Burke at SBL

TONY BURKE: 2013 SBL Annual Meeting Diary.

My own report on the 2013 SBL conference is here.

More on the Temple in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Miraculous Architecture of the First Temple Leads to Religious Sectarianism in the Second. To the Talmudic rabbis, a miracle is more plausible than the notion that their sources were incorrect. Excerpt:

Imagine that you wanted to build an exact duplicate of your house, and you hired an architect to do the job. But the architect isn’t allowed to see the building she was supposed to duplicate, and you aren’t allowed to make any blueprints or drawings of it: All you can do is describe its dimensions in words. Something like this is the challenge facing the rabbis when they try to imagine the Holy Temple, which stood in Jerusalem for centuries before the Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E. The Amoraim had never seen the structure they were trying to describe. All they had were conflicting reports from a variety of rabbinic sources, which had to be reconciled with each other and with the biblical description of the Temple. It’s no wonder, then, that the accounts of the Temple in Tractate Yoma, which Daf Yomi readers have been exploring this week, are so inconsistent and hard to follow.

[...]

Previous Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

UPDATE (8 December): Bad link now fixed. Sorry!

GJW follow-up

IT'S MARK GOODACRE'S TURN TO ASK: Whatever happened to the Gospel of Jesus' Wife? And he asks another excellent question at the end of the post.

Background here and links.

UPDATE: More from Larry Hurtado: “Jesus’ Wife” Fragment: A Continuing Puzzle.

Burke on Christian Apocrypha

EERDMANS BLOG: “Revealing Christianity’s Secret Scriptures” by Tony Burke.

MOTP

NIJAY K. GUPTA: Make Shelf-Space for More “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha”! Indeed.

Mingana Collection

SYRIAC WATCH: The University of Birmingham's Mingana Collection website includes some interesting Syriac manuscripts, as well as manuscripts in Arabic and Greek.

(HT Emmanouela Grypeou on Facebook.) More on the Mingana collection here and link.

Oxford, Vatican manuscript project now live

DIGITIZATION: Vatican and Bodleian libraries launch online archive of ancient religious texts. Website funding from Polonsky Foundation includes Bodleian's 1455 Gutenberg Bible and aims to put 1.5m pages online (Maev Kennedy, The Guardian). Excerpt:

The works to be digitised include the small but staggering collection of Greek manuscripts in the Vatican, including ancient texts of works by Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Hippocrates. The Bodleian's collection is much larger – by the end of the 17th century the most important in Britain – but later, mainly of 15th and 16th century manuscripts.

The Vatican's Hebrew texts include the oldest Hebrew codex – a manuscript bound as a book – in existence, and a copy of the entire Bible written in Italy around 1100. The Vatican's collection of 8,900 incunabula – the earliest printed books, many published in Rome – is the fourth largest in the world, followed closely by the Bodleian's.

The project website is here. Note also its Hebrew Manuscripts page, the essay thereon by renowned Hebrew codicologist Malachi Beit-Arié, and the essay by Nigel Wilson on the Greek manuscripts.

Background here, with lots of links about other digitization projects.

Temple Mount graphic

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The most contested real estate on Earth?

Yeah, pretty much.

In the Washington Post Richard Johnson, Gene Thorp, and Bonnie Berkowitz have an interesting and useful graphic about the history of the site.

Deutsch is suing the IAA

THE ISRAEL FORGERY TRIAL BLOWBACK CONTINUES: Deutsch Files $3 Million Suit Against Israel Antiquities Authority (Matthew Kalman, Bible and Interpretation). Excerpt:

[Robert] Deutsch filed suit on 28 November in the Tel Aviv District Court against the Israel Antiquities Authority, its director Shuka Dorfman, the head of its anti-theft unit Amir Ganor, the Jerusalem District Attorney and Assistant District Attorney Dan Bahat who led the prosecution. He is seeking 12 million shekels ($3.4 million) in damages – an astronomical sum for Israel. In an interview, Deutsch said the multi-million-dollar damages demanded were “a drop in the ocean” compared to the wreckage wrought to his reputation and business by the affair. Deutsch was never accused of any involvement with the alleged forgery of either the James Ossuary or Jehoash Tablet, but when those items propelled the sprawling, 18-count indictment sheet into the headlines, as the main co-defendant his name was yoked to the allegations against Golan.

In the verdict delivered in March 2012 and upheld by Israel’s High Court earlier this year, Golan was also acquitted on all counts of forgery while charges against two other defendants were dropped halfway through the trial. Golan and a fifth defendant were convicted on three minor charges of mishandling genuine antiquities. In his verdict, the trial judge, Aharon Farkash, described Deutsch as “an honest and decent businessman, professional and experienced, who has advised many people without demanding any financial return.”

Background on the Israel forgery trial and its aftermath is here with many links.

Iraqi Jewish Archive - new developments

THE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES:

The discoverer of the Iraqi Jewish archive weighs in: Scholar fights to keep Jewish artifacts from returning to Iraq. Harold Rhode's elation at finding the trove during the Iraq war has since turned to outrage that the salvaged texts might go back. (David S. Cloud, L.A. Times).

WASHINGTON — Harold Rhode still recalls the euphoria he felt a decade ago after finding thousands of dripping, moldy artifacts of Iraq's once-vibrant Jewish community in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service headquarters in Baghdad.

"How do you describe it? An enormous elation, a deep connection, but also shock: Why would this be here?" says the 64-year-old former Pentagon official, an Orthodox Jew who discovered the purloined archive in the bombed-out building days after he arrived in the Iraqi capital with the U.S. invasion force in the spring of 2003.

People who saw him at the time recall that Rhode, a disheveled, rotund scholar of Islamic history, was nearly overcome with emotion as he rescued the waterlogged books, personal papers and sacred texts, including a 400-year-old Hebrew Bible, all of which seemed to be a link to the ancient — and mostly dispersed — Jewish population of Mesopotamia.

But like the arc of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Rhode's involvement with the Iraqi Jewish archives has progressed from exhilaration to disillusionment and recrimination.

Since he arranged 10 years ago for the collection to be brought to the United States in metal shipping containers, on which he had scrawled "RHODE" and "TORAHS" in big letters, the books and documents have been carefully cleaned of mold and grime, preserved and digitally photographed by experts at the U.S. National Archives.

When summer comes, however, they are to be returned to the Iraqi government, an ending that Rhode likens to giving the personal effects of Jews killed in the Holocaust back to Germany.

[...]

Ouch.

At a hearing last month before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lawmakers grilled Brett H. McGurk, deputy assistant secretary of State.

He affirmed that the U.S. was committed to the "safe and rightful return of these artifacts" but also acknowledged that "we have heard loudly and clearly the concerns" of the Jewish community. "We'll see what we can do."

I hope they do.

I mentioned Harold Rhode in connection with the archive here back in 2004.

Jews expelled from Iraq are also having their say: Tug-of-war erupts over planned return of Jewish archives to Iraq (Sylvia Westall and Jonathan Saul, Reuters). Excerpt:

Edwin Shuker, 58, who escaped to Britain with his family from Baghdad in 1971, said he had discovered his long-abandoned school certificate on display as part of the National Archives exhibition.

"This is more than a school certificate - it is the identity we were forced to leave behind," he told Reuters, likening the document's journey and survival to his own.

"I would like to be reassured that my children and future generations will have unrestricted access to this collection."

Cynthia Kaplan Shamash, from the New York-based World Organisation of Jews from Iraq, said Iraqi Jews were grateful for the restoration but did not want the archive to go back. "Returning the collection to a Jewish-free Iraq in the current conditions is incomprehensible and unacceptable," she said.

Likewise in this article in the National Post: ‘Like sending back art Nazis looted’: Iraqi Jews who fled persecution fight to stop U.S. from returning stolen artifacts to Baghdad (Joe O'Connor). Excerpt:

Finding her old report card in an archive that houses the Declaration of Independence was “kind of cool” for Dr. Bassoon-Zaltzman. But mostly it wasn’t cool. Mostly it made her angry, and sad, and brought back a tide of bad memories from her childhood, from the Iraq of the 1960s where a once vital Iraqi Jewish community lived in fear, never knowing who would be arrested next.

“I really felt violated seeing my report card because I knew the Iraqi secret police had no way of getting it unless they took it from our house,” Dr. Bassoon-Zaltzman says. “All I could think about was somebody being in the house I grew up in and stealing this document and storing it in the basement of the Mukhabarat — the secret police of Saddam Hussein.

“Sending these items back to Iraq now would be like sending art that the Nazis looted from Europe’s Jews back to Germany. But it’s even worse, because I am nobody. I am not famous, and I am still alive, and there is no inherent value to these items. Nobody in Iraq is going to care about looking at documents and photos of Iraqi Jews that they don’t even know and that have no value to them, or the Iraqi government, or anyone — except the people they were stolen from.

“It is my report card.”

Background here with endless links

Hannibal miniseries

PUNIC WATCH: History Developing Hannibal Miniseries Executive Produced by Halle Berry (comingsoon.net).

History is developing the miniseries "Hannibal" (working title), co-produced by A+E Studios and Red Arrow Entertainment with Academy Award-winning Actress Halle Berry executive producing and Oscar-nominated writer Jeffrey Caine (The Constant Gardener, GoldenEye) penning the script, it was announced today by Dirk Hoogstra, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History & H2. The miniseries will tell the story of the greatest generals in antiquity - Hannibal Barca and his archrival Scipio Africanus - who went head-to-head in the Second Punic War.

[...]

This is evidently unrelated to Vin Diesel's longstanding project of a Hannibal movie. I have many other past posts on Hannibal, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here.

Review of Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon

MARGINALIA: Edmon L. Gallagher on Timothy H. Lim’s The Formation of the Jewish Canon. Excerpt:

Timothy Lim’s new book The Formation of the Jewish Canon does not seek to provide a comprehensive treatment of canon formation but rather attempts to address select questions with some depth. He thus gives little attention to what we can learn of the Jewish Bible from patristic sources, which scholars such as Gilles Dorival have shown to be valuable for this task. Nevertheless, each of the debatable points listed above receives treatment here. Lim concentrates on the pre-rabbinic sources that illuminate (however faintly) the process by which the main contours of the Jewish canon were established during the period from Ezra in the fifth century BCE to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

The book was noted earlier as forthcoming here.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature, Christianity in the Lycus Valley

MORE NEW BOOKS FROM BRILL:

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature

Edited by Jean-Sébastien Rey , Université de Lorraine
The relationships between Pauline literature and the Dead Sea scrolls have fascinated specialists ever since the latter were first discovered. Now that all the Qumran scrolls have been published, it is possible to see more clearly the amplitude and impact of this corpus on first century Judaism. This book offers some syntheses of the results obtained in the last decades, and also opens up new perspectives, by highlighting similarities and indicating possible relationships between these various writings within Mediterranean Judaism. In addition, the authors wish to show how certain traditions spread, evolve and are reconfigured in ancient Judaism as they meet new religious, cultural and social challenges.

Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley

In Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, Ulrich Huttner explores the way Christians established communities and defined their position within their surroundings from the first to the fifth centuries. He shows that since the time of Paul the apostle, the cities Colossae, Hierapolis and Laodicea allowed Christians to expand and develop in their own way.

Huttner uses a wide variety of sources, not only Christian texts - from Pauline letters to Byzantine hagiographies - but also inscriptions and archeological remains, to reconstruct the religious conflicts as well as cooperation between Christians, Jews and Pagans. The book reveals the importance of local conditions in the development of Early Christianity.

Fish or dish on the Talpiot Tomb B inscription?

MARK GOODACRE (Wim G. Meijer): If it walks like a duck: Ossuary 6 of the Talpiot 'Patio' Tomb depicts commonly used Jewish images.

Numerous earlier posts on the Talpiot Tomb B inscription are here and links.

4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, Wisdom and Torah

NEW BOOKS FROM BRILL:

Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch
Reconstruction after the Fall
Edited by Matthias Henze, Rice University and Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan with the collaboration of Jason M. Zurawski

The two Jewish works that are the subject of this volume, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, were written around the turn of the first century CE in the aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple. Both texts are apocalypses, and both occupy an important place in early Jewish literature and thought: they were composed right after the Second Temple period, as Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity began to emerge.

The twenty essays in this volume were first presented and discussed at the Sixth Enoch Seminar at the Villa Cagnola at Gazzada, near Milan, Italy, on June 26-30, 2011. Together they reflect the lively debate about 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch among the most distinguished specialists in the field.

The Contributors are: Gabriele Boccaccini; Daniel Boyarin; John J. Collins; Devorah Dimant; Lutz Doering; Lorenzo DiTommaso; Steven Fraade; Lester L. Grabbe; Matthias Henze; Karina M. Hoogan; Liv Ingeborg Lied; Hindy Najman; George W.E. Nickelsburg; Eugen Pentiuc; Pierluigi Piovanelli; Benjamin Reynolds; Loren Stuckenbruck; Balázs Tamási; Alexander Toepel; Adela Yarbro Collins

More on the Sixth Enoch Seminar here, here, and here.

Wisdom and Torah
The Reception of ‘Torah’ in the Wisdom Literature of the Second Temple Period
Edited by Bernd U. Schipper, Humboldt University and D. Andrew Teeter, Harvard Divinity School

A proper assessment of the manifold relationships that obtain between “wisdom” and “Torah” in the Second Temple Period has fascinated generations of interpreters. The essays of the present collection seek to understand this key relationship by focusing attention on specific instances of the reception of “Torah” in Wisdom literature and the shaping of Torah by wisdom. Taking the concepts of wisdom and torah in the various literary strata of the book of Deuteronomy as a point of departure, the remainder of the book examines the relationship between wisdom and Torah in Wisdom literature of the Second Temple period, including Proverbs, Qohelet, Ps 19 and 119, Baruch, Ben Sira, Wisdom, sapiential and rewritten scriptural texts from Qumran, and the Wisdom of Solomon.

1 Enoch and the canon

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Seriously?

Jack Collins: "Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led to Enoch's rejection from most Christian biblical canons ..."

Mezuzot and persecution in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: The Talmud Says God Can’t Protect Jews From Persecution; They Must Take Precautions. A ‘mezuzah,’ like Judaism, is designed for life in this world, not for a messianic future, or for martyrdom.

This week’s Daf Yomi reading gave striking examples of such Talmudic difficulties. Say, for instance, that you wanted to know whether a certain building or doorway required a mezuzah. We know that the door of every residence is supposed to have one. But what about a public building, like a synagogue? What about a building that gets filthy, like a barn or a bathhouse, or a temporary structure, like a sukkah? What if two people own a house in partnership—do they both have to put up a mezuzah? And what about unusual entryways, like a tall arch—do they qualify? These are the kinds of minutely detailed questions you would expect the Talmud to ask, since it is always concerned with anticipating the full range of possible questions, no matter how unlikely. What you would not expect is that the answers to those mezuzah-related questions would be found in Tractate Yoma, which is supposed to be about Yom Kippur.

Previous Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

SBL 2013 highlights

EXCELLENT SBL MEETING IN BALTIMORE. I went to some good papers, did some good networking, and was very happy with the review session on the new Pseudepigrapha book. This was the first year I have ever had two new books in the Book Display auditorium. (Click on all the images below for a larger version.)

My translation of the Hekhalot literature is to be reviewed at the 2014 SBL in San Diego in the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity Section.

L to R: Jim Davila, Judith Newman, John J. Collins. Photo courtesy of Sarah Whittle.

As I said, I was pleased with this year's review of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, Volume One (photo above). There were people coming and going throughout the session and at peak attendance I counted about 60 in the room. I recall that there was an SBL review session on Charlesworth's two Old Testament Pseudepigrapha volumes back in 1986 or 1987. It took place around a single large table in a room and my recollection is that there weren't more than about 20 people present, which perhaps reflects something of the expansion of interest in the field since the mid-80s.

One of the reviewers, Liv Ingeborg Lied, has posted her review on her blog: Text – work – manuscript: what is “an Old Testament Pseudepigraphon”? In return, I am posting my response to her review below, along with the opening and closing paragraphs of my whole response.

First, let me thank all of the reviewers for their kind remarks about our new volume. It is gratifying indeed both to hear their praise and to receive criticisms that reflect such attentive reading and careful engagement with the volume. Their remarks will help us continue to develop our thinking about the second volume and today's discussion marks the beginning of what I trust will be a long and fruitful conversation generated by this new material. My remarks that follow should be heard with all this in mind. I would also like to thank my co-editors, Richard Bauckham and Alexander Panayotov, who read the first three of the reviews and shared their thoughts with me, some of which I have included here. ...

Liv Ingeborg Lied Liv raises some legitimate methodological concerns over the fact that we treat a large number of alleged quotations of now otherwise lost works ("conceived compositional units") as representative of actual lost works and that sometimes we even infer the existence of lost works from passages in the work of a later author which imply or hint at the use of an earlier source. This would be her third category, "entries that represent as works texts-on-page that are conceptualized in a rather different way in the manuscripts themselves." She asks specifically about the text fragment attributed to a Book of Noah, but implicitly about a number of other texts translated in the volume, "[I]s the textual entity described here a work at all, and if it is; what work are we talking about and to whom is this a work?"

The editors were of the view, as we said in the introduction, that the quotation fragments included in this volume and the forthcoming one could at least be argued to come out of earlier, otherwise lost "works" and that it was worthwhile to present the case for each so scholars could evaluate it. I imagine some will stand the test of time and scrutiny and others won't. The format chosen for presentation has ample precedent in earlier collections. All that said, there is always room for methodological reflection and refinement of what we are doing. And what we do with quotation fragments is, as Liv observes, complicated.

But much of the complication consists of factors that scholars specializing in ancient texts have learned to take for granted. Like the Book of Noah fragment (if that is what it is), most of our manuscripts of ancient or early medieval works are medieval and we must try to reconstruct the ancient work as best we can, often on the basis of maddeningly corrupt manuscripts. The complications of interest here are with the additional inference that a passage in the Book of Asaph (as best we have it in a medieval manuscript) which claims to give us the Book of Noah is actually an excerpt from an ancient book with that title.

Here it is not clear to me why Liv only allows that "other sources may point" in the direction "that there was an ancient conception of a work ascribed to Noah." This very cautious formulation seems to me to be a simple matter of fact. There are references to a book of Noah, not only in Jubilees 21:10 and 10:13, but also in Aramaic Levi 57 and in the Genesis Apocryphon v 29. There was a conception of a work ascribed to Noah. Whether in fact one or more such works actually existed is uncertain (I think it likely) and whether we can reconstruct part of it is more uncertain still. But I believe that Martha Himmelfarb has made a good case for the fragment in question to be a stratigraphically earlier version of material found in Jubilees. This material is connected both there and in the Book of Asaph with a book of Noah, so it may well be that that is where it came from.

Liv asks about this book, "can we really get to it, and why is it an aim to get to it?" My answer to her first question is: Quite possibly, based on the specific case that Martha has made. Why is it an aim to get to it? Because our aim is to recover every surviving scrap of writing from antiquity. Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

I take it that Liv is not concerned so much with the question of whether any or all of the quotation fragments we have published actually come from ancient "works." A specific case has been made for each on its own terms and doubtless other specialists will find some cases more persuasive than others. Rather, she has broader methodological concerns about applying what she calls the "work-model" to these texts at all. Along these lines she asks some wide-ranging methodological questions.

First she says "We need to ask ourselves about the extent to which it is fruitful for readers of MOTP to get acquainted with this material in the work-format, or whether this format hides too much information, or even creates a map of second temple Judaism and late antiquity that may not fit the territory." My main response to this is that we chose this format as the best and clearest way forward to present the material to both a specialist and a nonspecialist audience. Our concerns were practical and not just methodological.

Second she asks, "[H]ow do we value the information contained in the source material when 'the ancient books' are what we aim for?" There are many different possible answers to this question. Her approach using New Philology values the manuscripts and texts in ways rather different from the ways we valued them, but both approaches have a significant contribution to make.

She asks finally, "Does the Pseudepigraphon have to be a book, identifiable as a 'work,' in order to be something in its own right at all?" My answer: I don't know. I doubt it.

Liv's three questions are phrased in a way that seems to imply she has answers in mind, so I am happy to turn them back to her and ask her for her own answers. And, again in practical terms, if she thinks there is a better way for us to handle these quotation fragments in accordance with our own objective of getting them published in a form readily useful to specialists and nonspecialists, I invite her to tell us about it. ...

In conclusions, once again, I want to convey the gratitude of the editors to this review panel for their warm welcome of the new volume, their praise, and their thoughtful critical comments.

UPDATE (29 November): Jack Collins was at the session and comments here. Since Jack brings up the dissatisfaction with the term "pseudepigrapha" in the discussion (especially in relation to the title of our book), here are some comments I made about the issue:

Regarding the question of terminology, I would like to sound a note of caution. The current discussion reminds me of the similar discussion of the term "magic" in the 1990s, in which specialists in the area expressed strong and quite justified reservations about the use of the term for what they were studying. Marvin Meyer offered a replacement term, "ritual power," and Jonathan Z. Smith argued that the term "magic" should be dropped in favor of more specific terms on a lower order of taxonomy, but by the early 2000s the discussion had died down without coming to any conclusion. This conversation was quite useful for helping specialists in magic understand better what they were studying, but ultimately the unsatisfactory term "magic" carried the day and it is the term used in the various SBL sessions in which the specialists carry on with the important work of understanding the ancient magical texts.

It could happen again. I appreciate the many problems with the term "pseudepigrapha" and I don't dispute that the current discussion is helping us better to understand the texts on which we are working. At the same time, I see no sign of a groundswell of support for new terminology that can adequately replace the term "pseudepigrapha." I cannot predict the future, but I see no need to assume that the current discussion will succeed in producing such terminology, and it may well be that at a certain point we pseudepigraphers will join the magicians and just get on with studying the texts. There is a certain irony that we are being told in the Pseudepigrapha Section that "pseudepigrapha" is a term we should drop and that should not have been used in our volume. When we reach the point of consensus that the title of this unit should be changed to something else that most of us can agree on, not to mention the title of the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, and the titles of both are in fact changed, I will be more worried about the word "pseudepigrapha" in our volumes.

I suggested the Unobtainium Section and the Journal for the Study of Unobtainium, but no one seemed to want to go with that.

Jesus and Brian

CONFERENCE AT KING'S COLLEGE LONDON:

Jesus & Brian - Or: What Have the Pythons Done for Us?

Location
Safra Lecture Theatre (Ground Floor) Strand Campus

Category
Conference, Film Screening, Public Talk

When
20 (16:00) - 22/06/2014 (17:00)

Monty Python’s Life of Brian provoked a furious response in some quarters when it first appeared in 1979, even leading to cries of ‘blasphemy’. However, many students and teachers of biblical literature were quietly, and often loudly, both amused and intrigued. Life of Brian in fact contains numerous references to what was then the cutting edge of biblical scholarship and Life of Jesus research, founded on the recognition of the historical Jesus as a Jew who needs to be understood within the context of his time. Implicitly, in setting ‘Brian’ within the tumultuous social and political background of his age, Life of Brian sets Jesus within it also. It assumes the audience has some knowledge of the gospel accounts, which directly inform the comedy.

Ever since Philip Davies first wrote on the film 15 years ago, other scholars too have turned their gaze to consider exactly what Life of Brian does in regard to Jesus scholarship, and have increasingly delved into its curious corners to reflect on what it says both about the tumultuous times of Jesus and also contemporary scholarly discussions. Biblical scholarship has moved on greatly in the past 25 years, and various aspects of Life of Brian correlate with themes now intensely explored. Every Bible scholar knows what ‘blessed are the cheese-makers’ means among us!

This conference opens up Life of Brian to renewed investigation, using it in an innovative way to sharpen our view. Papers presented by some of the world’s most eminent biblical scholars and historians will discuss the film’s relevance to history, biblical studies and Life of Jesus research (see below). There will be discussion of the socio-political context and Josephus; costuming and setting; and other topics. The aim is to use the film to reflect on history, interpretation and meaning, as a tool that can help us consider our assumptions and the historical evidence: a ‘reception exegesis’ approach. There will be a book produced with selected conference papers, with a publication date of mid-2015.

It is also a celebration of a British movie masterpiece.

I am dumbfounded by what a good idea this is. Follow the link for registration information and an impressive list of speakers.

Brock bibliographical handouts

SYRIAC WATCH: Bibliographical Handouts by Dr. Sebastian Brock (Dumbarton Oaks).

This page attempts to reproduce the priceless set of bibliographical handouts prepared by Dr. Sebastian Brock over many years of teaching Syriac in the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford. Dr. Brock's students have, for years, saved their handouts and constantly referred back to them, at times trading each other for more recently produced editions. We ourselves have treasured our sets of Dr. Brock's handouts and most of what we know about Syriac studies originates from his classes, his articles, and his famously generous and helpful conversations and advice. ...

(Via Emmanuella Grypeou on Facebook.)

UPDATE: Dead link now fixed.