Women Bibliobloggers (or lack thereof)

This issue of why there are so few women bibliobloggers has raised its head again in the biblioblogosphere at a time when I am rapidly sinking under a load of the work that I get paid to do so that I can afford to study. Please therefore excuse me for failing to link to all the people who are discussing this and for not acknowledging who said what. Kudos, though, to Pat McCullough for highlighting the issue. I don’t all that often hear men asking this kind of question an we women get sick of asking it for ourselves.

Before I say what I have to say, let me give you some background.  I was ordained by the Uniting Church in Australia in December 1987. My church, which formed in 1977, has always ordained women. Two of its parent churches, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches had been ordaining women since the mid sixties. The Congregational Union in Australia ordained its first woman in the 1930s – internationally, it was the late 1800s. On the surface, my denomination has a pretty good track record with respect to women in leadership.

While I was training, some of the male candidates felt it was OK/their duty to explain to the female candidates why it was against God’s will for women to be ordained. The congregation where I currently worship has had two previous women ministers, one for 9 years. It currently has a woman minister. I have been attending worship there for some eight and a half years while I have been working as the denomination’s chaplain at the university. Significant numbers of members of the congregation still refer to any generic minister as “he”. I recently had a conversation with the chair of a “search committee” (we call them joint nominating committees) from another congregation who told me that a number of members of their committee did not want a woman because the person who has just left to join another denomination was a woman. I have never heard anyone suggest that they should not get another male minister because the previous man had done something they didn’t like – even serious misconduct.  They just say that the last guy was a dud!

The general consensus amongst Christian churches in Australia is that my denomination is so liberal as to be hardly Christian and yet there is still significant misogyny observable and even more if you scratch below the surface. Although we have a significant proportion of female clergy and quite a few of our lay leaders are also female, most of our gatherings are very “blokey”. Men have very loud voices and they pray and sing loudly. Which is why you can have a nicely balanced choir with 7 sopranos, 5 altos, 1 tenor and 2 bases. (Many men also take more than their fair share of seats in aeroplanes, but that’s probably got nothing to do with biblioblogging). My church often feels like a men’s club.

Some time back, someone did a list of bibliblogs that described them according to their theological positions as well as their frequency of posting. I appear not to have bookmarked it, but  it confirmed my impression that by far the majority of well-known bibliobloggers are theologically more conservative, which means that they are also less likely to be female. One of the other chaplaincies on my campus is Evangelical and although they ordain some women, these women are not allowed to teach men, so they are girls’ school chaplains or women’s and children’s ministers. One of the women leaders used to run a bible study group in the meeting room next to my office.  I didn’t always agree with her theology, but she was a great group leader and an excellent teacher. The men’s group thought it was just perfectly OK to disrupt her group by playing pranks, like locking her out. At team meetings (which I overhear), there is almost always a “pick on the female leader” segment aimed at making whoever is currently in the position feel small and stupid.  I actually don’t think this is deliberate. The guys are for the most part genuinely nice people, but their culture simply values women’s input on serious faith issues less than it values men’s. If, every time you open your mouth you’re ridiculed, it would take an incredible amount of self esteem and courage to put your thoughts about Bible out there on the web.

As I suggested on April DeConick’s blog, I think that another problem is that in many families where both partners work full time, there is an uneven allocation of housework and childcare at home.  This is well documented in the literature, and it means that women tend to have less time and less headspace than men to blog. If you are going to blog serious theology, you need headspace (this was pointed out by another woman blogger who rarely blogs theology despite having academic qualifications therein).

I am different. I grew up in an egalitarian family. My mother taught me to cook and my father taught me to fix cars. I went to an all girls’ school where we were told that we could do anything we wanted if we worked hard enough. I was in my early twenties before anyone whose opinion I respected told me that there were things I couldn’t do because I am female. My husband has been the primary care giver for our children ever since they were born. He recognised my call to ministry and was prepared to support it.  This has limited his choices in life.  April is also different. I don’t know about her family and educational background, but she didn’t have a child until she had already established her academic career and from what I have observed, she does have a husband who is willing to share the household chores and child care fairly evenly. This is not the case for many of my female colleagues.

If real life doesn’t overtake me again, tomorrow I will make some comments on the place of the Bible, which I think is really important.

I will close by saying that I really wish I had known about the Emerging Women blog when I was doing my Biblical Studies Carnival.  I really struggled to find women to link to, but here some of them were!!

 

A translation assumption in Layton’s Coptic grammar

I was somewhat gobsmacked (can you be “somewhat gobsmacked”, or is that akin to saying “almost a virgin”?) to read the following comment made by Layton in talking about how he chose his examples:

There is no reason to doubt that Biblical Sahidic Coptic is normal, idiomatic, and polished in character even thought its wording and rhetoric are also governed by the Greek original. (xii)

This brought me to a stop in my reading. As Layton says (albeit much less colloquially) in his opening chapter, there is much about how Coptic operated that we don’t know because it hasn’t been a spoken daily language for around a millennium. He also says that the Nag Hammadi texts “whose language resembles Sahidic display a non-Standard mix of isoglosses, sometimes fluctuating, from all over Egypt” (xii) so he has omitted them. I have no difficulty with the idea that the Biblical Sahidic in the oldest manuscripts is polished. I am less sure that it is necessarily either normal or idiomatic.

I think it is eminently sensible of him to chose the Sahidic Bible and the writings of Apa Shenoute (which he also uses) as the standard for Standard Sahidic because the corpora that we have available are those, Nag Hammadi and non-literary material such as personal, magical, legal and medical texts.  I think it making too sweeping an assumption to say that religious texts, especially those translated from another language are either normal or idiomatic, though. Certainly, most modern English bible translations  are neither particularly normal nor particularly idiomatic and there are loud cries of dismay when a version comes out that attempts more normal and idiomatic usage (and no, I don’t think I’m confusing this with colloquial usage, which is definitely not well accepted – I am thinking about how well the TEV/Good News is accepted in most church circles).

While we have no evidence that the Copts were like us in this, we have no evidence that they weren’t either.  I think it would be safer to assume that the Sahidic Coptic Bible and the writings of Apa Shenoute are good examples of polished, formal, religous Sahidic and since it’s what we’ve got to work with, to use it as the standard. Even in my limited reading of the Nag Hammadi Sahidic corpus, I  have come across examples where a word is clearly using the spelling of another dialect, so I would not doubt his expert judgement about the isoglosses in it.  I just don’t think we can assume that religious documents are necessarily good examples of normal idiomatic usage and I think that there have been times when too-broad assumptions that “everybody knows” have blinded people to important discoveries for too long in the past.

 

Layton’s Coptic Grammar – some comments

As I said in my previous post, I’ve just received my copy of Bentley Layton’s A Coptic Grammar.  This is the revised, 2004 edition, which he says has been kept affordable by a grant from they Yale Endowment for Egyptology. If that’s the case, I am very grateful to Yale, because it is not a cheap book. I can see why, though, because, unlike many paperback books, it is perfect bound, ie the pages are divided into a number of sections which are folded and stitched before being glued into the binding. Cheap paperbacks have their pages cut to size and are then glued to the binding, making it much more likely that they will fall to pieces in your hands with frequent use.

It’s a grammar, so I am not actually planning on reading it from cover to cover, but I am reading the introduction and first few of chapters and am finding them enlightening. As I commented here in 2007, Layton uses a different terminology for describing Coptic to the one used by Lambdin (who, incidentally, taught Layton Coptic). It is the same as the terminology used by Ariel Shisha-Halevy (Coptic Grammatical Chrestomathy – A Course for Academic and Private Study. Leuven: Peeters 1988.) which I had difficulty following, because although he says that the book can be used to teach yourself Coptic, the level of explanatory material provided in it is very limited and I was used to the Lambdin terms.

After outlining the history of twentieth-century Coptic linguistics, Layton says:

Finally, a word about traditional terminology.  Readers accustomed to the traditional terms of Coptic grammar in English, French or German will find many of these included, as cross-references, in the subject index at the end of this book.  But as might be expected in a new full-scale grammar some old terms had to be abandoned or replaced, and some new ones created, when the overall structure of the language more precisely came into view.  For these innovations I ask the readers’ indulgence, hoping they will look beyond the new names and consider, instead, the enduring structural entities that they merely serve to label. (xiii-xiv)

So, happy, happy, joy, joy, I need to get my head around some of this and be able to use both sets of terminology so that anything I say will make sense to those who are used to the older terminology (probably the majority of Coptic scholars at the moment) and those who are used to the new. I expect them to increase in numbers now that Layton’s Coptic in Twenty Lessons is available as a teaching tool and of course I don’t want to be thought out-of-date when I publish.   Note that Coptic in Twenty Lessons is also a perfect bound paperback.

 

The joys of buying books on line

I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a copy of Bentley Layton’s A Coptic Grammar with Cherstomathy and Glossary- Sahidic Dialect. I have been resisting this for a long time because I am not keen on spending in the vicinity of AUD150 plus postage on a paperback book, but it never seems to be available second hand and I needed it, so in late April I ordered a copy from the place that had the best price at the time, bücher-galerie-ac, a bookseller in Aachen, Germany, for 78 Euro. Cost me around AUD 178 posted. It took an incredibly long time to get here – they posted it on 11 May and it arrived on 17 July.  This surprised me because I have bought items from Germany before and had them arrive much faster – 3-4 weeks. It surprised the bookseller, too, and it arrived 10 days after the bookshop and I both filled in Deutsche Post lost mail forms.  I needed to consult LEO several times in order to do this – my German vocab doesn’t contain many words related to mail.

Today, just out of interest, I looked at Amazon to see what price they were charging. I was fascinated to find that they have the same (revised second edition) listed twice.  If you buy a copy of the item that doesn’t have an image on the website, it’s USD 105. If you buy a copy of the item that does have an image on the website (same description and it’s the book I bought), it costs USD 117.  Or you could buy it from another seller in the US listed on Amazon and pay USD 229 for it. Since USD 105 is the cheapest I’ve seen this book listed in a couple of years of sporadic looking, if you’ve been looking for one too, now might be the time to buy it.

 

Bible and Critical Theory Seminar 2

Roland has put up a post about the seminar on his blog.  It has photos, which is good because I didn’t actually take any although I did have a camera with me.  Featured in the photo taken outside the Grand are Melissa Pula (University of Denver, “Job’s Body in Pain: Reading Job 16:7-14 with Elaine Scarry”), Simon Holloway (University of Sydney, “‘If I forget you’: a linguistic and stylistic analysis of Psalm 137), Helena Bolle (Macquarie University, “The Vulnerable Body in the Wisdom Literature) and me. I am the one wearing blue jeans and carrying the SBL Auckland bag. Melissa is on my left.

It is interesting that everyone who actually addressed specific biblical texts looked at Hebrew Bible.  In addition to the three above, we also heard from Julie Kelso (University of Qld, “A Woman is being Beaten and Maybe She Likes it? Approaching Song of Songs 5:2-7 with the Formidable Intellect of Andrea Dworkin”), James Harding (University of  Otago’ “Ideology, Intertextuality and the David and Jonathan Narratives”) and Roland Boer (University of Newcastle, “Negri, Job and the Bible”).  Clearly next year the people who are looking at the other stuff need to present  so that there is no need to change the title to Hebrew Bible and Critical Theory.

Not, mind you, that I minded only getting Hebrew Bible (and more general work).  I don’t have the time or the expertise to do work in this area, so it’s fascinating to hear what other people are doing and the conclusions they’re coming up with.

And now, onto the things that struck me about the papers. Note that this is not by any means an exhaustive coverage of the seminar – just things that stood out for me.

A definite highlight for me was Darren Jorgensen (University of Western Australia) presenting “Simulating the sacred: Theodor Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia“. Strehlow was the son of the Lutheran founder of Hermansburg Aboriginal Mission near-ish to Alice Springs and because of his relationship with the Arrernte people with whom he grew up he was entrusted with many of their stories. Songs of Central Australia is a book of his translations of these song-cycles into English, although Darren argues that they are not so much translations as conversions. Instead of simply providing word-for-word English versions, Strehlow converted them in poetic form with a rhythm and cadence influenced by Greek and Norse myth.  This has frustrated later anthropologists who are unable to trace back from Strehlow’s versions to the original Arrernte songs, but in trying to recreate the sense of the sacred for a Western audience, Strehlow used, ISTM, the principles of dynamic equivalence.  Perhaps I’m a little slow, but one of the things that stood out for me about this was Darren’s explanation that although Aboriginal societies have much sacred information that is only available to particular parts of the group, when the community gathers, all the information is available to the community.

Stefan Solomon talked about “Revenant Revelation: Reading the Archive in Carpenter’s Gothic“.  His paper presented me with a new way of understanding the word αρχων.  It is related to αρχηων (or perhaps αρχηον) which means archive, a repository of knowledge.  Thus αρχων, which I have always understood as meaning ruler or judge or authority, is actually (also) a guardian of knowledge.  This, of course, makes sense in the context of  gnosticism and the fact that I had not realised it before probably just shows that my understanding of Greek has been limited to New Testament studies, but still…

Julie Kelso gave us a whirlwind tour through her paper (“A woman is being beaten…”). Despite the fact that she had all her quotes on handouts, I found it too dense to follow easily – given that it is right outside my area of expertise. What I took away was the need to think about how often heterosexuality and heteronormativity are functionally equivalent – another new-to-me concept.

Tamara Prosic (Monash)  talked about “Orthodox Christianity, Utopia and Socialism”. Through my post-prandial stupour,  the bits I latched onto were those that helped me to understand some of the significance between Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant theology – the Orthodox church does not have a concept of Original Sin, but sees sin as something that disrupts community.

Melissa Pula introduced me to Elaine Scarry’s concept that to be embodied is to be without power and that to have a voice is to have power.   To have a body is to have limits and being able to give voice is a means of survival for a body in pain. God in Job has a voice but no body. OTOH it occurred to me that in Job God describes Godself in bodily terms eg when God asks Job (38: 28-29)

Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew: from whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfost of heaven? (NRSV)

Interesting.

James Harding’s paper looked at the problems inherent in misuse of statistics in biblical studies in his examiniation of the work of  Sylvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli on the one hand and Markus Zehnder on the other on what it means for David to love Johnathan. He argued that Schroer and Staubli’s problem was assuming that because the particular Hebrew word describing David’s love for Johnathan is used to describe erotic love in Song of Songs, it must  indicate erotic love in the David/Johnathan relationship. Zehnder argues that because it is more often used to describe non-erotic love, it is not erotic in David and Johnathan. In doing so, he fails to take into consideration the respective contexts and genres of his sources. Thus, although there are statistics, they don’t prove what the people using them suggest that they prove.

Simon Holloway, OTOH, was much more careful with his use of statistics. He justified paying attention to a particular Hebrew word by saying that it is used 88 times in the active voice (in the Hebrew bible, I think, but maybe it was just in Psalms) and everywhere else except in Psalm 137, it has a direct object. In 137:5, we have literally “if I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget” (no object). He looked at a number of ways that commentators have dealt with this anomaly and the problems with them. On the surface, a rather nice option is revoicing the verb.  I found myself wishing that I had enough Hebrew and a sufficient understanding of the transmission of the Hebrew Scriptures to be able to consider intelligently whether this option really does imply that we think we are better at Hebrew than the Masoretes.

So many interesting things to study, not enough time to do it in. If anyone has any ideas about ethical ways for me to find enough money to study full time for the rest of my life whist still maintaining the standard of living to which I have become accustomed, please let me know.

Update:

Neither Roland nor I mentioned what must surely be considered the most important point of the seminar (at least by Jim West) – Michael Carden mentioned Huldrych Zwingli in his presentation on “Sodomites, Sodomy and Same-Sex Marriage”.  It was only a passing reference to him when Michael quoted Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor as head of the Zurich church and pastor at Grossmünster, but nevertheless, a mention.

 

Bible and Critical Theory Seminar 1

Just back from the 2009  Bible and Critical Theory Seminar in Newcastle, NSW (10 and 11 July) organised by Roland Boer of  Stalin’s Moustache. My enjoyment of this delightful event was somewhat marred by my neck going out of alignment, so I was in significant pain and/or doped for a significant portion of the proceedings.  I was unable to post during the seminar because I didn’t have internet access and I think I will wait until after I’ve had my neck fixed to talk about the content of the papers but here are the obligatory photos of my room.  Note that it’s the spare room at my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s home, hence the non-motel-room touches.

My room view 2

My room - view 1

Some info about the proceedings, though:

We met at the Grand Hotel, across the road from the Newcastle Law Courts. Despite being a small group, we had international participation – Melissa Pula from University of Denver, Colorado being the person who had travelled the greatest distance to attend.

This was my first B&CTS and I really appreciated the opportunity to participate in a fairly informal gathering which nevertheless offered high quality papers with plenty of opportunity for interaction and discussion.  It was also great to  meet several people I’d only known via blog before:  Simon Holloway from Davar Akher and Michael Carden of Jottings as well as Roland.  I was disappointed that Marion Maddox had to withdraw at more or less the last minute, but the rest of the company made up for her absence.

None of the papers had any direct relevance to my research, but it was very pleasant to be able to be in the company of people who do Bible at an academic level and to be introduced to new ideas and new approaches to familiar texts. My thanks to Roland for putting it all together and to the presenters for their work.  More anon.

 

It must be summer again . . .

. . . because memes are abounding in the blogosphere again. I’m always ambivalent about them.  On the one hand, it’s nice to be recognised by other bloggers as having something worth linking to.  On the other, one of my friends once suggested that they’re not far removed from chain letters…

However, I’ve been tagged with two in the last week or so and  I want at least to acknowledge the taggers.

noblesse oblige logo

The first was Tim Bulkeley from SansBlogue, who tagged me with the noblesse oblige meme. The rules of this meme are very simple – you display the logo on your blog and tag up to 9 other bloggers whose work you think deserves it. The concept, for those who are not familiar with it, is that with nobility comes obligation (in the case of the French aristocracy, the obligation to look after their serfs, in the case of the tagee, to tag others). Tim is a scholar of Hebrew Bible whose blog has recently concerned itself with the ethical dilemma for people from the developed world of spending money on life’s little luxuries when people in developing countries don’t have adequate food, clothing, shelter or education. Malheureusement, so many people have now been tagged, which makes selecting targets challenging.  Those whose interest in biblical studies extends to putting the study into practice in worship might find both Cheryl Lawrie’s hold :: this space and Roddy Hamilton’s abbotsford.org.uk sites interesting and thought-provoking, maybe even refreshing and encouraging.

Today, the person who goes by the nom de plume Theophrastus Aristotle and writes over at What I Learned from Aristotle tagged me with the far more work-intensive meme. This one, Books that Influenced My Reading of the Bible, as the name suggests, requires five books that have influenced how you read the Bible. I find this very, very difficult to do, because I actually can’t remember any books that have had a lasting influence, but there have been people:

• Prof Brendan Byrne, sj,  who helped me to understand what exegesis is all about and how important it is to read meaning out of rather than into the text
• Prof Nigel Watson, who introduced me to Koine Greek and to the concept that it’s OK to change how you interpret biblical text based on new insights from other scholars
• Prof David Scholer, about whom I’ve written elsewhere, who introduced me to the concept of lenses or grids through which we view the bible
• Dr Morna Hooker, who showed me that a female biblical scholar could have credibility without being ordained or trying to write like a male one and whose “On Using the Wrong Tool” I have also written on elsewhere
• Prof Majella Franzmann, my doctoral supervisor/adviser (does this make her my Doktormutter?) who gently reminds me when I am reading biblical texts wearing my “person of faith” lenses and making  assumptions based on church dogma.
• Prof April DeConick, my mentor and friend, of The Forbidden Gospels Blog, who also reminds me about my faith lenses and who helped me to see why having a clear methodology for approaching text is so important.

While it is very tempting to tag Jim West, just because everyone knows how much he hates memes, I am going to resist.  Tim Bulkeley has just moved house, but might wish to participate, seeing he tagged me with the other one. Hey, if you read this blog and would like to join in because you have books or people you’d like to mention, consider yourself tagged. Oh, and my daughter has just wandered past and after getting over the shock of discovering that bibliobloggers do memes, suggested that I should mention her personal favourite blog, I can haz Cheezburger, although I can’t really see them getting excited about writing about books that changed how they read the Bible or feeling noblesse-ily obliged to link to other blogs. Anyone got a picture of a cat looking at a Bible that we can caption “O, u mean ai should look at it from dis saide”?

Oh, and just so you know, here in lovely Armidale, NSW, Australia, I am wearing thermal underwear in an attempt to deal with the winter cold in a way that has less negative impact on the environment. Our students started end of semester exams on Tuesday and classes begin again on 28 July.

 

Creating Jesus

As readers may be able to tell from the sudden flurry of posts, life around my place has become significantly less hectic.  The first of the end of semester exams begin today, so the students basically all have their heads down working and the things that have been taking up much of my creative headspace are beginning to settle.

I have been meaning for some time to call attention to a series of posts on April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels Blog around the topic Creating Jesus – How a Jewish Rabbi became God. In her first post (there are 19 so far, written over a two month period) she says:

This has always been the central question to studies of Christology and there have been many scholarly models which have varying amounts of success taking into account the vast amount of written evidence. What is certain is that Jesus was not being worshiped as a god by his disciples during his life. This came later after his death. The question is how long it took to happen, and how it happened that a “monotheistic” Jewish sect took on the worship of a second god.

If you click on the link above, it will take you to all the posts on the issue archived together and you can begin at the bottom and read up. It’s created a huge amount of discussion on the blogsite, most of which I haven’t had time to read, but just reading the postings gives a great insight into how studying early christian documents from a “secular” academic perspective happens.  This is quite different to devotional or confessional biblical studies in which the student is asking different questions and therefore using different methodologies and coming up with different answers.

 

Dynamic equivalence and inclusive language

In response to my previous post on dynamic equivalence, Mike Grondin asked some questions about my approach to inclusive language on the Gospel of Thomas email list. In particular he asked

1. why I think that “kingdom” excludes women since women can be both subjects and rulers?
2. why worry about the word “kingdom” when Coptic Thomas talks about the “kingdom of the Father”?

Seeing I am sure that not all readers of this blog also belong to the email list and I thought these were very good questions that made me think further about the issue, here are my responses in a somewhat more considered form than my response on-list:

Re Question 1:

I don’t think that the notion of  kingdom actually excludes women.  It simply makes them into second class citizens. Growing up as a woman in a British Commonwealth country, I have known ever since I was quite small that a kingdom is a place where men are privileged above women in the leadership stakes. We’ve had a queen for as long as I have been alive, but only because Elizabeth had no brothers. Although Princess Anne was her second child, as soon as her younger brothers were born, she was moved down the list of those in line to the throne to third and then fourth. While the wife of a king is a queen, the husband of a queen who is ruling in her own right is only a prince. A king or queen can have twenty daughters and their succession to the throne is in birth order, but as soon as a son is born, he gets shunted straight to the top of the line. This is why England has only had six queens in modern history – two Elizabeths, two Marys, an Ann and a Victoria. To give you some sense of how few this is, Elizabeth II’s father was George VI and his father was Edward VIII, then there were at least 8 Henrys, 4 Williams and quite a few James and Charles.

Because Commonwealth countries are constitutional monarchies, we all learn this stuff at school. It is quite clear to us that a kingdom is a place where a male is in charge unless there is no male available.  A woman in charge is always the last resort and the choice is based on chromosomes, not ability. Of course, it doesn’t work like this in all countries and in the US, I suspect that this kind of gendered hierarchy is not so deeply engrained and obvious.

In addition, if Crum is to be believed, Coptic speakers didn’t have the option of an alternative to MeNTERO to talk about the concept that we name “kingdom”, so the writer of Gos Thom didn’t deliberately choose a term which has masculine overtones – that was the only option available to express the desired concept.

Re Question 2

The term “Father” is the title, or  one of the titles,  of the current ruler. It doesn’t say anything about who’s allowed to be ruler, just who is currently in charge. The fact that the author of  Gos Thom has chosen to use  “Father” rather than “God” is at least as likely to be because the term “Father” emphasises the relational aspect of the divine as that the divine is conceptualised in masculine terms. I think the use of Father lines up with the notion that we are reading the secret sayings of Jesus that only those “in the know” get to hear.  Surely the readers of this kind of thing would be encouraged to think about the divine in the closer “Father” terms rather than the more distant “God” terms?

Comments, anyone?

 

gospels.net relaunch

Andrew Bernhard relaunched his gospels.net site this week.  It has a new look and in his words:

It is now “an online resource dedicated to the Gospel of Thomas and other early Christian gospels” … The design is straightforward. It includes a blog, which will focus on providing the latest news relevant to the study of early Christian gospels not included in the New Testament.

It also includes three web pages, which I have labeled “resource centers.”

Each resource center provides extensive lists of helpful online and offline resources. These lists aren’t intended to be exhaustive. Instead, I want to focus on highlighting top-quality websites, blogs, books, and articles that deal with the pertinent gospels and related subjects. I will ultimately be providing a summary of the nature of each offline resource, effectively creating a select annotated bibliography for each of the different gospels (but this will take some time since I’ve already got nearly 100 bibliographic entries posted).

The Thomas material is already linked in the blogroll from this blog, but I expect that some readers are also interested in the other non-canonical gospels. Andrew currently has material on the Gospels of Judas, Mary, Peter, Ebionites, Nazarean, Hebrews, Secret Mark, Infancy Gospels of Thomas and James, The Unknown Gospel: Egerton Papyrus 2 and Oxyrhynchus Parchment 840.