More on commentaries – DeConick

The second post in my series on commentaries on GosThom focuses on:

April DeConick’s The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation

DECONICK, A. D. 2006. The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation, With a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel, London, T & T Clark (hardcover) and DECONICK, A. D. (2007). The original Gospel of Thomas in translation: with a commentary and new English translation of the complete gospel. London, T&T Clark (paperback). The paperback is considerablely cheaper and has a much nicer cover, with artwork by April herself. I bought the hardcover because I wanted a copy as soon as it was released. It is next because it was next on my pile.

Assessment of Thomas

DeConick argues that the Gospel is not Gnostic. She maintains that the most likely explanation for the Thomasine-Synoptic parallels is that they come from orally transmitted rather than literary sources. She suggests that it came into being over time, with the earliest Kernel of sayings originating in the Jerusalem mission prior to 50 CE and various layers of accretions added between 50 and 120 CE.

Positive Aspects

• Has a significant amount of detailed comment on each saying, interacting with the various positions stated in the literature.
• Provides the Coptic text and her English translation of each saying, together with the  full text of parallels from the literature of the time.
• Each section has a selected bibliography at the end and the bibliography at the end of the book is comprehensive
• Consistent methodology for approaching each saying, together with an informative introduction, makes her line of reasoning easy to follow
• The layout is very easy to follow and the language is clear and relatively simple, without being simplistic
• Provides an appendix of verbal similarities between Thomas and the Synoptics
• The paperback edition is relatively inexpensive (and nicer to look at)

Negative Aspects

I found it very difficult to find any significant negative aspects, but two minor niggles…

• although the introductory material summarises her hypotheses about the way in which GosThom evolved and the reasoning behind them, in order to follow this completely, one needs access to a copy of the companion volume, DECONICK, A. D. 2005 (hc) and 2006 (pb) Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth, London, T&T Clark. The alternative would have been either one huge volume or skimping on the scholarship, so I think going with two volumes was the right decision.
• the bibliography is perhaps less comprehensive of the German language literature than is Nordsieck’s, but Nordsieck’s is less comprehensive of the English language literature. It is hardly surprising that a scholar puts more emphasis on material in his or her first language.

Usefulness

For those doing intensive work on the text of GosThom this is a “must have”. Even if you don’t agree with her conclusions (which I do), it provides some extremely useful tools for doing your own textual analysis.  Those who want a less “in-depth” approach will still find this a very, very useful volume.

A little plug here for T&T Clark/Continuum – very few publishers in the field of academic biblical scholarship are prepared to release a paperback edition only twelve months after they launch the hardcover edition, but they did this both for the commentary and its companion volume. Kudos also to April for making the effort to negotiate for this to happen.

More on commentaries – Nordsieck

A while ago, I posted about the commentaries that I had on GosThom. Brandon Wason also has a summary of GosThom commentaries over at Sitz im Leben, but I am now working fairly intensively on some specific texts and thought it might be interesting to provide comment about how I am finding using the various books.  I will do this over the course of several posts, starting with:

Reinhard Nordsieck’s Das Thomas-Evangelium

Reinhard Nordsieck, Das Thomas-Evangelium: Einleitung: Zur Frage des historischen Jesus: Kommentierung aller 114 Logien, Neukirchen-Vluyn, Neukirchener Verlag, 2004, 408 pp, paperback.  I chose this to start with simply because it is on top of the pile on my desk.

Assessment of Thomas

Nordsieck argues that the Gospel is neither Gnostic nor dependent on the Synoptic tradition. He believes that it was initially written early – 40 CE to 70 CE – with several later additions and is one of the oldest examples of the gospel genre, very close to the oral tradition.

Positive Aspects

• Has a significant amount of detailed comment on each saying, interacting with the various positions stated in the literature.
• Provides comment on the saying’s likely relationship to Q and to the various canonical and non-canonical parallels and an assessment of its likely authenticity as a saying of Jesus.
• Traces catchword connections from saying to saying.
• Provides a good overview of the German-language literature and picks up the most recent scholarship (at the time of writing) on GosThom
• Consistent methodology for approaching each saying makes his line of reasoning reasonably easy to follow (however, see below re language)
• In text referencing and author’s names in uppercase makes it easy to see whose arguments are being talked about. (Although Brandon finds the use of uppercase for names irritating it doesn’t bother me and I found it quite useful when I was scanning to find out what I wanted to aquire from the library.)
• Being a paperback, it is relatively inexpensive

Negative Aspects

• the layout is not at all reader-friendly – there is very little whitespace which makes finding things on the page quite challenging.  The bibliography is unformatted – no italics for book titles, inverted commas for article/chapter titles or hanging indents for citations longer than one line.  I found the bibliographay so difficult that I actually scanned it and reformated it so I could find things. I am happy to provide readers with a copy of this if they wish. There are also inconsistencies in the referencing methods. My guess is that it was originally formatted differently, but was deemed to be too long and has been redone to take less space. I notice that the cover picture on Amazon is quite different to the one on my copy, so perhaps there is another edition which is nicer to read.
• the language is quite complex. In the comment on every saying I find one or two sentences that I simply cannot be sure I have understood correctly.  I have two friends who help me when I get stuck.  Both speak German as their first language and both have theological qualifications and they both tell me that they have to read the bits I send them several times to work out what he is saying.

Usefulness

For those doing intensive work on the text of GosThom who are comfortable reading complex theological German, this is a useful book, but not a particularly “nice read” because of its layout.

Our language has moved on a bit . . .

. . . and this is good!

I just started reading Norman Perrin’s The kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus, (1963) Philadelphia, Westminster Press and his language is driving me crazy! He is clear and lucid etc, but he uses “man” and “men” as inclusive terms at every turn. My vote for most irritating so far is on p18 : “The high point of this development is the rabbinical conception of an act of obedience whereby a man or a people take upon themselves the yoke of the Kingdom of God.” I cannot imagine why anyone  would compare “a people” with anything other than “a person”. This occurs on a page that is nearly 1/3rd footnotes and has four other instances in the main text where he uses “man” or “men” to refer to human beings in general.

Perrin was, however, a person of his time. Now, even in pieces written by people who see no point at all in attempting to make their lanugage gender inclusive with respect to human beings, the rate of man/men to denote all people is much lower than it is in this book of Perrin’s.  Our language is becoming more inclusive through usage as well as intent, I think, and I’m encouraged that this is happening.

Why? Well, because our language shapes the way we think. This has, of course, been the argument of people who are trying to change racist and sexist language for decades and is typically dismissed as “political correctness” by their opponents.  However, some work that has been done by psychologist Lera Boridski in her labs at Stanford and MIT has demonstrated that it is true. In her article “How does our language shape the way we think?” and a number of other articles available from her website, she traces the effects of differences in the way different languages express concepts on native speakers and people who have been taught to speak them as second languages. Gender issues are not her primary focus, but she does touch on them. People who translate between languages are aware of the problems that are involved in translating some concepts between languages, but I found this bit fascinating:

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.

It would seem to me that this kind of work provides concrete evidence for the argument that it is important that we say “people” or “women and men” rather than “men” because it does affect how people of both genders conceptualise themselves in their relationships with other people.

This morning, I grabbed my copy of  Brian Wren’s What Language Shall I Borrow? (Wren, Brian A. 1989. What language shall I borrow?: God-talk in worship : a male response to feminist theology. New York: Crossroad) to lend to a friend whose interest was piqued when I introduced a Wren hymn in worship a little while ago with a comment about Wren’s hymn-writing. I was waiting for my husband to be ready to leave for church, so I started reading it for the first time in well over a decade and ended up regretting that I’d promised to lend it. His language usage is in stark contrast to Perrin. He talks about the effect that male gender language has on our concept of ourselves, others and God, but without any “proof” other than common sense. Boroditsky and her associates are producing empirical evidence for what common sense and personal experience have been telling us for some time.

So, having got that off my chest, I’m hoping that when I go back to Perrin I can ignore his expression and concentrate on the meaning of his words because what he writes makes sense. I will, however, continue to encourage the people I mix with to speak more inclusively, because speaking does change how we think.

Adventures with tech support

. . . whilst transferring from ADSL to ADSL 2+

Because we live in regional Australia, our preferred ISP has only been offering ADSL 2+ connections since the beginning of this month. It offers 20 GB/month more download for $20/month less and is faster, so why wouldn’t we want it???

I have learned a number of things in the last couple of days, which I offer for the edification of others.

• Belkin does its tech support out of a call centre in India. (Most companies with off-shore call centres for Australia use Malaysia rather than India).
• When you upgrade to ADSL 2+, you also need to upgrade your splitter/s (line filter/s) or you will start getting line noise on your telephone.
• All things being equal, it is better for one person to do all the communication with the tech support.  If either I had spoken to both TPG Soul and Belkin, or Hugh had, we could have solved our problems somewhat faster.
• Apparently, some people who ring Belkin do not know how to open Internet Explorer!! I received a major accolade from my friendly tech support person because by the fifth time I had reconfigured the router, I could do it without any instructions.
• Your ADSL 2+ ready modem/router may nevertheless require a firmware upgrade to deal with some peculiarity of your particular ISP. The person at the other end of the phone may not think of this if you don’t ask because s/he is dealing with calls from people running a huge variety of hardware and there are other people taking calls in the same room and s/he is only human. I really wouldn’t like to work in a call centre.
• It is very frustrating that you can’t get onto the same support person each time you ring, because you can’t apologise for making a mistake which kept both of you on the phone for quite some time making unnecessary tests.
• A handsfree phone and a laptop are quite useful if you have more than one phone socket in your house.
• Even if you don’t buy your modem/router through your ISP, it is helpful to buy a model that they support. This means you don’t have to ring the modem/router manufacturer as well as the ISP.

So, we now have faster internet, but the connection keeps dropping out. Hugh is of the opinion that we need a new router. He could be right.  Looking at the box that this one came in (it is only about 6 months old), it appears that he should have selected the model that is suitable for high definition video, online gaming, high bandwidth applications and VoIP products, rather than the one that he came home with which is two levels down from this and only useful for surfing the web, emailing and instant messaging. The intermediate version is good for streaming music and videos from the Web, file sharing and transferring photos. With a degree in computer science,  you would think that he would make wiser hardware choices to support his preferred internet usage, wouldn’t you.

Women in biblical studies

A while ago, there was a flurry of interest in why there are so few women biblibloggers (see my contributions, which link to others) and I suggested that part of  it is the way the church operates – that while women are present in the church in significant numbers, their voices are still under-represented. As I was going through my Endnote library, it occurred to me that there weren’t all that many women in my bibliography. Having done a lot of reading in psychological literature for my work on eyewitness testimony, I got the impression that this wasn’t so in psychology so I decided to see whether my feeling was justified. It was.

Of the roughly 400 authors represented in the biblical studies part of my Endnote library, 15 or 4% are women. Of the roughly 300 authors represented in the psychological part, 70  or 23% are women. It seems as though the proportion of women bibliobloggers is a reasonable mirror of the proportion of women who write in the area of biblical studies.

I have material dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century in both biblical studies and memory, although eyewitness testimony research only really got going in the early 1970s, whereas Gospel of  Thomas research got going about a decade earlier, which will bias the results somewhat. The reason that I have around 300 authors in the psych area (only a minor part of my research) and 400 in bib studs is that the majority of psychological literature has two or more authors while the majority of biblical studies material has only one. There are at over 550 bib studs items and only 162 psych ones.

So, for those of you who are interested, the women authors included in the biblical studies part of my Endnote library are:

• Barbara (Ehlers) Aland
• Kamila Blessing
• Madeline Boucher
• April DeConick
• Majella Franzmann
• Morna Hooker
• Karen King
• Eta Linnemann
• Betsey Fordyce Miller
• Elaine Pagels
• Pheme Perkins
• Ann Nyland
• Susan Nidritch
• Luise Schottroff
• Mary Ann Tolbert

I am well aware that this is not an exhaustive or carefully controlled study and that I am working in a “fringe” area of biblical studies, which may not be an accurate reflection of the more mainstream. Given the difference in proportions between the two fields, though, I think it’s reasonable to suggest that biblical studies has lagged a long way behind psychology in enabling women to exercise their gifts as scholars.

Being published

In the course of going through my blogsite, I discovered that I never got around to publishing this post which I last edited on 15 June last year.  It’s a bit dated, but still, why not add to the flurry of postings in the last day or two?

After I presented my paper on eyewitness testimony in psychological research and its relevance to studying the gospels at SBL Auckland in July 2008, I began the task of writing it up as a journal article.  This was very time-consuming.  It wasn’t helped by the fact that I decided that I wanted a manuscript without footnotes to work from when I spoke, so I stripped the footnotes from it and then did some significant revisioning in my hotel room.  The paper I presented was significantly better as a result of these revisions and easier to read without the footnotes, but the task of re-connecting the references to the new text was tedious.

Note to self: In future, just change footnotes to endnotes and leave notes pages in hotel room!!!

I just about had it ready to send off when the end of year editions of JSNT and JSHJ came out.  They both had critiques of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, with responses from Bauckham, so I had to get hold of them and make sure that my paper hadn’t already been written by someone else. Fortunately, it hadn’t, but I then had to respond to the articles, which meant I had to do some significant re-jigging.  Again, it was a better paper as a result, but still…

Finally sent it off at the end of January and received a letter saying it could take up to 6 months to review, but in May I got an acceptance letter and a very encouraging reviewers’ report, with no suggested changes.  I just had to cut 182 words to get it in under the word limit and check that it really did adhere to the style required.  After a minor panic and a frantic hunt because I’d neglected to put the page number on a reference, I finally posted the two hard copies and one soft copy off to the editor in June. I am hoping that it won’t matter too much that I forgot to adjust the top and bottom margins, so they’re only 1″, not 1-1/4″.

I am now waiting for the proofs with the editor’s assurance that in 9-12 months from the time that it arrived in his office, my “How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research” will appear in the Journal of Biblical Literature. The university should be pleased as it will count towards their research output and JBL is an A* (ie maximum research quantum points) journal.

Since I still haven’t received the proofs six months down the track, I am assuming that it is going to be closer to twelve months than nine. I’m looking forward to seeing it in print and I hope other people will agree with the reviewer that it is “intriguing” and “a very valuable contribution to the field”.

Typing Coptic on a PC

Fonts

Having been somewhat preoccupied by my employment situation during the past year, I have only just caught up with the fact that the new SBL Unicode font was released in March (I don’t type much Greek, so it wasn’t a big deal). I was reading through the post and comments about it on Rod Decker’s New Testament Resources Blog and the discussion about people’s favourite Greek fonts re-awakened my interest in Coptic Unicode font.  I am now wondering what other people who have PCs use when they type Coptic.

I went through a phase when I did all my documents in New Athena Unicode because I could type English, Coptic and Greek without having to change fonts, but the Roman font is too ornate for my liking and my principal supervisor/advisor kept marking my manuscript to say that I’d omitted spaces when I hadn’t – the uppercase letters were just too big and the kerning wasn’t right.  I then found MPH 2B Damase, which has less ornate Roman characters and is somewhat more compact in general.  I used this for a while but discovered that the supralinear strokes only line up over the letters properly if you (or at least I) type them in New Athena first and then change them to Damase. If I type them directly into Damase, they don’t sit in the right places.  This is truly bizarre.

At the moment, the default font in most of my documents is Cambria – a serif font that installs with Office 2007 for Windows.  It has a Greek character set which, while not particularly pretty, is serviceable, so I am using it for the occasional Greek word that I type, although I will probably change it to something more attractive for final versions. I’m using New Athena as my Coptic font but it’s too rounded for my taste and if I don’t find something better, I may well do a global exchange to Damase for my final versions, although I don’t like either of these fonts as much as some of the non-Unicode fonts. Note that there was a new version of New Athena released in December 2009 in response to a request for glyph variants for some papyrological symbols.

Question: can anyone recommend a free or very inexpensive Coptic Unicode font that they have used on a PC and liked?

Non-Roman Keyboards in Windows 7

When I got my previous computer about two and a half years ago (courtesy of the church) it came with Windows Vista installed on it but I couldn’t get it to install the Logos Coptic keyboard, so I “downgraded” to Windows XP which I was happier using, anyway. Recently I bought my own laptop because I was going to have to return the church one and I figured that I probably didn’t really want to stay with XP which Microsoft will probably stop supporting soon. My son had a beta version of Windows 7 installed on his computer and was able to install the Logos Coptic keyboard quite happily, so I waited until Dell was offering laptops with 7 pre-installed and bought one with Windows 7 Ultimate which promises that you can install programs built for older versions of Windows, work in the language of your choice and switch between any of 35 languages (includes Greek and Hebrew but not Coptic). The language option is not offered with Business or any lower versions and Ultimate also comes with BitLocker which is what sold it to my programmer son.

Imagine my joy when I discovered that I couldn’t install the Logos keyboard on my new computer!!! Not sure whether it is because I ordered the 64 bit option (poor reading of specs rather than intention) or because of some change made between the beta and the final release, but not happy. It appears that at least this version of 7 doesn’t like installing any software that isn’t in a .exe format and the Logos Coptic keyboard install file is a .msi and there are definitely issues when transferring from 32 bit to 64 bit software.  However, my son downloaded a copy of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, install the keyboard on a computer that had the keyboard already installed, loaded it into Creator and save it as a  64 bit .exe file  which installed quite happily on the new computer.

Not happy about the Win7 on-screen keyboard, though.  In XP, I used to use the on-screen keyboard to remind me of the character mapping when I hadn’t typed in Coptic or Greek for a while (I touch-type, so I usually don’t need the visual mapping for very long). All I had to do was change language on the language bar and change font in on the on-screen keyboard and away I went. I can’t get the new one to let me to change the font for the on-screen keyboard so I can’t actually see the Coptic characters because the default font has a Greek character set but not a Coptic one.

I guess I could email Microsoft and ask them to fix this when they release SP1 as I am sure they will do in the not too distant future.  The new version is probably much simpler for those who use it because of accessibility problems because it seems to change font to line up with the keyboard mapping selected. For those of us who have tricked it into using a keyboard mapping for a language that isn’t supported, though, it’s a nuisance. When I wanted to downgrade to XP, I had to ring Microsoft for support and the person I spoke to asked why I wanted to downgrade.  I could hear him gearing up for his “Vista is waaaaaaay better” speech but as soon as I explained that I am doing a PhD for which I need to be able to type Coptic and couldn’t install a Coptic keyboard in Vista, he made no attempt at all to persuade me to keep Vista. With luck, this same approach might work to convince them to add a “change font” option to the on-screen keyboard.

Christians and Biblical Scholarship

It matters how you understand God

No, I don’t mean how (if at all) you think God communicates with human beings. Rather, I mean that how you understand God to work in the world has a significant effect on how you do Biblical Studies. I am about to try to articulate coherently something that’s been wandering around in the back of my mind for a while, so I hope it makes sense. And perhaps I should warn you at this stage that the example I use in this post deals with material that some people might find upsetting because of their own personal experience.

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me a copy of the updated edition of her book about how she coped with her grief at the tragic death of her 21 year old son. It’s now ten years since he died and the new section talks, amongst other things, about her communication with other Christians who have found the book helpful.

She writes very well but the way she copes with the family tragedy requires a view of how God works in the world that I just don’t share. She sees her son’s death as the result of being hit by a car whilst on a family holiday in Canada as part of God’s sovereign plan for his life. In other words, her world/faith view says that God has a quite detailed plan for each person and that this plan includes taking her son up to heaven after a relatively short life.

It works for her and for many other Christians, but not for me (and others like me), because I cannot see how you can insert human free will into this kind of understanding. I see God as offering a more general game plan for human beings as a whole and allowing us to choose how closely we follow it. I see something like stepping out in front of a car because you were looking the wrong way in a country where the traffic drives on the other side of the road as human error, not part of a divine plan. Where God comes in is in helping us to deal with the effects of human action, not in determining the human action. I don’t plan to go into detail about this issue because this is not a blog on Christian theology and I have no intention of debating the rights and wrongs of particular theological perspectives here, nor of trying to suggest that someone else’s experience of God is wrong.

What, though, does this have to do with Biblical Studies?  Well, it seems to me that how Christians view and analyse biblical texts depends on what they think about how God acts in human history. It depends on whether they think that Jesus came to earth with a detailed plan of action or with general guidelines that enabled him to function in the situations in which he found himself, and on how much they think that God is involved in the events of everyday life.

If Jesus had a detailed plan of action, and God is involved in the minutiae of everyday life, then the areas that are open for discussion in the biblical texts are fairly limited. Which of the multitude of early manuscripts available to us represent the best witness to the original text is certainly one. Arising from this, what constitutes the received text is another. Other than that, the focus must be on translation and interpretation. Research on the effects of oral transmission, eyewitness testimony and memory is meaningless because God’s intervention has ensured that what was transmitted and remembered is accurate. Understanding the copying process and the errors arising from it would help to evaluate the manuscript tradition, but because God is in control, the possible thought processes or belief systesm of redactors is irrelevant.

If Jesus had guidelines and God intervenes to provide support when things go wrong rather than to affect what happens, much more is up for grabs. There is worth in tracing back the processes of redaction, oral transmission etc because it helps to explain how the text came into being and what it might originally have said. It is possible to suggest that what happened during Jesus’ encounter with the Cananite/Syrophonecian woman was that Jesus became aware that his ministry was not just to the Jews, something he had not understood until then, that he wasn’t just being rude and offensive to test whether she, as an outsider, had enough faith to be worthy of becoming an insider. It is possible to ask “Did God really say that, or is this an adjustment that’s been made later to fit a particular understanding of what was happening at the time?”

The fundamental issue for biblical interpretation by Christians is, I suppose, how we understand the notion that Scripture is “inspired by God”. People who prefer to speak about this as “God-breathed” and understand that it therefore has a guarantee of accuracy are going to read the first part of my forthcoming JBL article on pyschological research on eyewitness testimony and memory and say “yes, but what does that have to do with the Bible?” and disregard my conclusions. Those who think that it means more that God nudged people to write down in their own words how they experienced God in action in their lives are going to find it quite interesting, even if they don’t agree with my conclusions.

Those in one group are not going to be convinced by the arguments of those in the other about meaning and interpretation unless they change their fundamental understanding of how God works. This is not to say that we should keep saying what we believe because there are some people who hear the arguments from the other perspective and say “Ah, finally this makes sense … now, how do you get to that point?” For the majority, however, the answer to the question “But can’t you see that this makes more sense” is “no, no, I can’t because it doesn’t” and trying to convince them with logic at the level of the current point in question is a waste of everyone’s time. I don’t know about yours, but my time is too precious to waste on this kind of venture.

Help with a bible reference

I am having difficulty tracking down a half-remembered reference and am wondering if one of the people who reads this blog can help, please?

I am of the opinion that somewhere in the New Testament there is a statement to the general effect that God’s people will no longer have to bind God’s words on their foreheads and their arms as they were commanded to do in Deuteronomy because they will live in their hearts because of Jesus.  This is a wild paraphrase, but if anyone can help me to locate the relevant passage, I would be very grateful. I am not sure if it is Jesus saying this about himself or someone like Paul saying it about him.

I’ve come a long way…

…since I started my theological training.

I came to the United Faculty of  Theology in Melbourne as a reasonably conservative, evangelically inclined Christian. I loved learning from the Uniting Church, Jesuit and Anglo-catholic Anglican professors, but I remember saying to a friend of mine one day that I was quite concerned because something that Bultmann had said had made sense to me. I was equally concerned to find myself agreeing with Cardinal Ratzinger.

I was reminded of this today because I have been re-reading Robinson and Koester’s Trajectories Through Early Christianity, (1971) Philadelphia, Fortress Press and in the introductory chapter, Robinson talks about bringing Bultmann’s work to the US. I am no longer at all alarmed when I find myself agreeing with Bultmann and his school, and I was most impressed by Koester’s analysis of the parables in GosThom in “One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels” in Trajectories. It is still a very rare occasion, however, when I find myself agreeing with Benedict XVI although I find the work of many other Catholics really helpful and illuminating.

Even though I didn’t consciously believe that God dictated the Bible word for word when I started my theological training, I certainly had no appreciation of why people might be suggesting that what I was reading was not in its original form (although I did understand about the translation issues). It would have been good if the lecturers had spent some time on the background material before they threw form criticism at us, given that they all complained about how uniformed we were when we hit the place. It’s not as though it’s all that difficult – my campus bible study group quite enjoyed comparing the Thomasine parallels to the Matthew 13 parables in 2008, and don’t seem to have lost their faith as a result – although they do seem to be heavily into social justice.

As an aside: I really, really don’t like the way that you can scroll through the “reference type” drop-down menu box in Endnote by turning the scroll wheel on your mouse. I notice that I have managed to list “One Jesus” as a patent, rather than a book section, because I forgot to click outside the box before I turned it!