“‘Christianity.’ ‘The faith.’ ‘The church.’ By using these terms in the singular, we repeat the rhetoric of the retrospectively ‘orthodox,’ and we obscure the vital variety that always characterized this protean movement.”
– Paula Fredriksen, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2024), 198.
- Robyn Faith Walsh talks the “real” Paul over at the YouTube channel Bible & Archaeology. We have some of Paul’s correspondence with various communities and we have interpretations of Paul in second century works like the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of Paul. Walsh does a great job of unpacking some of this. She also hints at some of her future research.
- Charles Hedrick looks at the mythological Tartarus in the New Testament and its implications.
- I just noticed that the latest issue of Novum Testamentum has a couple of open access articles, including a piece by Nicholas Moore on the epistle of Jude and the Watchers from the book of 1 Enoch.
- Paul Davidson has a new video out, this time on cherubim. It’s really informative!
- In the above video, Davidson quotes from Esther Hamori’s excellent book God’s Monsters. And wouldn’t you know, Hamori was recently interviewed about sea monsters in the Bible!
- In response to an op-ed in The New York Times that compares Donald Trump to a pagan king due to his largely immoral and ethically rudderless “might makes right” philosophy of governing instead of a more “Christian” one, Stephen Young notes that this is far too simplistic and that the Bible has its share of problems too, from genocide to sexual slavery to sexual violence generally. (It’s why I tend to shudder when I hear people get their morality from the Bible because it usually means they’ve never read it fully.)
- Need some reading material? The articles in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism are available for free! (HT: Ekaterini Tsalampouni.)
- I’m reading!
The Amateur Exegete 
Hamori raises a good question about how many (most?) of us don’t notice or recall the conspicuous creation of “the great sea monsters” (התנינם הגדלים, hattanninim haggedolim) in Gen 1:21–surely a memorable image.
Gotta wonder if a key cause of our semi-ignorance/amnesia is at least partially a function of the translations to which we’ve been exposed, especially as kids. The more traditional, orthodox-inclined translators seem to have been uneasy with the implications of Elohim releasing the krakens and cthulhus and whatnot. So the KJV gives us “the great whales”–cool, but somewhat forgettable. The NIV is even blander, with “the great creatures of the sea.”
More modern, scholarly translations (JPS, NRSV, NABRE, among others), likely drawing in part on what we’ve learned about the תנינם in Canaanite/Ugaritic and Babylonian sea myths in the past century or two, have the good stuff: “the great sea monsters.”
(Happy to say I have a copy of God’s Monsters; embarrassed to say I haven’t read it yet.)
LikeLike
Neat Selection for the Latest Roundup. There’s even more from Robyn Faith Walsh and an appearance from Esther Hamori- cool! (I put God’s Monsters on my reading list and hope to get a copy a some point.)
And Stephen Young’s point is quite apropos with believers on both sides of the isle trying to appeal to the Bible or their understandings of Christianity while presenting their group as “true” Christians.
One of my observations about Christianity (and maybe religion is general) is that it tends to become a sort of Rorschach Test. A person will tend to project their own values or thoughts onto the “ink blots” that are revered passages in scripture or church traditions. Using scholarly methods like historical criticism might be the best chance of ensuring there is at least a common outline for the picture being painted in the minds of different readers when they encounter a verse.
There’s also a tendency among many Christians to engage in what I sometimes call “Christian chauvinism.” They tend to think that anything good (or personally appealing) must be “Christian” and everything else must be “pagan,” “Muslim,” “New Age,” etc.
Variations on this theme might be them talking as if morality came down from heaven at Mt. Sinai or thinking that (outside of Ancient Judaea) everyone was busy getting drunk, engaging in every sort of sex act, or slaughtering babies until the Church came along. (Alright, guess that’s two observations on Christianity.)
To be honest, though, other religions can do this as well: I once read a book on Hinduism claiming that there was a ancient Indian saying about “worshipping your women.”
If they were truing to promote the idea that the Vedic culture was progressive for its time, then this might be a mirror image of the “chauvinism” above. (Not saying necessarily that the author was wrong but without seeing the context of the saying, it might not be as feminist as they claim.)
Oh, as a final side note, I did have an interesting adventure trying to get a copy of The Origins of Early Christian Literature:
So after checking for it at the local library, I ended up submitting a purchase request in the hope that they might get a copy.
I figured that, besides my interest in Walsh’s book, other people (who might not know much about the latest scholarship on the New Testament) would have the opportunity to borrow something on biblical studies (in addition to the Bart Ehrman volumes they tend to carry).
Three months after submitting the request, I saw a hold mysteriously appear on my account. They apparently accepted it and automatically put me first on the queue after adding it to their collection!
Since I had never requested an item for purchase before, I had no idea they automatically gave the requesting patron first dibs.
Thanks (and sorry for the long post),
J Source
LikeLike