The Resurrection: History and Myth
Geza Vermes
Doubleday, 2008
171 Pages
Purchase from Amazon.COM or Amazon.CA

Here is the TOC:
Prologue: The Christian Notion of Resurrection and Its Historical Antecedents
Part 1: Afterlife in teh Jewish World Before Jesus

1. A Bird’s-Eye View of Human Destiny in the Bible: From Lost Immortality to Resurrection
2. Death and Its Sequels in Ancient Judaism: Paving the Way for Resurrection
3. Biblical and Postbiblical Antecedents of the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus
4. Martyrdom and Resurrection in Late Second Temple Judaism
5. Jewish Attitudes to Afterlife in the Age of Jesus

Part 2: Resurrection and Eternal Life in the New Testament

6. Introductory Note
7. The Teaching of Jesus on Resurrection and Eternal Life
8. Predictions of the Resurrection of Jesus
9. Resurrection Accounts in the New Testament Regarding Persons Other Than Jesus
10. The Gospel Accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus
11. Initial Evaluation of the Accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus
12. The Resurrection of Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles
13. The Resurrection of Jesus in Saint Paul
14. The Resurrection of Jesus in the Rest of the New Testament
15. The Meaning of the Concept of Resurrection in the New Testament

Epilogue: Resurrection in the Hearts of Men

Here is the dust jacket description:
World-famous biblical scholar Geza Vermes has studies all the evidence that still remains, over two thousand years after Jesus Christ was reported to have risen from the dead. Examining the Jewish Bible, the New Testament, and other accounts left to us, as well as contemporary attitudes toward the afterlife, he takes us through each episode with a historian’s focus: the crucifixion, the treatment of the body, the statements of the women who found the empty tomb, and the visions of Christ by his disciples. Unraveling the true meaning conveyed in the Gospels, the Acts, and Saint Paul, Vermes shines new light on the developing faith in the risen Christ among the first followers of Jesus.

This book is clearly meant to be an accessible introduction to this topic — evidenced by its size and its sparse reference and dialogue with studies on the topic.

How cool is this little piece of software! It is called Kalos software, available for free for both pseudo-computers (PC) and real computers (Mac).

Kalos does 3 things: 1) it is a dictionary. 2) It is a morphological tool that will parse any word form. 3) It will spit out full paradigms for any word! Very cool.

Enjoy, and hat tip to my colleague Ken Penner for pointing it out to me.

I received a notice by email of a new journal in biblical and theological studies which will be launching its first issue in ‘08. Below is the content of the email for your info…..

THE ORTHODOX CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF BIBLICAL STUDIES (OCABS) is pleased to announce the launching of its new, on-line academic journal, The Journal of the Orthodox Center for the Advancement of Biblical Studies (JOCABS).

The mission of JOCABS is to promote scholarship in biblical studies, homiletics, and religious education among Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians around the world.

Although submissions in English are preferred thus ensuring greater accessibility, academic papers in other languages (especially Arabic, Armenian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish) will be considered by our multi-lingual editorial board and its international associates.

Articles may be submitted in the following areas:
Old Testament and Cognate Studies. Including (but not limited to) critical studies in Hebrew Bible; Septuagint; Pseudepigrapha; Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture; Syro-Palestinian Archaeology.
New Testament and Cognate Studies. Including (but not limited to) critical studies in New Testament; Early Christian Literature; Apocryphal Literature and Traditions; Classical Studies; Archaeology of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
The Bible in Homiletics and Christian Education. Including theoretical and methodological studies dedicated to the practical applications of biblical scholarship to both preaching and pedagogy.
Book Reviews. Submissions of critical reviews of books related to the field of biblical studies will be accepted and invited.
JOCABS is committed to promoting scholarship among scholars and graduate students and encourages them to submit papers to its peer-reviewed process. The first issue will appear in the Summer of 2008, and semiannually thereafter.

For additional information, please contact Dr. Nicolae Roddy, at nroddy@creighton.edu or Fr. Vahan Hovhanessian, at vartabed@stnersess.edu.

To submit an article online, please visit http://www.ocabs.org/journal.

My last post highlighted a new and exciting feature of Google Books - the ability to create your own ‘library’ of google books which are searchable.
I took the time to import a sizeable list of books that I own into my Google Books library. Frankly, I was a little disappointed at how few of my books are available on Google Books. The majority of the books have no preview whatsoever, just the book details! I can’t speak for other disciplines, but it seems that the biblical studies publishers are being a little stingy on the Google Books front!
Now here is why I hope the publishers in biblical studies will start to rethink their position on Google Books: the search has now reached the point that it is going to be very very helpful for people who have already purchased your books. Although my enthusiasm has been squashed a bit, I can only hope that one day I’ll be able to use my Google Books library to do a full text search through my own library, find what I was looking for, and pull the book of my shelf for research. This is such a promising research utility and such a great use of technology. As far as I understand it, it is the publishers that can make this happen.
I sympathize somewhat with publishers on this topic, after all the point is for people to purchase the books, not have free access to them online. But the options in Google Books seem pretty accommodating to me. You can have the whole book indexed, but it can only be viewed in the “snippet” view. This still gives the flexibility of full text searching while not allowing people to read the book online.
So Biblical studies publishers, the ball is in your courts now. Jump on the Google Books bandwagon and you’ll hear the applause of your buyers! Cheers!

My buddy Mike Swalm has posted the latest and greatest Christian fad since WWJD! I’m really excited to join the next wave of Christian bracelet wearing.

Check it out here.

Kavin Rowe’s new interesting published dissertation, Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke, gets a good review from Joel Green in Review of Biblical Literature (click to download the five page review for free). Rowe, who also has several nice articles worth examining, is part of the world’s greatest NT faculty (Duke). In short Rowe’s book argues for a progressive presentation of Jesus as Kypios, such that Jesus shares in divine identity through his name and activity.

Similarly, Rowe’s article on Romans 10:13 has been important for Richard Bauckham (see especially this paper) and N. T. Wright (in his Romans commentary) in their work on Jesus, God and monotheism in Paul; there Rowe and others see Jesus presented as YHWH, a presentation rooted in Joel 2 and the eschatological expectations of Jewish monotheism. “Christological monotheism” seems to be gaining credibility and picking up steam. In any event I think it’s safe to say that James Dunn (among many others), who argued a fair bit that everything related to Trinitarian thought was exceedingly late, is now due for revision. See also Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ and Fee’s Pauline Christology–the latter reviewed in great detail by Chris Tilling. The best short introduction to such things, easily accessible to all, is R. Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament, available cheap from Amazon, under 80 pages. Google the full title in quotes for positive reviews in Theology Today and Denver Journal.

The paper by Bauckham above appears to be a paper delivered to the Pauline Epistles Section of SBL in Toronto on November 25, 2002. I have only found it online. The first paragraph runs as follows: In my book God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (The Didsbury Lectures for 1996; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) I set out in broad outline a particular thesis about the relationship of early Jewish monotheism and early Christian Christology, which also entails a relatively fresh proposal about the character of the earliest Christology.1 My purpose in the present paper is to summarize the thesis of the first two chapters of God Crucified, and then to focus in considerably more detail than I have done hitherto on the Pauline epistles, to show
how the thesis is verified and exemplified in Pauline theology.

For a program in which I’m teaching, I’ve been reading E. Metaxas, Amazing Grace (2006), a biography of William Wilberforce, written and released in conjunction with last year’s good film of the same title. Metaxas is a cracking good writer, and the book can only be described as sprightly and riveting. I’m ashamed to say I avoided this text previously because the topic was “faddish”: I should not have done so.

Metaxas notes one of the prominent influences in Wilberforce’s life as one Granville Sharp. I was blown away—I learned Sharp’s rule in seminary, of course, but never knew anything about him. He apparently was quite a character with several freakish gifts (playing two flutes simultaneously, for instance; self-taught in Greek and Hebrew) and a fine example of coupling scholarship and Christian social praxis.

The best thing I’ve found in short amount of searching is a lengthy article by Dan Wallace in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 41.4 (1998), 591-613: available online for free.
According to Dan Wallace, Sharp’s first book was “a slender volume dealing with OT textual criticism. It was a critique of a paper written by Benjamin Kennicott who had outlined plans for introducing textual variants into the text of his forthcoming Hebrew Bible.ls Sharp’s critique, followed by correspondence and visits with Kennicott, persuaded the Oxford scholar to leave the text intact and place the variants culled from over six hundred Mss in an apparatus criticus at the bottom of each page. Sharp’s acumen in Biblical studies was such that he assumed no pretense about the infallibility of the MT, ls but he thought it imprudent to bury the readings of the MT in the apparatus when the science of OT textual criticism was still in its infant stages. Thus part of the reason that the HB has continued, even to the present, to be a diplomatic text (based on a single Ms)-as opposed to an eclectic text-is due to the influence that an untrained clerk had on Kennicott, the great Hebraist of the day.”

His other works were no less influential, as was his effort in abolition. See Wallace’s article for more.

In any event, Sharp stands as potent testimony to those who not only study with intensity, but live what they learn with the same intensity. These two facets are summarized by Dan Wallace, JETS 1998 (cited above), a good read. Wallace has defended at length the validity and utility of Sharp’s rule (despite two centuries of misunderstanding), both in his dissertation and in his massive Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: an Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Zondervan 1996ish). The latter can be searched, almost in its entirety. The section on Sharp is interesting, though I wonder if other, non-NT and non-patristic evidence is properly accounted for. In any event, Wallace’s defense is forceful and well worth consultation.

Here’s a short quote from Sharp’s famous rule (the first of six in his little tract):
“When the copulative kai connects two nouns of the same case, if the article ho, or any of its cases, precedes the first of the said nouns or participles, and is not repeated before the second noun or participle, the latter always relates to the same person that is expressed or described by the first noun or participle . . . .” (citing Sharp, Remarks on the Uses of the Definitive Article, 2).
This has been modified various times, various ways, but still (arguably) applies in various, Christologically important NT passages.

Any thoughts on the validity (or non-validity) of Sharp’s rule for exegesis today?

One of my interests lies in exmaning the role of social location in biblical interpretation. This is a crucial, oft-neglected topic for many “average” readers of the Bible (and not a few scholars as well). I’m prepping for a course at present, and I think I’m going to use 1 Kings 10-11 on the opening day as an example for them.

I have noticed a tension in the presentation of Solomon’s wealth in 1 Kings 10. His accumulation of possessions (10:14-25), power (chariots and horses, paritcularly from Egypt, 10:26-29), and pleasure (wives, especially “imports,” 11:1ff) runs explicitly against Deut 17:14-17 (vv 18-20). There is a tension in Solomon’s reign the writer wants us to pick up: yes, it was good to be blessed with wealth (see especially the beginning of his reign, 4:20, 25, with the wealth spreading to the people, and Solomon focusing upon “justice and righteousness,” 10:8-9); yet such prosperity was not unproblematic in light of God’s word, which he had been called to obey in 9:4-5 and elsewhere.

Readers miss this connection to Deut 17, for a variety of reasons: an unhelpful chapter division; poor English translations which emphasize disjunction: “however,” NIV; “But,” NKJV; contrast NRSV, Holman Christian Standard Bible, and NAB. ESV adds a very slight disjunctive, “Now,” as this translation typically does in this book. But no disjunctive is required here for Hebrew’s standard vav consecutive and LXX standard trans for the same (kai).

This emphasis is not found in the Chronicler’s more idealistic presentation, of course. It also has no role to play in many of our comfortable lives–not because it’s not in the text (I think it’s pretty strong!), but because we have no need to be criticized for wealth or what we do with it.

Yesterday at the library I scanned a few study Bibles; I also checked out my favorite expositor/commentator on historical books, the always fun D. Ralph Davis (great little commentaries for doing Bible study, leading small groups, etc). Davis errs here, I think: “1 Kings 10 speaks a word of testimony, namely, that the prosperity of the people of God is always a gift of Yahweh’s goodness” (his italics; p. 107). Davis wants us to learn to enjoy wealth with gratitude and not worry so much about such passages, i.e., let’s not be afraid of material prosperity. He does not deal with or mention the Deut 17 connection. While I agree the theme of grateful enjoyment as an ideal is present in 1 Kings, there is also an intentional tension here to which we absolutely must attend, all the more so (for Christians) given NT warnings about accumulation and lack of generosity.

The only study Bibles I found which adequately explored the challenge posed by Deut 17 were the Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible and New Oxford Annotated (whose excellent notes on Kings were done by Iain Provain, whose short commentary on Kings is also good); NASB Study Bible, New Jerome, New Geneva, and many others fail to help the reader make the connection.