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Teaching Christianity

The Graduate Program in Religious Studies

QUESTION: Can you write something about the background of your PhD students, how you selected them, what makes a prospective doctoral candidate stand out against the pack, whether there is a huge academic gulf between knowledge and argumentative skills of your undergraduates and research students. RESPONSE:  Ah, this is an interesting question, and as I’ve thought about it I’ve realized that there are lots of things that I take for granted about the process of admitting students into our graduate program what would not be “common sense” at all to someone who is not deeply involved in the process.   I’ve been admitting graduate students for 25 years now.   (Occasionally I realize that I’ve never been out of school.   After high school I went straight to college, which took me five full years; after college – in fact the next month, because I had to finish courses over the summer – I went into my MDiv program; after my MDiv program I went directly into my PhD program; and I started teaching at Rutgers while I [...]

2020-04-03T14:10:43-04:00January 12th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

My Forgery Seminar (Syllabus)

            The academic semester, alas, has begun, as of this past Wednesday.   As usual, I’ll be teaching two courses.   My undergraduate class, as is true every spring, is “Introduction to the New Testament.”   My PhD seminar, this term, is “Literary Forgery in the Early Christian Tradition.”   I’ve taught this class twice before, but now I have my book (Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literacy Deceit in Early Christian Polemics) to structure the course.  I’ve never had one of my books as the focus of a PhD seminar, but there’s really nothing else out there that can be used.  The first time I taught the class I used Wolfgang Speyer’s classic, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum as the main text.  It, obviously, is in German.  The students were not thrilled.  Or convinced that it was a good idea.  But their German certainly got better.  So even though there’s a ton of reading this term, I won’t be entertaining any complaints! Here’s this semester’s syllabus for the course, for your reading pleasure.   [...]

2020-11-28T21:33:49-05:00January 10th, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, Teaching Christianity|

Can My Students Believe in the Inerrancy of the Bible?

QUESTION: Do you ever get a student in your class who doggedly insists upon the inerrancy of the Bible? If so, and if they write their term papers in support of Biblical inerrancy, is it possible for them to get a passing grade in your class?   RESPONSE: HA!  That’s a great question! So, part of the deal of teaching in the Bible Belt is that lots of my students – most of them? – have very conservative views about the Bible as the Word of God.    A few years ago I used to start my class on the New Testament, with something like 300 students in it, by asking the students a series of questions, just for information.  I would ask: How many of you in here would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God (PHOOM!  Almost everyone raises their hands) OK, great: Now, how many of you have read the Harry Potter series? (PHOOM! Again, almost everyone raises their hand). And now, how many of you have [...]

2017-12-14T10:31:48-05:00October 24th, 2014|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Introduction to My Introduction (to the NT)

I have decided to add an "Introduction" to my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.  I is very similar (indeed!) to the introduction that I have now in my Introduction to the entire Bible.  The whole idea is to get students to see why taking an academic course on the NT is very important.   Here is the new Introduction, in full: ****************************************************************************************************************** Introduction Why Study the New Testament? The New Testament is the most commonly purchased, widely read, and deeply cherished book in the history of Western Civilization.  It is also the most widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused.  These facts alone should make it worth our time to study it.   But there are other reasons as well – religious reasons, historical reasons, and literary reasons. Religious Reasons Most people who study the new Testament do so, of course, for religious reasons.  Many people revere the Bible as the word of God, and want to know what it can teach them about what to believe and how to live.   In [...]

2021-02-23T01:24:49-05:00October 20th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Where Do You Start an Introduction to the NT?

One of the hardest parts of writing an Introduction to the New Testament is figuring out where to begin.   If someone were writing a literary introduction, or even a theological one, it might make best sense to begin at the beginning, with the Gospel of Matthew, and then continue through the New Testament all the way to the book of Revelation.  But what if one is writing an Introduction from a *historical* perspective?   Matthew wasn’t the first Gospel to be written; Mark was.   So doesn’t it make better sense (after discussing the Greco-Roman and Jewish milieu out of which these books arose) to start with Mark? But the problems go even deeper.   The Gospels were not the first books written: Paul’s letters were written earlier.   Students almost never know this; they simply assume that since the Gospels occur first in the NT, and since they talk about Jesus, who lived before Paul, that they were written before Paul.   So if one wants to deal with the NT historically, doesn’t it make best sense to begin [...]

2020-04-03T16:31:46-04:00October 5th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Getting Started on My NT Introduction

So far I have been talking about how I conceived of my textbook when I first started working on it in the mid 1990s, stressing in particular that I wanted to approach the task from a rigorously historical perspective.   I should say again, I really was not sure that anyone would be interested in a textbook like that.  The only think comparable that I knew about at the time was a textbook by Joseph Tyson, a fine scholar at SMU, whose book, though, was not widely used. In addition, I heard, while I was doing the research for my book, that an Introduction was being written by none other than Raymond Brown.  I thought that this was *certain* to make my book a non-entity.  Many of you may not know who Raymond Brown was.   At the time, he was arguably the premier scholar of the New Testament in North America.   He was extremely learned; incredibly deep; unusually insightful.  He had read everything.  He was tremendously energetic.  He trained some of the finest scholars of my [...]

2020-04-03T16:31:57-04:00October 3rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

On Boring Textbooks

There is one other general principle that I tried to follow when writing my NT textbook in the 1990s.  In my experience, most textbooks – not just in biblical studies, but in all fields – suffer from one ubiquitous problem.   They are BORING.   A guiding principle for me was to try my best to keep from boring readers to death. I’ve always been amazed over the years how otherwise intelligent human beings can take really fascinating material and make it dull, uninteresting, soporific, and general snooze-worthy.   Take the Hebrew Bible – the Christian Old Testament – for example.   It’s an amazing book, filled with incredibly interesting stories, and beautiful poetry, and gut-wrenching reflections on life and the disasters that happen within it.  How can you make the boring?  Simple!  Ask someone to write a textbook on it. The New Testament too is a really interesting book – even apart from being the most important book in the history of Western civilization.   Any textbook written for undergraduates will be, for many of them, their first (and [...]

2020-04-03T16:32:07-04:00October 1st, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

The Importance of a Comparative Approach to the NT

I started this thread thinking that I would devote it to discussing the changes that I am making in the sixth edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.  But I realized, once I started, that I needed to explain more fully what the textbook was at its inception back in the mid 1990s before talking about changes that I’m making now.  And so my past few posts have been about how I imagined the book to be a distinctively *historical* introduction to the New Testament and about what that actually meant in terms of how I approached the task. One other aspect of this being a historical introduction (as opposed to a theological or principally interpretive or mainly literary introduction) is that I wanted the book to be rigorously comparative in its orientation.   What I mean is this. When people read the New Testament, they naturally assume that it is *one* book.  After all, you buy it as one book.  It has covers.  It has a table [...]

2020-04-03T16:32:16-04:00September 30th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

The (Ancient) Genre of the Gospels

In this thread I’ve been talking about how I conceived of my New Testament textbook, some 20 years ago now, as a rigorously historical introduction.   I’ve  been stressing that one of the ways it is historical is that it takes seriously the Greco-Roman milieu out of which it arose, and that one of the key implications is that one needs to read the NT books in light of the ancient genres which they employ.   My argument in the book (and in general!) is that if you misunderstand how the ancient genre works, you will misunderstand the book.   The Gospels, I argue, are written as Greco-Roman biographies.   Here is an excerpt where I describe what that means and why it matters, again from the first edition of my textbook. *********************************************************  We have numerous examples of Greco-Roman biographies, many of them written by some of the most famous authors of Roman antiquity, for instance, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus.  One of the ways to understand how this genre "worked" is to contrast it with the way modern biographies [...]

2020-04-03T16:32:25-04:00September 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

Placing the New Testament in Its Own Historical Context

In my previous post I began to discuss how I chose, back in the mid 1990s, to conceptualize my New Testament textbook, not as a theological/interpretive introduction to the NT, or as a literary introduction, but as a rigorously historical introduction.  Among other things, that meant treating the books of the New Testament as *some* of the early Christian wriitngs, which needed to be discussed in relation to other early Christian writings produced at about the same time.   In this post I’ll talk about one other feature of a more historical approach to the New Testament. Almost all the other introductory textbooks available at the time, as I indicated yesterday, began with a kind of obligatory appendix on the “background” to the New Testament – information on the historical, political, social, and religious matrix out of which the New Testament sprang (first the Greco-Roman context and then Jewish).   Once all *that* was over with,  these textbooks typically moved to talk about the writings of the New Tesatment without incorporating any insights from the world in [...]

2020-04-03T16:32:36-04:00September 25th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

A Historical Approach to the New Testament

In my previous posts I talked about how I came to be convinced to write my textbook on the New Testament, back in the early to mid 1990s.   Once I agreed to do it, the first step was to decide exactly what *kind* of Introduction to the New Testament I wanted it to be.  This was a problem, because I was pretty sure that the kind of introduction that I would like to write would not be the kind of introduction that college professors would like to use. There were already lots of textbooks on the New Testament available at the time.   I myself had used two different ones over the years, one that was filled with all sorts of jargon and assumptions that made it way over my students heads (that one didn’t last!  but for years it was one of the most widely used on the market); the other one was very sensitive to the theological interests of the authors and, presumably, of the students, and that was very heavy on using each [...]

2020-04-03T16:32:45-04:00September 24th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Agreeing to Do the Textbook

In my previous post I indicated that I was not at all inclined to write a textbook on the New Testament.   In fact, before the editor at Oxford University Press asked me to do it, I had never given it a moment’s thought – except for that moment when I thought (some years before), that whatever I did with my publishing career, I did *not* want to write such a thing.  Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I was so dead set against it.  I suppose it was because my plan was to write scholarship for scholars and nothing but scholarship for scholars. About a week after I turned down the offer to do the textbook, she called me again to see if I had changed my mind.  No, I hadn’t.  But I had started thinking about it.   When she called me the third time I had begun to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. There were several reasons I had begun to change my mind.   For [...]

2020-04-03T16:33:09-04:00September 23rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

My New Testament Textbook

I thought I would take a few posts to talk about what I’m working on these days – for the past month or so, with another month or so to go.  As many of you know, I spent almost the entire summer doing nothing but reading books and articles about “memory” and related topics (such as the telling of stories in oral cultures) from a variety of perspectives: cognitive psychology, neurology (very low level!), anthropology (oral cultures and how they pass along their traditions), sociology (communal memory), folklore (urban legends, rumors, gossip), and so on.   All of this was in preparation for my next trade book dealing with what we can say about the oral traditions of Jesus as they were passed along in the years before the Gospels were written.   I am still leaving open the possibility of writing a scholarly monograph on a similar topic. But I have had to take a break from all that.  And with huge reluctance.  There are dozens and dozens of books and articles that I’m still desperate [...]

2020-04-03T16:33:16-04:00September 22nd, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Why We Need Tenure

I’ve been discussing what a university professor does with his or her time, and have devoted a couple of posts to the question of what it takes to receive tenure.  In doing so I  have indicated that tenure is a guarantee of life-long employment by the academic institution, barring such extraordinary circumstances as moral turpitude on the part of the professor (it happens!) and financial exigency of the institution (it too, alas, happens). I should say as well, though, that once one receives tenure it is no pure boondoggle for the rest of one’s life.  At UNC, at least, we have a mandatory “Post-tenure Review” process every five years, where we who have tenure have to explain in writing what we have been doing in our teaching, research, and service since the previous review.  If performance is not satisfactory, a plan of remedial action is implemented, and if things go from bad to worse, disciplinary actions can be implemented.   But for most of us, we’re working our tails off all the time anyway, so there’s [...]

2020-04-03T16:33:24-04:00September 18th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

What Counts for Tenure?

I have one more post to make on this thread, which has taken me off onto a tangent, away from early Christianity per se and onto what it means to be a university professor at a research institution such as UNC.  That other post – hopefully tomorrow – will be about why tenure is absolutely essential for this kind of job, even if it is highly unusual anywhere else (unheard of, of course, in the business world).  But before then, I want to say one other thing about the tenure process, something that would not occur to most people and that in fact will be both surprising and, possibly, counter-intuitive.  It has to do with what “counts” as research. Virtually every school on the planet will tell its assistant professors that there are three factors considered in evaluating a case for tenure:  research, teaching, and service.   The balance of those three factors, though, differs significantly from one school to another.  Some schools focus almost exclusively on teaching, so that research is not that big of [...]

2020-04-03T16:33:34-04:00September 17th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

The Academic Tenure Situation

In my previous post I discussed what a professor at a research university does with his or her time.   I did not go into detail about a lot of the really time consuming obligations, which I may at some point devote a post to.   For now I want to deal with one other thing that I mentioned in yesterday’s post:  the question of tenure.   Most people in the rest of the working world have trouble getting their mind around what university tenure is all about.   You mean they guarantee you a job for life?  They can’t fire you?  Really??? Yes, pretty much really.   With some provisos. The tenure system has come under fire in recent years by those outside the system who think that it is a disaster and a bit of a joke.   It is sometimes thought or said that that once a professor has tenure, there is no incentive for him or her to do much of anything: they have a job -- permantently!  And that, it is said, is a recipe for [...]

2020-04-03T16:33:43-04:00September 16th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

A Day In the Life of a Research Professor

I sometimes get asked what it is that professors in universities actually do.   The question is usually raised when someone realizes that at a major research university, most professors teach two classes a semester.  Classes tend to involve three hours of class time per week.   But that means a professor is in the classroom only six hours a week.  Is this a full time job?  Are you serious??  And on top of that you have tenure so that you can, for all practical purposes, never get fired?  Hey how can *I* get a job like that??? It’s a really good question.   First let me say something about what it is professors do, maybe in a couple of posts, and then say something about tenure. As it turns out, being a full-time professor is a boatload of work.  I won’t say that it’s more than a lot of other busy and highly demanding occupations – a lot of you, I’m sure, work just as hard and long as I do.   But it *is* a busy and [...]

2020-04-03T16:33:51-04:00September 15th, 2014|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

My Apostolic Fathers Seminar/Syllabus

I am preparing for classes, now as we speak.  In the Fall term, which begins (moan and groan) in next week, I’ll be teaching two classes, my “first-year seminar” called “Jesus in Scholarship and Film,” and my PhD seminar on “The Apostolic Fathers.”   My Jesus course will be pretty much like last year’s, with a few tweaks (including a full showing of the Life of Brian!); if you’re interested in the basic layout, I posted my syllabus from last year on August 24, 2013. The Apostolic Fathers is a course I have not taught for about three years.  The term “Apostolic Fathers” is a technical one, referring to specific corpus of ten proto-orthodox authors writing just after the New Testament period (actually, a couple of the books were probably written before the final books of the NT).   If you’re wondering who these authors were, refer back to posts I made starting November 19, 17, etc. in 2012. I’ve been interested in the Apostolic Fathers for years; it’s been one of my regular PhD offerings since [...]

Hiatus: A New Teaching Company Course

Another brief hiatus as we near the end of my thread on the burial traditions of Jesus, occasioned by the inquiries of several members of the blog, and others not on the blog, about my new course for the Teaching Company (the company is also called The Great Courses). A couple of days ago my new course on “How Jesus Became God” came out.  It is obviously based (roughly) on the book of the same title.   The Course consists of twenty-four lectures, each thirty minutes in length, and as with all the Great Courses, it is available in numerous formats: on CD for audio only, or DVD for video, or as a download, and so on.  For a quick link:  http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=6522   You’ll see that it is right now being offered at a serious discount.  One hint about the Teaching Company courses: ALWAYS buy them at discount!  (They all get discounted on and off.) These are the titles of each of the lectures: 1 Jesus—The Man Who Became God 2 Greco-Roman Gods Who Became Human 3 [...]

2017-12-14T22:50:46-05:00July 26th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Being Consistently Critical (in the good sense)

I know that by now I’m supposed to  be citing Craig Evans’s best arguments that Jesus was probably given a decent  burial on the day of his crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea, rather than being left hanging on the cross for a few days in accordance with standard Roman practice.  But I’ve realized that before I get to the first of these arguments, I have to say something about how historians need to use their ancient sources.  The short answer to that question is that they need to use them … gingerly.  And consistently gingerly. This perspective will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read this blog for a long while and seen how I think we need, consistently, to use the books of the New Testament itself as sources for what actually happened in the past – whether we are considering the Gospels for knowing about what Jesus really said and did, or considering the book of Acts for knowing about the life and teachings of Paul, or considering the letters [...]

2020-04-03T16:43:39-04:00July 22nd, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Teaching Christianity|
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