Archive for July, 2012

ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM MY FORTHCOMING SCHOLARLY DISCUSSION OF FORGERY AND COUNTERFORGERY, WHERE IN THE INTRODUCTION I CONTINUE MY ANECDOTES OF FORGERIES THAT CONDEMN FORGERIES AND DECEIVERS WHO GET DECEIVED, THIS TIME BY LOOKING AT A CHRISTIAN EXAMPLE (SEE MY EARLIER POST ON THE DUPED HERACLIDES)

This ironic phenomenon has its rough parallels in the later Christian tradition.  To begin with, we might look at a work universally recognized as pseudepigraphic, the late fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, a so-called “church order” allegedly written by none other than the apostles of Jesus (hence its name), but in reality produced by someone simply claiming to be the apostolic band, living three hundred years after they had been laid to rest in their respective tombs.

We will be considering other aspects of this text in a later chapter. For now it is enough to note that the book represents an edited composite of three earlier documents still extant independently, the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum, which makes up books 1-6 of the composite text; the Didache, which is found in book 7; and the Apostolic Tradition, wrongly attributed to Hippolytus, in book 8.   Since this author has taken over earlier writings without acknowledgment, he could well be considered a plagiarist by ancient, as well as modern, standards.  Consider, for example, the words of Vitruvius:…..

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I mentioned in my previous blog that I am reading through the page proofs of my scholarly book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics.    And I suggested that I might give a few extracts to give some idea of what the book looks like.  Much of the book is hard hitting scholarship that only inveterate philologists could love (or like).   I can give a taste in later posts, if anyone’s interested.  But I start off on a light note, in part to get people interested (even scholars have to be interested!).   I open with the following anecdote.  If you’ve read my popular book Forged, the final part will sound familiar.  This is how I would (and do) do the same bit for a more scholarly audience.  (I have not included the footnotes here)

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Heraclides Ponticus was one of the great literati of the classical age.   As a young man from aristocratic roots he left his native Pontus to study philosophy in Athens under Plato, Speusippus, and eventually, while he was still in the Academy, Aristotle.  During one of Plato’s absences, Heraclides was temporarily put in charge of the school; after the death of Speucippus he was nearly appointed permanent head.  His writings spanned a remarkable range, from ethics to dialectics to geometry to physics to astronomy to music to history to literary criticism.  Diogenes Laertius lists over sixty books in all.   Ten others are known from other sources.  Few texts remain, almost entirely in fragments….

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       My plan over the next three weeks was to write the seven chapters of my Bible Introduction.   The best laid plans….   On the theme of “life sometimes interferes” I was presented yesterday, to my chagrin, with two tasks that require my attention, right away.  Both of them unpleasant.   Ugh.

      As I have indicated on this blog, I have a couple of books in the publication pipeline.  One is The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, which I am co-editing with my friend Michael Holmes (it’s the second edition; the first edition came out in 1995 in honor of Bruce Metzger; it is being published by E. J. Brill in the Netherlands).   This book consists of a collection of essays on every major aspect of New Testament textual criticism, for scholars and their students who are already abreast of the basic issues in the field.   The other is my scholarly version of the forgery book, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (being published by Oxford University Press).

     As fate would have it (cruel fate), I received the page proofs for both books yesterday.

     So here’s the deal.  When an author writes a book, s/he submits the final version to the publisher, who hires a typesetter to make it into a book.   When the typesetter has finished working his/her magic, the pages are run off.  They are to look exactly like they are to look in the final book between hard covers.   And they are sent to the author to check.  These are the “page proofs.”

      Checking page proofs is a MAJOR pain in the WAZOO.   You have to read every word and make sure there are no typographical mistakes, left out parts, incorrect punctuation, wrong hyphenation, mistakes of any kind.  It is slow and painstaking work, but it has to be done.  And it is worse, so much worse, when the manuscript contains quotations from other languages.   These two books are full of other languages.   My Forgery book quotes scholars in French and German and cites texts in Greek and Latin.  All that has to be checked.  Ai yai yai….

      So, the Bible Intro is on hold, for a while.  Gods willing, only a week.  OK, I said page proofs are slow and painstaking, but I work very fast and am focused when I have to do something like this.  I hate doing it, but the sooner done, the SOONER DONE!!   So that’s what I’m doing all day every day this week, instead of watching the Olympics or eating bon bons and watching soaps…..

     But reading through the Forgery book today, it did occur to me that it might be interesting to post a few passages here and there on the blog over the next week or so.   And that’s what I think I’ll do!

QUESTION:

What do you make of the author’s reference to a Silvanus in 1 Peter 5:12? Could it be that this really is Peter saying he used a secretary to write this letter?  I know you said there is little to no evidence that people used secretaries, but what do you make of this reference to a Silvanus?

RESPONSE:

Yes, this is a question that I deal with in my book Forged, and that I deal with at yet greater length in the book coming out in the fall, Forgery and Counterforgery.   Several points are important to make about the question, but first a bit of background.

                Background.   Scholars have long noted that the book of 1 Peter is written in elegant Greek, and that it seems highly unlikely that an Aramaic-speaking fisherman of the lower classes (which Peter must have been), who is called “unlettered” (literally, “illiterate”) in Acts 4:13, would have been able to produce it.   And so, scholars have had recourse to the theory that it was Silvanus, mentioned in 5:12, who was the actual author of the letter….

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I CONTINUE MY RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EXPERIENCES WITH MY MENTOR, BRUCE METZGER:

Metzger directed my PhD exams, and was responsible for writing the questions for one of them.  To explain that situation requires a good bit of background.

In a typical PhD program, at the end of two years of taking seminars (usually three a semester, for four semesters), a student takes the PhD exams.  These go by different names: “Comprehensive exams” (that’s what we called them at Princeton Seminary); “Preliminary Exams” (i.e. preliminary to writing a dissertation); “Qualifying exams” (i.e. that qualify you to move on to the dissertation stage) – all of these refer to the same battery of exams.   In most respects the way it was set up at Princeton was fairly typical – it is the way we also have it set up in the PhD program that I teach in at UNC.  Here at UNC, students take five examinations, each of them four hours in length, followed by a two-hour oral examination before the examining committee.  At Princeton we took four exams, but they were six hours in length, followed by an oral exam in front of the entire biblical studies faculty…..

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The following is just a small chunk that I’ve written up for my Bible Introduction on the idea of “resurrection” — in relationship to other views of afterlife in the Bible.   It’s short, but it’s the last sentence that is very much worth thinking about (most people haven’t thought about it; I know I never did, until fairly recently).

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Many readers of the Bible are surprised to learn that the ideas of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible are not closely related to what most people think today.   The idea that after you die, your soul goes either to heaven or hell (or even purgatory) is not rooted in the Jewish Scriptures.  The few passages that refer to an afterlife in the Hebrew Bible assume that after death, a person goes to “Sheol.”  That is not the Hebrew equivalent of “hell” – a place of punishment for the wicked.  It is the place that everyone goes, good or evil….

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I mentioned in my previous posts that there are discrepancies between Paul’s letters and the book of Acts in both major and minor ways, and in my last post I dealt with some differences that appear when one looks closely at the details (the issue I addressed: what does Paul do immediately upon his conversion).  There are many instances like that throughout Acts:  if you compare what Paul has to say with what Acts has to say, on the same topic or about the same  event, you will find differences, and often these differences matter a lot to the overall narrative.  

There are also of differences that emerge from the overall portrayal of Paul and his Christian mission.   In this post I’ll deal with one example, and in a future post with one other.

For this Post:  Paul and the Other Apostles.   One big area of interest is Paul’s relationship with those were apostles before him.  This consists principally of the former disciples of Jesus (Peter, John, etc.) and Jesus’ own brother James, who was to become the leader of the church in Jerusalem.   When you read the book of Acts there is no ambiguity whatsoever about how Paul relates to these people….

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      Some members wrote me to say they  had trouble accessing the second (and most interesting!) part of the Metzger and the Squirrel story a couple of days ago.  Sorry not to respond sooner; I’ve been galavanting hither and yon.  The mistake was mine (I hit a wrong button when posting the story), but it has been corrected, and you should be able to access it now.

HERE I CONTINUE MY REMINISCENCES OF BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR

As I indicated on my previous post, for years friends of mine were eager for me to find out whether the story about Metzger and the squirrel really happened.  They wanted me just to ask Metzger.  But there were problems with that.  Among other things, if it had happened, he almost certainly wouldn’t remember, since it would have simply been something that happened with no significance to him – only to the one who thought it was very odd that Metzger would happen to know what the Greek word for squirrel was and that he would volunteer it at that rather inauspicious moment.

Moreover, there were aspects of the story that did not “ring true.”  Metzger was not heartless toward other living beings and he was not one to boast about his knowledge about Greek — or  about anything else.  Years later something happened to me that made me realize that the narrative itself could not be true…..

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My post on the portrayal of Paul in Acts generated a considerable response, so I thought maybe I should say a few more words about this issue in another post – or in a series of posts, if need be.   Some responses have suggested that maybe “Luke” (we don’t know the author’s real name, so we may as well call him this) had sources of information available to him for the book of Acts, just as he clearly did for the Gospel (e.g., the Gospels of Mark and Q).  

I think this is absolutely right, he almost certainly did have sources.  Otherwise he would have had to make everything up himself, and I don’t think there’s any way that happened.  There are too many close parallels to what Paul has to say about himself — even though on closer look, in almost all these parallels there are striking discrepancies; so Luke had sources, but the sources were not completely reliable; and he altered them as he saw fit….

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