MARK GOODACRE notes more about James Barr from the Times of London.

THE JOURNAL OF GRECO-ROMAN CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM has articles posted for volume 3. Mark Goodacre and Rick Brannan have details.

HALLOWEEN JOKE HEARD LAST NIGHT:

Q: What would happen if you threw a blue book into the Red Sea?

A: It would get wet.

TICKETS ARE ON SALE already for the San Diego exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which opens at the end of June 2007. The general public can start buying them today. The museum has sold more than 5,000 tickets so far to members and groups.

ONE NIGHT WITH THE KING is reviewed by Darius Kadivar in the Persian Mirror. Excerpts:

The film's budget of $20 million is relatively small for a story of such epic proportions. But what could be considered as an achievement is flawed by the lack of historical research in both the costumes and sets. This is anything but Ancient Persia ! Where are the Zoroastrian Priests, Persepolis and its Halls of a Hundred Columns topped by the double headed lions or bulls or its tall walls and bas-relief’s ornated by the winged Griffin’s, or Susa and its emerald looking Immortal Guards that commanded respect to any unwelcome visitor of the Kings Palace. Instead lndia and its extravagant palaces were used to replace those of Ancient Persia. The sets are as Kitsch as any Bollywood Soap Opera Production and needless to say nothing, absolutely NOTHING looks or sounds Persian of the Aechemenid Era in the slightest way.

[...]

The truly sad aspect of this production is precisely to have such a good cast and legendary film Stars like Sharif and O’Toole who made Movie History in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, be reduced to appearing in a parody of an Epic in the true sense of the word.

As an avid moviegoer myself, I will never call to boycott any film. After all one can always recreate a film genre as Ridely Scott did so brilliantly with Gladiator. But at least good Ol’ Ridley is a believer and his faith is called “Cinema”. If the producers of One Night with the King believe in anything, I very much doubt it is what Hollywood was so good at in the late 50’s and 60’s combining entertainment and a minimum of historical education.

MY BOOK, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha, receives a sympathetic and thoughtful review by Sabrina Inowlocki in the Review of Biblical Literature. It's always rewarding to have one's work read and thought about this carefully.

IN THE MAIL -- My review copy of:

Todd E. Klutz, Rewriting the Testament of Solomon: Tradition, Conflict and Identity in a Late Antique Pseudepigraphon (Library of Second Temple Studies 53; London: T&T Clark, 2005)

ED COOK discusses some Hebrew Phrases in the Qumran Texts.

Q IS FOR QUMRAN. The Religion Column of the Dallas Morning News has a brief description of the site and the usual interpretation of its inhabitants and importance.

Blogger has been down most of this morning and has been glacially slow when available at all. I have more to post, but my time to waste over this is limited.

"THERE WERE ERRORS." Some sort of Blogger glitch kept me from posting today until just now. The posts showed up on my dashboard, but I kept getting this message when I tried to published them and they refused to appear on the blog. Blogger has been having a lot of technical trouble this week (and, to give them credit, they've apologized profusely on the Blogger blog). Sorry for the delay.

THE BIBLE BEFORE THE YEAR 1000 EXHIBITION was reviewed last week by the Washington Post:

A Testament To Change: Early Scraps Of the Bible
Rare Fragments Show Evolution of Scripture

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 21, 2006; Page C01

If 40 percent of Americans refuse to believe that humans evolved from earlier hominids, how many will accept that the book we know as the Bible evolved from earlier texts and was not handed down, in toto, by God in its present form?

The fossil evidence for human evolution is permanently on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Hard evidence that the Bible took its present shape over centuries will be on display for the next 11 weeks, from today through Jan. 7, across the Mall at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

They are rarer than dinosaur bones, these fragments of papyrus and animal skin that tell the Bible's story. With names such as Codex Sinaiticus, the Macregol Gospels and the Valenciennes Apocalypse, they evoke lost empires and ancient monasteries as surely as archaeopteryx and ceratosaurus conjure up primeval swamps and forests.

The Sackler's exhibition, "In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000," is one of the broadest assemblages of this material ever brought together in one place. "It has not happened before, and we will not see its like again in our lives," said guest curator Michelle P. Brown, professor of medieval manuscript studies at the University of London.

These are documents with the proven power to shake faith. That's what happened to Bart D. Ehrman, author of the 2005 bestseller "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why."

[...]

Ehrman's story is interesting, but I don't think that textual criticism has that much effect on most people's faith when they become aware of it.

A NEW JESUS MOVIE has just come out, in which Jesus is black:

New Jesus film puts race into religion
POSTED: 8:01 a.m. EDT, October 27, 2006
By Simon Hooper for CNN

(CNN) -- The life of Jesus has always provided controversial subject matter for filmmakers.

From Monty Python's irreverent "The Life of Brian" to Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," which depicted a sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Hollywood's often iconoclastic interpretations of the gospel story have rarely failed to stir up religious fury.

Earlier this year Mel Gibson's bloody account of the final hours of Jesus, "The Passion of the Christ," was named the most controversial Hollywood movie of all time by U.S. magazine "Entertainment Weekly."

Appearing at No. 13 on the same list was the movie adaptation of Dan Brown's blockbuster, "The Da Vinci Code."

But a new film covering the last two days of Jesus' life is aiming to stir up a new debate about popular representations of Christ by depicting him as black. Furthermore, the film suggests that the persecution suffered by Jesus may have been racially motivated.

[...]

GHOST STORIES and the Dead Sea Scrolls:

Tess Gerritsen, author of the novel The Mephisto Club (Ballantine Books):

"It all starts with `the chill.' While reading the news, or listening in on a conversation, I'll hear something that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, and I know this will be my next plot.

"Reports of a corpse who woke up in the morgue inspired my novel Vanish. Ancient accounts of demons described in the Dead Sea Scrolls launched The Mephisto Club. Both books started with `the chill.'

Timely.

ARAMAIC IN A POLITICAL AD?

He said what?

The mystery over what actor James Caviezel says in Aramaic at the end of an ad opposing Missouri Amendment 2 on stem cells has an answer. Some scholars say Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” says, “You betray the Son of God with a kiss.”

Jaci Winship of Missourians Against Human Cloning confirmed that: “The point is, Amendment 2 is a betrayal.”

One wag joked that Caviezel was saying, “I’m Jesus, and I approved this message.”

The ad, which features baseball players Mike Sweeney and Jeff Suppan, was to air for the first time in the World Series on Thursday night.

Did anyone out there who knows Aramaic see this ad? I can't find it on YouTube (let me know if you can) but here's the scene from The Passion of the Christ in which Caviezel says the words in question.

UPDATE: Joe Cathey e-mails to point to the Caviezel ad here. The beginning of the ad seems to be cut off and the first Aramaic word is missing: he says (in Aramaic) "- the Son of Man with a kiss."

SPEAKING OF INDIANA JONES, his (unsuccessful) tenure review can be read here.

(Heads-up, Chuck Jones.)

INDY 4 NEWS:

At age 64, Ford says he's still fit to play Indy
Oct. 24, 2006. 01:00 AM (AP)

ROME-Harrison Ford says he feels "fit to continue" to play Indiana Jones, despite growing older.

[...]

Not much in the way of detail in that article, but someone named Mark Harrison publishes some rumors in the Alabama Times-Journal::

Ford has said the fourth movie will be set in slightly more recent times, to reflect a proper degree of aging for the characters. It will be interesting to see is how well the concept itself has aged, and whether audiences can still feel quite so detached from the concept of pure evil in a post 9-11 world. Suddenly, the concept of evildoers trying to get their hands on weapons of great power seems a little less like fantasy.

We'll see.

By the way, it's "Ark," not "Arc."

THE DEMISE OF SECRET MARK is described by Bruce Chilton in "Unmasking a False Gospel" in the New York Sun. Excerpt:

A recent book by Stephen C. Carlson shows us how the basics of scholarship were eclipsed by sensationalism on the left, compounded by willful dismissal on the right, and why "Secret Mark" needs to be seen as a fraud. In "The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark" (Baylor University Press, 151 pages, $24.95), Mr. Carlson, a lawyer, argues his case as if in a civil proceeding, meeting the test of proof by preponderance of evidence, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. He has mastered his brief impressively, and although in my view he does not quite prove that Smith was a forger, he does demonstrate - within the limits of certainty that incomplete evidence involves - that "Secret Mark" is someone's forgery, and that Smith, who died in 1991, was the likely culprit.

He'a also pretty hard on modern "neo-Gnostics":

Publicity and naïveté have encouraged the rise of a form of neo-Gnosticism, a fashion greatly encouraged by recent discoveries and alleged discoveries. In embracing these ancient sources, the neo-Gnostics are unlike their ancient counterparts. They want to embrace the earth, not subjugate it; they don't wish to be elitist. Above all, they want to insist on the gender-equality of women with men. You need to cherry-pick Gnostic sources, and ignore a great deal of what they say, to make that picture work as an account of the Nag Hammadi library. Neo-Gnostics do just that, and falsify history. Many ancient Gnostics were openly anti-Semitic, taught that the physical world was the hopelessly corrupt product of a false god, and insisted that only the predestined elect could know the divine truth. These are persistent tendencies, rather than a set of precise ideas that all Gnostics repeated, but they are facts that can't be denied.

One can make the same sort of criticisms of a lot of religions, and I'd rather see them improve on Nag Hammadi Gnosticism than the alternative. But that's just me. The final paragraph has some searching criticism of scholars:

No literature has suffered more from this problem than that of the second century of Christianity. In the case of "the Secret Gospel," a modern researcher ( Morton Smith himself, or someone whose forgery duped Smith) has made up a Gnostic document up in the attempt to manipulate scholarly discussion and public perception. The fact that this attempt succeeded for so long stands as an indictment of American scholarship, which prides itself on skepticism in regard to the canonical Gospels, but then turns credulous, and even neo-Gnostic, when non-canonical texts are concerned.

UPDATE (27 October): To clarify, regarding the neo-Gnostics: Many, perhaps most, religions can be accused of misconstruing and selectively reading their own scriptures to suit later agendas. Some go as far as falsifying history (for example, Christian fundamentalist creationists and Muslims who deny that a Jewish Temple stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). If people today want to be Gnostics (and it's not for me to tell them whether they should be or shouldn't), I would rather they be Gnostics who support women's rights and the prudent use of the earth's resources and who aren't anti-Semitic. If any of that is untrue to ancient Gnostic scriptures or doctrines, so be it. (But if they want to claim that these are the actual values of ancient Gnostics, I will, as usual, call them on any historical inaccuracies.)

UPDATE: Loren Rosson takes a somewhat different view over at The Busybody. And (via a comment by Stephen Carlson in the same post) a neo-Gnostic responds to Chilton here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Loren here.

UPDATES: I've added updates to posts on the 23rd and 24th. I'm busy with work and family things today, so that may be all for today.

PRADA "THUNDER PERFECT MIND" -- Now you can see the video on YouTube.

GOLB AND THE SCROLLS -- Various people have been sending me this article from the Chicago Tribune (requires free registration to access):

U. of C. professor may be right after all
Chicago scholar's long-discredited theory on Dead Sea Scrolls finds support in new archeological dig

By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 22, 2006

The Dead Sea Scrolls have provoked endless controversies since the ancient manuscripts, hidden away in the age of Jesus, were recovered in an obscure corner of the Holy Land in the late 1940s.

But one thing scholars have agreed upon: Norman Golb is wrong.

Golb, a feisty University of Chicago professor, has long argued that the scrolls are a sort of library of writings by different Jewish sects hidden near a site known as Qumran to protect the texts from Roman invaders.

Most scholars, meanwhile, have insisted that the scrolls are the work of a tiny sect that wrote them in a monastery at Qumran.

"In 40 years, about the only one Golb has been able to convince is himself," said Eugene Ulrich a University of Notre Dame professor and eminent scrolls scholar.

But a new archeological dig has produced evidence that puts a spotlight on Golb's long discredited theories and suggests new ideas about the missing link between Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity.

"A lot of people said he was wrong," said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, "But Norman had one small piece of the puzzle all along."

[...]

Now, comes independent verification of Golb's hunch. As noted in Biblical Archaeology Review, Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg concluded that the site wasn't a monastery and had nothing to do with the Essenes. It began as a fortress--just as Golb said--when the Jews had an independent kingdom. When the Romans afterward took over Palestine, it housed a pottery factory.

"Whosoever severs the link between the site, its Essene community and the scrolls found in the caves, of necessity also undermines all previous ideas about the nature and provenance of the scrolls," Magen and Peleg wrote.

[...]

I've always found Golb's ideas interesting and worth thinking about (see, e.g., here and here). And it does seem plausible to me that numerous small libraries from around Judea were consolidated during the Judean revolt with whaterver library was at Qumran. But the contents are uniformly sectarian or at least unobjectionable to sectarian sensibilities (with vanishingly few, if any, exceptions), so I think the collections of scrolls that were brought to Qumran came from sectarians living outside it.

Until recently, everyone seemed to agree that Golb was wrong about Qumran being a fortress, on the grounds that the water system is inadequately defended. But this has been challenged now for some time (see this post from 2004). For more on the theory of Magen and Peleg, see here. And Golb's theory has already received attention in relation to the new excavations.

UPDATE (25 October): David Stacey e-mails:

Jim, In today's blog you flag up an old internet article of mine. That was written before I'd had a chance to study de Vaux's field notes which are not in C.U. library. When interlibrary loans eventually produced a copy I realised that there was a fundamental error in his interpretation of the archaeology of the aqueducts, an error that has been reproduced without question subsequently. (The 'main' aqueduct together with the so-called 'main building' could not have been built before the time of Herod). An article has been accepted for publication in DSD but will not get to the head of the queue before the end of next year. A shortened version without plans or photos can be accessed at [this link (word file)].