for a project chosen and administered by the successful candidate. The topic has to be Qumran studies. The fellow will further be expected to teach a 2-hour course each semester within the Faculty of Theology. The language of instruction can either be German or English.

The position is housed under the umbrella of the Centrum Orbis Orientalis et Occidentalis, a centre jointly funded by the University and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. A close co-operation with the Department of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, with the Department for Qumran-Studies at the Faculty of Theology and the research projects of the Academy of Sciences such as the Edition of the Septuagint (Septuagintauntemehmen) and the Qumran-Lexicon is expected.

The applicant should have a completed doctorate (Dr. theol., Dr. phil, PhD) with particular focus on Qumran-Studies or ancient Judaism in one of the following subjects: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, New Testament, Judaic or Religious Studies.

Applications of candidates from abroad are explicitly welcome.

The University of Göttingen is an equal opportunities employer and places particular emphasis on fostering career opportunities for women. Qualified women are therefore strongly encouraged to apply as they are underrepresented in this field. Persons with disabilities will be given preference when equally qualified.

Please submit your application and supporting documents including a detailed curriculum vitae covering your teaching experience, a list of publications as well as a description of previous experience in the acquisition of external funding and a project outline to

Dekanin der Theologischen Fakultat der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Prof. Dr. C. Axt-Piscalar Platz der Göttinger Sieben 2 D-37073 Göttingen

From the Agade List and Eibert Tigchelaar.

A Coptic gospel that mentions Jesus' wife?

PROFESSOR KAREN KING of Harvard University reports that a fragment of Coptic papyrus has come into her hands which appears to be from a fourth-century manuscript of a noncanonical gospel in which Jesus uses the phrase "my wife." The Boston Globe has good coverage of the story:

Harvard professor identifies scrap of papyrus suggesting some early Christians believed Jesus was married
By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE -- A Harvard professor has identified what appears to be a scrap of fourth century Egyptian papyrus that contains the first known explicit reference to Jesus as married, a discovery that could fuel the millennia-old debate about priestly celibacy in the Catholic church.

The fragment, which has been preliminarily authenticated but still must undergo further testing, portrays Jesus as referring to a woman as his legitimate disciple -- most likely his wife, whom the text’s author probably believed to be Mary Magdalene.

The text is not evidence Jesus was married, said the professor, Karen L. King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is scheduled to discuss her discovery at an international gathering of Coptic scholars in Rome on Tuesday. But she said it may cast new light on the history of early Christianity, including the formation of Christian views of celibacy and whether women were members of Jesus’s inner circle, issues still intensely relevant to the Catholic church, which allows only celibate men to be priests.

“The issue has far from gone away,” King said.

The fragment is smaller than a business card, and appears to have been torn from the middle of a page of a codex, or primitive book, written in a southern Egyptian dialect. Its owner, who declines to be identified publicly, does not know where it was found.
It contains just eight broken lines, scrawled in a crude Coptic hand.

The fourth says: “… Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….”

The next line reads: “…she will be able to be my disciple.”

The text does not prove that Jesus had a wife, King emphasized. Even if it is actually a translation of a second century Greek text, as King theorizes, it would have been composed more than a century after the death of Jesus. The earliest and most reliable information about the historical Jesus is silent on the question of his marital status, King said.

“It’s not saying we’ve got the smoking gun that Jesus is married,” she said.
[...]

Inevitably, that last point is already being missed in some press coverage (see below). On the key issue of authenticity:

In March 2012, King tucked the papyrus into her red leather bag along with her iPad and boarded a train to New York, where she and [papyrologist AnneMarie] Luijendijk, a former student of King’s, met [papyrologist Roger] Bagnall at his office. They sat for several hours around a table, looking at the fragment under magnification and different kinds of light, noticing different details and talking through possible scenarios.

The fibrous, dual-layered material was clearly papyrus, an ancient Egyptian precursor to paper made of the pith of a plant that grew along the Nile. It seemed to be ancient; the pith, which makes the smooth writing surface, had worn off, along with the ink, on one side. They could see a spot where a tiny insect appeared to have nibbled at the surface.

Ancient papyrus is available for purchase on the antiquities market, however, so King and her colleagues had to figure out whether the ink was applied in ancient times or by a modern forger.

Infinitesimal details suggested it was genuine: Tiny fibers shredding from the sides of the paper contained almost invisible traces of ink from lost letters. Damage to fibers after they had been inscribed suggested the ink had been laid on the surface long ago, not recently.

The handwriting, workmanlike and laid on with a nubby pen, seemed to date to the 4th century. Its irregular, blocky script is more common in private letters -- and quite unusual for a literary text, Bagnall said. But it is also plausible, he said, that it was the work of an unskilled scribe with a poor pen.

All in all, Bagnall said, “The preponderance of evidence is clearly in favor of authenticity, both because it is so hard to imagine who could have faked it and how, but also because there is nothing inherently suspect about it,” Bagnall said. “You’ve got the physical object, the handwriting, the language, and the content. There’s not a single one of those that seems to me suspect.”

See also the New York Times: A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus' Wife; Karen King's own website on the fragment, which links to a downloadable draft of her article: The Gospel of Jesus's Wife: A New Coptic Gospel Papyrus; and this brief video by Professor King about the fragment: "Jesus said to them, my wife."

My take? I am ... wait for it ... skeptical. Professor King has done everything right and she is taking a very reasonable line of optimistic skepticism, but there's one point that I've seen no one raise so far and which Professor Bagnall in particular misses in the quote above: this fragment is exactly, exactly, what the Zeitgeist of 2012 would want us to find in an ancient gospel. To my mind that weighs heavily against its authenticity. Of course I hope I'm wrong and that it is genuine, and that is certainly a possibility, but this is equivalent to winning big in the lottery and that should make us nervous. It is too perfect. As Larry Schiffman put it, "The most exciting things are the things most likely to be forged." My working hypothesis at the moment is that someone who knew what they were doing went to a lot of effort using a piece of ancient papyrus to create a remarkable forgery.

Where do we go from here? The next steps are, first, to conduct the tests on the ink: if it demonstrates it to be the same chemical composition as ancient Egyptian ink, that will strengthen the case for authenticity considerably. Second, Professor King's article needs to be published in the Harvard Theological Review and evaluated by specialists around the world. I suppose it would also be possible to carbon-date the fragment, but this would at most show the date of the papyrus, not the writing, and the fragment has been taken out of its putative original context and moved around enough that it may now be thoroughly contaminated and un-dateable by such means. But with any luck we will be able to come to a consensus view in the next few years either for authenticity or against. We may never know the answer for sure, or we may come to a consensus that is either conclusively confirmed or conclusively refuted sometime in the future when a new technology is able to test factors that could not have been foreseen in 2012.

If it is genuine, it seems to be the earliest mention (fourth century or possibly somewhat earlier) of the idea that Jesus had a wife, which is of considerable importance for early church history. But it has no bearing on the actual question of whether the historical Jesus had a wife. Some of the headlines are not clear on this point: "Was Jesus married? Papyrus may give clue" (Houston Chronicle) and "'Proof' Jesus was married found on ancient papyrus that mentions how son of God spoke of his wife and Mary Magdalene" (The Daily Mail, which at least uses scare quotes for "proof," although not actually quoting anyone) and Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests (LiveScience; true but the phrasing is misleading). I have commented on the question of whether Jesus was married here.

Pretty much the entire Biblioblogosphere is abuzz with the news. I haven't tried to read all or even very many of the posts, but I note good substantive posts by Mark Goodace (The Gospel of Jesus' Wife) and Jared Calaway (New Gospel Fragment: Preliminary Notes and Hypothesis) and a roundup by James McGrath (Coptic Text Mentions Jesus’ Wife).

Also, Alin Suciu is now at The Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies where Karen King presented her paper on the fragment yesterday. On Facebook he has promised a blog post on the authenticity issue when he returns from Rome. He thinks it's a fake.

Stay tuned ...

UPDATE: I note that Mark Goodacre does raise the Zeitgeist issue in the link above. I am not, however, persuaded by his comparison with The Gospel of Judas, which is genuine and which, granted, did fit in a general way the Zeitgeist's desire for counter-gospel traditions. But the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a whole new level of Zeitgeist correspondence, playing into the widespread (not just Dan Brown) meme that Jesus must have married Mary Magdalene; also to the desire to find some stratum of feminist equality in the early church which can serve as authoritative precedent for equality in the modern church; and also to the desire to undermine the Catholic tradition of a celibate clergy. It is just too perfect.

Moreover, The Gospel of Judas illustrates my point in another way. When it was published, it was immediately read as presenting a sympathetic Judas who was not evil after all—a Judas congenial to our Zeitgeist. Subsequent research has called this conclusion very seriously into question on philological grounds. (Background here and links.) We must always be especially wary of both interpretations and discoveries that tell us what we want to hear.

Also, at a Nag Hammadi Facebook Group, Louis Painchaud, who is also at the Coptic Congress in Rome, has called for caution and indicated, as has Alin Suciu, that the script of the fragment doesn't look real, nor does the way it is cut. And apparently others at the Congress are questioning its authenticity. (Pointed out by Mark Goodacre.) Note that Painchaud was one of the first, if not the first, to challenge the initial interpretation of The Gospel of Judas and to find in it a good old traditional evil Judas.

There are also problems with the story of the provenance of the new fragment. Again, noted on Facebook by Mark Goodacre, who had been independently making similar points.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Karen King forged this fragment, nor as far as I know is anyone else. I am confident that she has in all honesty and good faith brought to light a text that was given to her by someone else, and she has handled the whole situation entirely properly. But I am not alone in thinking that there is good reason to doubt that the fragment is authentic.

UPDATE: The AP registers skepticism: Harvard claim of Jesus' Wife papyrus scrutinized. Alin Suciu and other specialists are quoted.

Also, Tom Verenna sees problems with the physical characteristics of the fragment: The ‘Wife of Jesus’ Fragment a Day Later: Some Concerns About Authenticity.

UPDATE: Still more! The Tyndale House website has Simon Gathercole's analysis of the text: Gathercole on Jesus' Wife. And (HT Richard Bauckham) over at Evangelical Textual Criticism, Christian Askeland, who is also in Rome at the Coptic Colloquium, reports on reactions to King's paper:

During the course of the last several hours, I have attempted to understand the reaction of various persons within the coptological community here at the International Association of Coptic studies conference. My initial perception is that those who specialize in Nag Hammadi and early manuscripts are split with about four-fifths being extremely skeptical about the manuscript’s authenticity and one-fifth is fairly convinced that the fragment is a fake. I have not met anyone who supports its authenticity, although I do not doubt that there must be some.

He then goes on to explain in detail why he thinks the fragment is probably a forgery.

UPDATE (20 September): More here.

The simulation argument meets NASA

THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT is being defended by NASA scientist Rich Terrile, who is interviewed by Ben Makuch at Vice: Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now? This NASA Scientist Thinks We Could Be. Excerpt:

VICE: When did you first surmise that our reality could be a computer simulation?
Rich Terrile:Unless you believe there’s something magical about consciousness—and I don’t, I believe it’s the product of a very sophisticated architecture within the human brain—then you have to assume that at some point it can be simulated by a computer, or in other words, replicated. There are two ways one might accomplish an artificial human brain in the future. One of them is to reverse-engineer it, but I think it would be far easier to evolve a circuit or architecture that could become conscious. Perhaps in the next ten to 30 years we’ll be able to incorporate artificial consciousness into our machines.

These are interesting speculations, but they are just speculations. Note in particular, the first clause, "Unless you believe there’s something magical about consciousness," which is a roundabout way of saying you don't understand what consciousness is and neither do I, therefore I'm going to run with my assumptions. Fair enough, but assumptions they remain. We have no theory of consciousness that has any explanatory value or that could lead to the ability to replicate it artificially. To say that it is an emergent property of sufficiently complex computation is to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius, explaining one thing we don't understand (consciousness) by something else we don't understand (emergent properties) and it simply sidesteps the real problem of why some hunks of matter (or at least the one I'm in) acquire a sense of "me-ness."

Moreover, complex computation and even mentation are not by any means necessarily connected to consciousness. Anyone who has experimented with Raja Yoga (and, really, who hasn't?) has learned that most of the thought processes running in their own mind are unconscious and are only briefly illuminated from time to time by the narrow sliver of consciousness that inhabits their mind and flits about it to use the mental processes as needed.

It may be that (1) consciousness is indeed the central processing unit of the physical brain—but we can't show yet why the CPU has its own sense of existence distinct from the mind. It may also be, as the ancient yogis thought, (2) that consciousness (which they called the purusha) is something external to the material world and cannot be explained in material terms, in which case we will not find an explanation of it. Lots of metaphysicians have problems with the idea of immaterial entities, but I'm enough of a Platonist that they don't bother me too much. It is also possible that (3) there is an explanation of consciousness in material terms, but because we process everything through our consciousness, we are in principle unable to understand the explanation any more than we can look in our ear with our eye. If 2 or 3 apply, we won't be populating any simulated worlds with conscious beings.

We not only do not understand consciousness, we also don't have any way to measure it. The Turing Test is a side issue. At best it would measure the ability to think, which is not the same as consciousness. Also, in practice, even today some chatbots can fool people into thinking they (the chatbots) are human.

So the case remains to be made that increases in computational power will eventually pass some threshold that creates conscious AI and allows us to simulate worlds with conscious creatures in them. But as, if memory serves, Nick Bostrom pointed out years ago, that doesn't preclude the simulation argument. The universe may indeed be a simulation with a limited number of player characters inhabiting it (me at least, plus you if you are reading this), but with everyone else as non-player characters who are simply realistic simulations with no internal consciousness.

I return to the simulation argument from time to time, because similar ideas are at the basis of ancient Gnosticism (the kind associated with the demiurgic myth): the universe is the flawed creation of a fallen creator and we are Pleromatic (heavenly, more or less) sparks of light that have become trapped in the material muck. The object of the game is to gain the knowledge (gnosis) that will allow us to escape from the fallen created world and return to the Pleroma.

Back to the article, for some final theological reflections from Terrile:

You seem really at peace with this concept. When I first heard about your theory I was incredibly bummed but, obviously, intrigued.
I find great inspiration in it, and I’ll tell you why: It tells me that we’re at the threshold of being able to create a universe—a simulation—and that we in turn could be living inside a simulation, which could be in turn yet another simulation. And our simulated beings could also create simulations. What I find intriguing is, if there is a creator, and there will be a creator in the future and it will be us, this also means if there’s a creator for our world, here, it’s also us. This means we are both God and servants of God, and that we made it all. What I find inspiring is that, even if we are in a simulation or many orders of magnitude down in levels of simulation, somewhere along the line something escaped the primordial ooze to become us and to result in simulations that made us. And that’s cool.

That's a much more positive take on Gnosticism, with demiurges all the way down, so to speak. Who knows, maybe the Gnostics or (and?) the simulationists are right. Call me when you have a real theory of consciousness.

Background on the simulation argument and Gnosticism is here with many links.

Jodie Magness at Biblical Studies List

JODIE MAGNESS will be visiting the Biblical Studies List to discuss her new book:

I’m happy to announce that Jodi Magness has agreed to join us on the Biblical Studies List for a colloquium (discussion) on her just published volume, The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest. It’s available in paperback from Amazon for $28. A bargain.

Our discussion will take place November 1-10 and if you would like to take part,

- Get the book, and read it. Then, when the time comes, you’ll have the opportunity to interact with Prof. Magness and other leading scholars on the contents.

Another colloquium with Avraham Faust is scheduled for December. Follow the link for details.

New(ish) book: Robinson, The Story of the Bodmer Papyri

THIS BOOK has been out for a while, but it has just come to my attention via Adam McCollum on Facebook:

James M. Robinson, The Story of the Bodmer Papyri: From the First Monastery's Library in Upper Egypt to Geneva and Dublin (Cascade Books, 2010)

Happy New Year!

ROSH HASHANAH begins this evening at sundown. Happy New Year to all those celebrating.