Biblical Studies Carnival #215 – February 2024

It’s March already and below you will find my contribution to the Biblical Studies Carnival, focusing on material from February. I know that I’ve missed a ton of stuff and, consequently, some readers may feel that I’ve missed or neglected or, far worse, snubbed some important posts, videos, or podcasts from the world of biblical studies. But I have a solution! If you indeed feel some sort of way about my iteration of the Carnival, perhaps you would consider putting together your own. Phil Long, the organizer extraordinaire of the Biblical Studies Carnival, is always looking for hosts and can be reached quite easily by email (plong42@gmail.com) or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Plong42).

BOOKS

• You may have missed it but James McGrath’s book The Burial of Jesus has been rereleased by Wipf and Stock. I should add that McGrath has a two more volumes coming out this year, both on John the Baptist. The first is Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist and is intended for a more popular audience. The second is John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer which is a more scholarly assessment.
  
• Available now in the US is Andrew Jacobs Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible. Jacobs also did a series of posts on Bart Ehrman’s blog introducing the ideas behind the book. Check out the first post here.
  
• Historian Timothy Brookins has a new volume available for preorder entitled Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Corinthians: Paul, Stoicism, and Spiritual Hierarchy. My first introduction to Brookins’ work was his commentary on 1-2 Thessalonians, which I really enjoyed. This volume on 1 Corinthians should prove insightful as well.
  
• Candida Moss has a new book coming out next month entitled God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. Last year Moss published in The Journal of Theological Studies a piece about the role enslaved people played in the production of early Christian texts. Like that piece, I expect this volume to be just as brilliant!
  
• Paula Fredriksen, arguably my favorite scholar, has written a new volume entitled Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. It comes out in October of this year and I cannot wait!
  

HEBREW BIBLE AND RELATED

• At the beginning of the month, Bob MacDonald continued his series looking at the texts used in Handel’s Messiah, beginning in February with Isaiah 40:5. As is his project, he turns these ancient Hebrew texts into musical scores.
  
• Over at thetorah.com, Gary Anderson looks at how the god of Israel relates to the poor. It is not merely that Yahweh commands charity. Rather, it is that he speaks on the poor’s behalf, identifying with them in their plight. Thus, to mistreat the poor is to mistreat the deity himself.
  
• Looking for someone to help guide you through the Hebrew Bible? Well, Kipp Davis and Joshua Bowen have a YouTube series called “Reading Hebrew with Drs. Josh and Kipp.” Here is an episode that appeared in February.

• Heather Thiessen posted a revised piece on Daniel 3. She observes some of the repetitions in the text, the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar, and more. It makes for an interesting overview of the passage. (Also, I love how accompanying her posts are pieces of art from artists of yesteryear.)
  
• An article over at Christianity Today by Carmen Joy Imes takes up the idea of reading the Old Testament through the lens of ancient Egypt. Things like the garden of Eden, the wings of the cherubim, and more are illuminated by what we find in ancient Egypt.
  
• A recent episode of Biblical Time Machine, hosted by Dr. Helen Bond and journalist Dave Ross, features an interview with Jonathan Friedmann and examines the story of David and Goliath through the technique of performance criticism. This was a really neat episode!
  
• Rabbi Rachel Barenblat talks about a poem she wrote entitled “We Sanctify.” It’s a brief but compelling poem, even for this middle-aged atheist. (HT: Bob MacDonald.)
  
• Over at Paleo Judaica, Jim Davila refers his readers to a recently published volume on the Abrahamic narratives from Aaron Hagler entitled Owning Disaster: Coping with Catastrophe in Abrahamic Narrative Traditions. Looks interesting. (HT: Bob MacDonald.)
  
• Phil Long celebrated his fantastic book The Book of Enoch for Beginners receiving its 100th review on Amazon. (Congrats!) He offers a brief synopsis of the book as well as a couple of reasons he wrote it. (You can check out my review of the volume here.)
  
• Lisa Jacobs talks about how Richard Elliot Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? challenged her views when she was in college. She also serves as a great example of how questioning one’s beliefs need not result in unbelief. (That was my trajectory but it’s not for everyone.)

NEW TESTAMENT AND RELATED

• Pauline scholar BJ Oropeza interviewed fellow scholar Matthew Thiessen about his recent book A Jewish Paul. Part one was posted in January while part two dropped in February.
  
• John Nelson, who this past year finished his PhD, has a new blog entitled Behind the Gospels. Early in February he posted on so-called “undesigned coincidences,” a so-old-its-new again apologetic proffered by apologists like Lydia McGrew and Peter Williams. What does Nelson make of it? You’ll need to read the post to find out!
  
• Over at the YouTube channel History Valley, Helen Bond was interviewed on the infamous Pontius Pilate. Bond, as you may know, wrote her first book on Pilate entitled Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1998). The host, Jacob, has interviewed a lot of scholars so you may want to give hit the subscribe button on his channel.

• On a recent episode of the NPR program Consider This, Candida Moss was interviewed about persecution as it relates to current political happenings. Moss is the author of The Myth of Persecution and talks about how the language of persecution is often used to prop up one’s beliefs and actions, for good or for ill.
  
• Need a good overview of some of the issues related to the Testimonium Flavanium? Mark Edward of the website A Bible Darkly has you covered. He looks at conceptual problems, literary problems, and historical problems. Whether you agree or disagree with him, it’s a helpful primer on the issues surrounding the problem.
  
• M. David Litwa was interviewed by Shirley Paulson for an episode of her podcast Early Christian Texts: The Bible and Beyond. The focus was on Simon Magus, a character found first in the Acts of the Apostles and who has a fairly rich literary afterlife.

• Candida Moss wrote on the history of Hell for American Magazine. Her starting point is recent comments made by Pope Francis and is hope that hell is empty. (Fundamentalists on Twitter were very upset by the idea.) Moss notes that depictions of hell are more like the conditions in which enslaved and imprisoned persons were forced to work in the Roman empire. “Since none of us would support these conditions in the real world,” she writes, “it is curious that some insist on them in eternity.”
  
• On a recent episode of Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman talked about why Paul despised early Christ-followers prior to his own experience of Jesus. He contends that the primary motivation was their insistence that a crucified man was the messiah of God.

• Did the author of Luke-Acts know and make use of the works of Josephus? A video over at the YouTube channel The Study of Christianity argues that he didn’t. (Somebody get this to Steve Mason, stat!)

• Jonathan Robinson treats his readers to a portion from an upcoming paper that he unfortunately had to cut. The subject is mountain moving in the NT and, while I appreciate Robinson posting this section to his website, it has only managed to whet my appetite for the paper itself!
  
• Over at his blog, Steve Walton posted a recent sermon he delivered (and an outline!) on the two witnesses of Revelation 11. Having grown up in a dispensationalist church and having been a consumer of the Left Behind novels, I had opinions about who the witnesses were. But their identity – left deliberately unclear by Revelation’s author – is less important than their function within the narrative world of the apocalyptic text.
  
• How was Jesus’s name pronounced? Drew Longacre posted a link to a 2022 video from Ben Kantor addressing the issue. Of Kantor’s work Longacre writes, “This is a helpful resource for those confused by the pseudo-scientific discussions of Jesus’s name that are abundant on the internet.” And boy is there a lot of it out there!
  
• The duo at The Skeptics’ Bible Project continues their series on forgeries in the Bible, this time looking at the epistle of 2 Thessalonians. There is considerable disagreement over the “authenticity” of the letter and this episode is a good primer on why there is warrant for doubt.
  
• Mary Ann Beavis writes about slavery in early Christianity over at The Bible and Interpretation. Surveying numerous texts from the New Testament and beyond, Beavis focuses on the case of Onesimus from Paul’s letter to Philemon.
  
• On May 30th, Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, a scholar who has done intriguing work related to Mary Magdalene, will be presenting a paper at CSNTM’s Text & Manuscript Conference on Mary Magdalene in early manuscripts. If you can make it, get there!
  
• Matthew Novenson delivered the inaugural lecture for the School of Divinity Edinburgh entitled “The Bad Bible in the Twenty-First Century.” This is the first time I’ve heard Novenson and I found him entertaining and informative.

• Scot McKnight offers his readers a glimpse into his forthcoming volume on the Corinthian correspondence for the Everyday Bible Studies series. In this section, he talks about the vulnerable Paul as well as the context of these epistles.
  
• Ian Mills and Laura Robinson discuss James Dunn’s “The New Perspective on Paul” for their latest episode of the New Testament Review podcast. Dunn’s work, a reaction to the work of E.P. Sanders, is a classic and Mills and Robinson offer listeners a great summary as well as their own response. The episode also made me wonder where Mills is from because he pronounces the word “root” like many people from upstate New York (where I grew up) do.
  
• Over at Scribes of the Kingdom, blogger καταπέτασμα on how the author of Mark’s Gospel may have reflected on the Roman massacre of Jewish rebels at Gadara in Mark 5 :1-20. An intriguing piece, offering some measure of evidence that Mark’s Gospel belongs to the period around 70 CE.