Saturday, October 20, 2012

Another Reason to Exercise!

I have not blogged before on health and fitness issues, but the subject does interest me.

Some interesting news this year on why exercise has positive health effects:
“Exercise and Longevity,” The Economist, 21 January, 2012.

Gretchen Reynolds, “Exercise as Housecleaning for the Body,” New York Times Blogs, 1 February, 2012.
These news stories report the findings of the following paper:
Congcong He, Michael C. Bassik, Viviana Moresi, Kai Sun, et al. 2012. “Exercise-induced BCL2-regulated autophagy is required for muscle glucose homeostasis,” Nature 481: 511–515 (26 January).
The upshot of this research is that exercise promotes autophagy (which comes in three kinds: macroautophagy, microautophagy and chaperon-mediated autophagy), the intracellular process by which bad proteins and other cellular waste are broken down and removed from the cells.

Vigorous up-regulated autophagy appears to help you ward off diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, infections, inflammatory diseases, and insulin resistance. So now the mechanism by which exercise increases human health – autophagy – seems to be better understood.

But the most interesting aspect of this research relates to autophagy and the way that human beings age: there is some evidence that increased autophagy not only increases one’s health but also one’s life expectancy. It is claimed by some that increased (or up-regulated) autophagy might slow aging in humans, and one can read further about this subject here:
Eric Drexler, “Autophagy: Why you should eat yourself,” Eric Drexler's Blog: MetaModern, 24 July, 2010.

Eric Drexler, “Trehalose, autophagy, and brain repair: Sweet,” Eric Drexler’s Blog: MetaModern, 15 September.
I suspect skepticism is in order. For one thing, a lot of the discussion of this issue seems to mix up human life span with life expectancy. They are not the same thing. Life span is the maximum extent to which an organism can live. The age of 120 seems to be about the upper limit of human life span,* and people very rarely ever live that long. But life expectancy is how long on average the organisms of a species actually live, or how long any one organism might be expected to live. Life expectancy in the US is 78.2 years.

Whatever benefits one can get from up-regulated autophagy (assuming one has a healthy diet and life style too!) would appear to increase one’s life expectancy, not human life span. And drugs that slow down or reverse aging are still the stuff of science fiction.

Another interesting theory emerging in current research is that antioxidants block autophagy, as reported here:
Eric Drexler, “Antioxidants block cell repair —New information and what it may mean,” Eric Drexler’s Blog: MetaModern, 26 September, 2010.
Amongst health conscious people there appears to have arisen a fad in recent years that one should take antioxidant supplements such as vitamin C, vitamin E, grape seed extract, etc.

But now it seems that the alleged health benefits of such supplementation are overrated – and perhaps even harmful, in that mega-dosing with antioxidants might block the health benefits that people normally get from exercise-induced autophagy.

Caloric restriction (cutting down one’s amount of food consumed while maintaining optimum nutrition) is also supposed to up-regulate autophagy. Some reasonably credible research has found that certain supplements like resveratrol increase the lifespan (or should that be life expectancy?) of organisms like yeast, fruitflies and nematode worms, but as far I can see there is no convincing scientific evidence for the same effect in humans (needless to say: what works in nematode worms or flies does not necessarily work in humans!).

Note
* The oldest documented human being was apparently Jeanne Louise Calment (1875–1997) who died at the age of 122 years and 164 days!

N.B.: I don’t offer people health advice on this blog, nor are my comments above meant to be actual health advice for readers!

Update: Another supplement that supposedly induces autophagy is pterostilbene, but I have not seen enough good sources on this yet.


Saturday, July 21, 2012

William Lane Craig versus Richard Carrier on the Resurrection of Jesus

This is a video of a debate between William Lane Craig and Richard Carrier, held at Northwest Missouri State University (March 18, 2009), on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Needless to say, I find the position of Craig utterly unconvincing. What is most strange is the lazy assumption that Craig takes from the beginning that the Judeo-Christian god exists! If this does not give his ridiculous apologetic game away, then nothing will.





I provide my own critique of Craig here:

(1) Craig’s first “fact” is the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. This is not a “fact” at all: it is merely assertion in the gospel of Mark, and there is no necessary reason why it must be true. The Christians might have invented this to give Jesus an “honourable,” rather than a shameful, burial. Furthermore, Craig commits a gross non sequitur: even if it were true that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus in a tomb, it simply does not follow that the location of the tomb was known by his disciples. One astonishing datum is that there was no known veneration of Jesus’s tomb in early Christianity: it is most probable that they had no idea where he was buried.

There is good reason to think that the gospel of Mark (the earliest gospel) is already filled with legends and fictions, and that the empty tomb story is one fiction of Mark (Collins 1989; Collins 1993; Lüdemann 1994). Moreover, it is quite likely that the author of Mark composed his empty tomb story as part of his literary mimesis or midrashic rewriting of certain Old Testament texts like Daniel 6:6–23 (Goulder 1976; Helms 1988: 135–136).

Despite Craig, even Jesus’s alleged rising on the third day in 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 is said to be in accordance with the scriptures, not with any eyewitness accounts, which suggests that the belief that Jesus rose on the third day could have come from nothing more than exegesis of an Old Testament passage in Hosea 6.2 (as Gerd Lüdemann 1994: 47 argues).

(2) Craig’s attempt to claim that Matthew and John are independent attestations of the empty tomb story is unconvincing. They are no such thing, but secondary and redactional stories from Mark. Nor does Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 require an empty tomb story at all. There is no direct evidence for any empty tomb in Paul. There are no multiple, independent sources for the empty tomb story: it is all dependent on Mark, and there is a good case he invented it (Collins 1989).

Contrary to Craig, the presence of women in the gospel of Mark as eyewitnesses to the empty tomb makes perfect sense if this was an invention of the author of that gospel. For the earliest tradition suggests that the male disciples had fled Jerusalem and returned to Galilee (so the women were plausible people to use in the empty tomb fiction), and the ending of the gospel of Mark tells us that the women told nobody of their discovery (Mark 16.8), which is exactly in accord with the more misogynist attitudes to women in the ancient world.

Moreover, it is a bad error to assert that women were never trusted as witnesses in the ancient Greek and Roman world. The gospel of Mark was clearly a work of Pauline Christianity and had its natural home in Gentile Greek and Roman Christian communities. While it was considered disreputable for high status women to appear in public in roles usually reserved for men in Greece and Rome, Richard Carrier has shown that women were perfectly able to give testimony in court: Cicero used women as witnesses against the corrupt Roman governor Verres (Cicero, Against Verres 2.1.94; 4.99), and an Oxyrhynchus Papyrus (P.Oxy. 1.37) preserves the testimony of a woman in court from Roman Egypt.

When early Christians heard the ending of the gospel of Mark, with the empty tomb, they will have asked: “Why have I never heard this before?” Michael Goulder has explained how some misogynist Christian men would have understood Mark 16.8:
“You know what women are like, brethren: they were seized with panic and hysteria, and kept the whole thing quiet. That is why people have not heard all this before.” (Goulder 1996: 58).
Thus it is not that the testimony of women would have been rejected per se, but their reliability in transmitting what they had seen and heard. Despite Craig and apologists like Craig, that is a very convincing explanation of why Mark used women.

(3) Despite Craig, the earliest tradition in Mark and taken over by Matthew is that the earliest resurrection “appearances”/hallucinations of Jesus were in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. This may well be true, and it suggests that the disciples fled back to Galilee after the death of Jesus. That is precisely why Mark has women go to an empty tomb in his ending, because in the tradition Mark received the disciples had fled. The stories of resurrection “appearances” at Jerusalem in Luke and John are therefore fictions. If these gospel writers could write fiction (such as the absurd fantasies one reads in the gospel of Matthew 28:1-3), then why not Mark in the empty tomb story?

(4) Craig asserts that there was no belief in a dying and rising Messiah in first century Judaism. That may well be true, but provides no serious evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. As Robert M. Price has argued, when Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), a Jewish rabbi who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah in the 17th century, apostatized, his movement did not collapse and there were Jewish believers in Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah for at least two centuries following his apostasy! Even Nathan of Gaza, his leading disciple, continued to think Sabbatai was the Messiah.

Anyway, it is clear that Christianity - before it became a Gentile religion as developed by the apostle Paul - remained a minority sect within Judaism.

Is that not precisely what one would expect if early Christian ideas about a crucified Messiah were peculiar and an innovation?


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 1989. The Beginning of the Gospel: Probings of Mark in Context, Fortress Press, Minneapolis.

Collins, Adela. 1993. “The Empty Tomb in the Gospel According to Mark,” in Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint (eds.), Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, In. 107–140.

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 2009. “Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark,” in T. K. Seim and J. Okland (eds.), Metamorphoses. Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 41–58.

Goulder, Michael. 1976. “The Empty Tomb,” Theology 79: 206–214.

Goulder, Michael. 1996. “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Resurrection Reconsidered, Oneworld, Oxford. 48–61.

Helms, Randel. 1988. Gospel Fictions. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y.

Lüdemann, G. 1994. The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (trans. John Bowden), SCM Press, London.

Richard Carrier on Jesus Mythicism

Richard Carrier gives a talk here on Jesus mythicism: the theory that there never was an historical person called Jesus of Nazareth, and that Christianity arose from belief in a purely “heavenly” Jesus, who was crucified in the lower spheres of heaven (what was called the second heaven in Jewish cosmology) at the hands of evil spirits and demons. Now I do not agree with this thesis myself, but Carrier presents an interesting summary of it.


Friday, July 6, 2012

Bibliographical Resources and Encyclopedias for Classics and Ancient Greek and Roman History

I. Guides to the Literature and General Bibliographical Works
(1) Halton, Thomas P. 1986. Classical Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography. Kraus International, White Plains, N.Y.

(2) Jenkins, Fred W. 1996. Classical Studies: A Guide to the Reference Literature. Libraries Unlimited, Englewood, Colo.

Jenkins, Fred W. 2006. Classical Studies: A Guide to the Reference Literature (2nd edn.). Libraries Unlimited, Westport Conn. and London.

(3) Hopwood, Keith. 1995. Ancient Greece and Rome: A Bibliographical Guide. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York.

(4) Schaps, David M. 2011. Handbook for Classical Research. Routledge, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY.


II. Bibliographical Abstracts, Indices and Resources
(1) L’année philologique: bibliographie critique et analytique de l’antiquité gréco-latine. Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique, Paris. 1928–.

L’année philologique on the Internet.

(2) Tables of Contents of Journals of Interest to Classicists TOCS-IN.

(3) Gnomon Online. The Eichstätt Information System for Classical Studies.

(4) Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt Search Index.


III. General Dictionaries/Encyclopedias
(1) RE = Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen
Altertumswissenschaft

Pauly, August Friedrich von, Wissowa, Georg, Kroll, Wilhelm, Witte, Kurt and Karl Mittelhaus, Konrat Ziegler (eds.). 1893–1972. Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Neue Bearbeitung unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgenosen herausgegeben von Georg Wissowa. Reihe I (A–Q), 47 vols in 48. Reihe II (R–Z), 19 vols. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart.

1903–1978. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Supplement. J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart. 15 vols.

Erler, Tobias. 1997–2000. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Gesamtregister. J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart. 1158 p. 2 CD ROMs.

Gartner, Hans and Albert Wunsch. 1980. Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Neue Bearbeitung begonnen vom Georg Wissowa fortgeführt von Wilhelm Kroll und Karl Mittelhaus, unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgenossen. Register der Nachtrage und Supplemente. Druckenmuller, Munich.

Murphy, John P. 1980. Index to the Supplements and Supplementary Volumes of Pauly-Wissowa’s RE: Index to the Nachträge and Berichtigungen in Vols. I–XXIV of the First Series, Vols. I–X of the Second Series and Supplementary Vols I–XIV of Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll’s Realenzyklopädie with an Appendix Containing an Index to Suppl. vol. XV (Final) (2nd edn.). Ares, Chicago.

– the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Encyclopedia of Classical Antiquity) is a huge multi-volume encyclopedia and the standard reference work for Classical studies. It is often called Pauly-Wissowa or abbreviated as RE.

The present work, which began in the 1890s under Georg Wissowa, is actually a new edition of an older work by August Friedrich von Pauly (1796–1845). A number of other editors followed Wissowa:

(1) from 1906, Wilhelm Kroll (1869–1939)
(2) Kurt Witte
(3) Karl Mittelhaus (1877–1946), and
(4) Konrat Ziegler (1884–1974).

The work is divided into 2 series: I. (A–Q) and II. (R–Z).

For more information, see here:
Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Wikisource.

Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Wikipedia

“Emerging Open Access Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft,” AWOL – The Ancient World Online, December 30, 2010.

Reference Reviews Europe Online, 1998 1/2-147, History and Area Studies.
(2) Der Neue Pauly/Brill’s New Pauly
Cancik, Hubert and Helmuth Schneider (eds.). 1996–2003. Der neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. 16 vols.

Cancik, Hubert, Landfester, Manfred, and Helmuth Schneider (eds.). 2004–. Der neue Pauly. Supplemente. Metzler, Stuttgart.

Cancik, Hubert, Schneider, Helmuth, Landfester, Manfred and Christine F. Salazar (eds.). 2002–2006. Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Antiquity. Brill, Leiden and Boston.

Landfester, Manfred et al. 2006–. Brill’s New Pauly. Classical Tradition: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Brill, Leiden and Boston.

– this is an updated version of Der Kleine Pauly: the original (1996–2003) was in German, with an English translation called Brill’s New Pauly appearing from 2002.
(3) The Oxford Classical Dictionary, various edns.
Hammond, N. G. L. and H. H. Scullard (eds.). 1970. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd. edn.). Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1176 p.

Hornblower, Simon and Antony Spawforth (eds.). 1996. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn.). Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York. 1640 p.

Hornblower, Simon and Antony Spawforth (eds.). 2003. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd rev. edn.). Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Spawforth, Antony and Esther Eidinow (eds.). 2012. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edn.). Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1592 p.

– the latest and most up-to-date edition. This supercedes earlier editions.
(4) The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, various edns.
Harvey, Paul (ed.). 1969. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1st repr. edn.). Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Howatson, M. C. 1989. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (2nd edn.). Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.

Howatson, M. C. 2011. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (3nd edn.). Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
(4) Andersen, Carl et al. (eds.). 1965. Lexikon der alten Welt. Artemis Verlag, Zurich. 3524 columns.

(5) Gagarin, Michael (ed.). 2010. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
This is also available online.

(6) Lemprière, John. 1984. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors Writ Large (3rd edn. by F. A. Wright). Routledge & K. Paul, London and Boston.

(7) Peck, Harry. 1962 [1896]. Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities (2nd edn.). Cooper Square Publishers, New York. 1701 p.

(8) Richardson, William F. 2004. Numbering and Measuring in the Classical World (2nd rev. edn.). Bristol Phoenix, Bristol.

(9) Shipley, Graham et al. (eds.). 2006. The Cambridge Dictionary of Classical Civilization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
– A work derived from the The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn.).

(10) Smith, William. 1875. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. J. Murray, London.

Smith, William. 1901. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (3rd rev. and enl. edn.). J. Murray, London. 2 vols.

(11) Speake, Graham. 2000. Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition. Fitzroy Dearborn, London and Chicago. 2 vols.

(12) Wilson, Nigel (ed.). 2006. Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. Routledge, New York.

(13) Warrington, John. 1970. Everyman’s Classical Dictionary 800 BC–AD 337. J. M. Dent, London. 537p.

(14) Carlos Parada, Greek Mythology Link.

(15) Encyclopedia Mythica.


IV. BOOK REVIEWS
(1) Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR).

(2) The Classical Review

(3) Gnomon: kritische Zeitschrift für die gesamte klassische Altertumswissenschaft, Weidmann, Berlin, 1925–.


IV. ATLASES
(1) Hammond, N. G. L. (ed.). 1981. Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity. Noyes Press, Park Ridge, NJ.

(2) Morkot, Robert. 1996. The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece. Penguin, London and New York.

(3) Talbert, Richard J. A. (ed.). 2000. Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

(4) Talbert, Richard J. A. (ed.). 1988. Atlas of Classical History. Macmillan, New York.

(5) Wittke, Anne-Maria, Olshausen, Eckart, Szydlak, Richard et al. (eds.). 2010. Historical Atlas of the Ancient World. Brill, Leiden and Boston.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Bibliography on Ancient Egyptian Language and Grammar

For an overview of the subject, see D. B. Spanel, 2001. “Reference Works,” in D. B. Redford et al. (eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (vol. 2). Oxford University Press, Oxford. 130.

I. Lexicons

(1) The Beinlich Wordlist.
This is an searchable database of ancient Egyptian words in transliteration. It provides a German translation of the word and references to the entry of the word either in the standard Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache (see next entry) or in more recent publications.

(2) Erman, A. and H. Grapow. 1955–1963. Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. 12 vols. Akademie-Verlag, Leipzig and Berlin.
This is the standard lexicon for the ancient Egyptian language. A list of words absent from the Wörterbuch can be found in G. Andreu and Cauville, S. 1977. “Vocabulaire absent du Wörterbuch,” Revue d'Egyptologie 29: 5–13 and Revue d’Egyptologie 30: 10–21.

(3) Faulkner, R. O. 1962. A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. 327 p. V. Ridler, Oxford.
A somewhat dated dictionary, but useful in that the translations are in English rather than German.

(4) Hannig, R. 1995. Die Sprache der Pharaonen: grosses Handwörterbuch Ägyptisch-Deutsch (2800-950 v. Chr.), 1412p. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz.
This is a recent lexicon, but has fewer entries than the complete Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache.


II. GRAMMAR AND PHILOLOGY

(1) Allen, J. P. 1999. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge University Press, New York.
This recent study is regarded as the best treatment of Middle Egyptian grammar since Gardiner’s work.

(2) Cerný, J. and S. Israelit-Groll. 1975. A Late Egyptian Grammar (Studia Pohl, Series maior, 4). Biblical Institute Press, Rome.
This is the standard grammar of Late Egyptian.

(4) Gardiner, A. H. 1957. Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs (3rd rev. edn.). Oxford University Press, London.
The standard grammar for Middle Egyptian.

(5) Layton, B. 2011. A Coptic Grammar: With Chrestomathy and Glossary: Sahidic Dialect (3nd rev. edn.). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden.
This will probably be the best Coptic grammar in English, since it incorporates all recent scholarship.

(6) Till, W. 1970. Koptische Grammatik (4th edn.; Lehrbucher fur das Studium der orientalischen und afrikanischen Sprachen, Bd 1). Verlag Enzyklopadie, Leipzig.
The standard grammar of Sahidic Coptic.

III. Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian

(1) A excellent transliteration font for Ancient Egyptian in both Macintosh and Windows format from the Centre for Computer-aided Egyptological Research used to be transliteration.tff, but I am not sure whether this is still available.

(2) The Deir el-Medina Database
Database uses a special font for Egyptian transliteration called Trlit_CG Times. This font will display characters for transliteration of Ancient Egyptian. To download the font, visit the Deir el-Medina Database website.

IV. Journals
The following are some of the more important journals for Egyptology:

Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR)
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
Egyptian Archaeology
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
The Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
Journal of Palestinian Archaeology
Journal of the American Oriental Society
Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society (JSNES) Index
Journal of Semitic Studies
Kemet
KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt
Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin
Near Eastern Archaeology
Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur

Saturday, June 2, 2012

James the Brother of Jesus, the Apostle Paul and the Apostolic Council

There has been a considerable amount of work on James, the brother of Jesus, in recent years, with important studies by Eisenman (1997), Bernheim (1997), Chilton and Evans (1999), and Painter (1997, with an expanded edition in 2004).

One of the best works, in my opinion, is Pierre-Antoine Bernheim’s James, Brother of Jesus (London, 1997). Bernheim’s book has an excellent analysis of the relationship between Paul and James, the brother of Jesus.

Forget the nonsensical ramblings of the Da Vinci Code: the really fascinating story about early Christianity was how the early Christians and disciples of Jesus were led by James, Jesus’s biological brother, and how James and the original Jewish church had a fundamental clash with Paul of Tarsus (or the apostle Paul), who changed and revolutionised Christianity by opening it up to Greeks and Romans.

In Acts, we are told that early in the history of the Christian community, when the gospel had been preached to non-Jewish people (Gentiles), certain Jewish Christians came from Judaea to Antioch in Syria and told the Gentile Christians that they could not be saved unless they were circumcised and converted to Judaism (Acts 15.1–2).

Christianity started as a Messianic sectarian group within Judaism, and it is no surprise that some Jewish Christians will have demanded that Greeks or non-Jews believing in Jesus should be converted to Judaism to be “proper” Christians. The earliest Jewish Christians were strong adherents of the Mosaic law (or Torah) as Jesus himself presumably was.

Certain diaspora Jewish Christian preachers like Paul may well have believed (as Paul did) that Gentiles could be saved without converting to Judaism. Many have seen Paul as a “second founder” of Christianity, who opened the religion to non-Jewish Greeks and Romans and who radically changed Christianity in the process. I think there is a great deal of evidence for this, and it consists in the quite hostile relations that Paul had with the original Jewish disciples of Jesus, who appear to have opposed Paul on a number of occasions, and, above all, his gospel of salvation by faith alone and the abolition of the Torah.

There was a fundamental split in earliest Christianity between
(1) Paul’s version of Christianity, and
(2) the original Jewish Christian form accepted by the Jewish disciples of Jesus (whom Paul calls the “Pillars” of the church) and their community in Judaea, led by Jesus’s biological brother James.
After the dispute at Antioch arose, the earliest Christian community had a meeting of its leaders at Jerusalem, presided over by James, Jesus’s brother. This result of this conference was the famous “Apostolic decree,” in which James accepted that in theory Gentiles could attain salvation by not fully converting to Judaism, but by following the core principles of the Torah: abstaining from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, the meat of strangled animals and sexual immorality (Acts 15:18-21). These prohibitions were similar to the so-called Noachic commandments (that is, the commandments supposedly given to Noah; Bernheim 1997: 171). Acts makes it clear that these instructions were required if Gentiles wished to be saved (Bernheim 1997: 171).

An alternative account of this meeting is given by Paul in Galatians 2:1–10, but it appears that Paul may well have suppressed details of what actually happened, in that he never refers to the Noachic commandments. Most recently, William O. Walker has argued that Paul may not have even been granted the status of apostle by the Jerusalem Church at this meeting (see Walker 2004).

But many conservative Christian scholars and theologians have badly misunderstood the purpose and consequences of the Apostolic decree. I briefly outline its purpose, on the basis of the excellent discussion in Pierre-Antoine Bernheim’s James, Brother of Jesus (London, 1997).

The Apostolic decree was not promulgated to allow Jewish Christians to eat with Gentile Christians. The purpose of the Apostolic decree was to declare that Gentiles could be saved without conversion to Judaism, and to set out the minimum requirements that they would have to fulfil (derived from the Noachic commandments) to be saved. The decree did not stop them from converting if they wished, nor did it in any way lessen the obligations of the Mosaic law on Jewish Christians.

Bernheim (1997: 169) speculates that James, John and Peter – the leaders of Jewish Christianity – thought that non-circumcision of Gentiles was tolerable, but that their conversion was actually preferable.

After the council at Jerusalem, there was the incident at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14). Here Jewish Christians were taking meals with Gentile Christians. Peter had been present at Antioch and had apparently been dining with Gentile Christians. But Peter and the other Jewish Christians stopped table fellowship with Gentile Christians when representatives of James arrived. These representatives criticised the fact that Jewish Christians had been eating with former pagan Gentile Christians (Bernheim 1997: 177). James did not think that pagans who had accepted Yahweh and Jesus as Messiah could be full members of Israel, the chosen people of God, and that Jewish Christians should maintain a ritual separation from Gentile Christians (Bernheim 1997: 180).

Thus, when Paul accused Peter of compelling Gentiles “to Judaise” (Gal. 2:14), this meant that Peter was compelling them to convert to Judaism, if they wished to eat with Jewish Christians (Bernheim 1997: 180–181). In the view of James, the missions to the Gentiles and Jewish people were to be kept separate and, while Gentiles who believed in Jesus would be saved, they would have to be circumcised and converted to the Mosaic law in order to be considered full members of the people of Israel and eat with them (Bernheim 1997: 181).

At Antioch, James and Jewish Christian leaders at Jerusalem won out, and Paul was defeated. Paul then left to carry out his missionary activities in areas well away from Syria, such as Galatia, Asia Minor and Greece.

Later Jewish Christian emissaries from Jerusalem, no doubt with the approval of James, were sent out to some of the communities where Paul had made converts. They opposed Paul’s gospel of freedom from the Mosaic law in a number of ways. The Jewish Christian opponents of Paul in Galatia appear to have demanded circumcision of the Gentile Galatians, but they did think that Gentiles would not be saved without circumcision? Bernheim (1997: 184–185) argues that their position was probably that the Gentiles could in theory be saved without circumcision (as was the position of the Pillars), but in practice it was preferable to be converted to Judaism, and to become a full member of Israel, the people of God.

At 2 Corinthians 11:4, Paul refers to his opponents, who were most probably Jewish Christian missionaries, with the backing of the Jerusalem church, proclaiming “another Jesus” and “another gospel” (much like the Torah observant “another gospel” in Gal. 1:6). The reference to “another Jesus” strongly suggests that the Jerusalem church had Christological differences with Paul as well, most probably rejecting his notion of Jesus’s pre-existence and incarnation.

Hence there was an irreconcilable difference between Paul’s gospel and that of the Jewish Christian disciples of Jesus: Paul came to believe that Jesus’s death on the cross had abolished the Mosaic law, while James and the Jewish disciples of Jesus held that the Mosaic law was completely valid, and could not be violated or abrogated.

When Paul made his final journey to Jerusalem with a collection of money for the community in Judaea, Bernheim (1997: 190) contends that James and the elders rejected Paul’s collection, or at least not before he had taken part in a Nazirite vow.

Bernheim raises the possibility that James was involved, directly or indirectly, with Paul’s arrest in the temple. James and the Pillars were opposed to Paul and (in their view) his dangerous and heretical gospel of abolishing the Mosaic law and justification by faith alone.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernheim, Pierre-Antoine. 1997. James, Brother of Jesus, SCM, London.

Chilton, B. and C. A. Evans. (eds.). 1999. James the Just and Christian Origins, Brill, Leiden.

Eisenman, Robert H. 1997. James, The Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Penguin Books, London.

Painter, John. 1997. Just James: the Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition, Fortress Press, Minneapolis.

Painter, John. 2004. Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (2nd edn.), University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, S.C.

Walker, William O. 2004. “Galatians 2:8 and the Question of Paul’s Apostleship,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123.2: 323–327.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Bibliography on the Cult of Mithras

The cult of Mithras is relevant to the early history of Christianity, in that they were both salvation (or “mystery”) religions, and both had a rite called the “Lord’s supper”.

I have compiled a bibliography below.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beck, R. 1977. “Interpreting of Mithras in the Roman Orient. The Problem of Origin,” Journal of Mithraic Studies 2.1: 53–68.

Beck, R. 1992. “The Mithras Cult as Association,” Studies in Religion21: 3–13.

Beck, R. 1996. “The Mysteries of Mithras,” in John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (eds.), Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World, Routledge, London and New York. 176–185.

Beck, Roger L. 2000. “Ritual, Myth, Doctrine, and Initiation in the Mysteries of Mithras: New Evidence from a Cult Vessel,” The Journal of Roman Studies 90: 145–180.

Beck, Roger L. 2004. “Dancing at the Spirit Gates: A Mithraic Ritual Recovered from Proclus (in Remp. 2. 128. 26ff. Kroll),” in Rory B. Egan and Mark Joyal (eds.), Daimonopylai. Essays in Classics and the Classical Tradition Presented to Edmund G. Berry, University of Manitoba, Centre for Hellenic Civilization, Winnipeg, Manitoba. 1–6.

Beck, Roger. 1998. “The Mysteries of Mithras: A New Account of their Genesis,” Journal of Roman Studies 88: 115–128.

Clauss, Manfred. 2000. The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and his Mysteries (trans. Richard Gordon), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Court, John M. 2001. “Mithraism Among the Mysteries,” in Dan Cohn-Sherbok and John M. Court (eds.), Religious Diversity in the Graeco-Roman World. A Survey of Recent Scholarship, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield. 182–195.

Duthoy, R. 1969. The Taurobolium. Its Evolution and Terminology, Brill, Leiden.

Gordon, Richard. 1988. “Authority, Salvation and Mystery in the Mysteries of Mithras,” in J. Huskinson, M. Beard and J. Reynolds (eds.), Image and Mystery in the Roman World. Three Papers Given in Memory of Jocelyn Toynbee, Sutton, Gloucester. 45–88.

Lennon, Jack. 2010. “Jupiter Latiaris and the «taurobolium»: Inversions of Cleansing in Christian Polemic,” Historia 59.3: 381– 384.

McLynn, Neil B. 1996. “The Fourth-Century Taurobolium,”Phoenix 50: 312–330.

Moore, Clifford Herschel. 1924. “The Duration of the Efficacy of the Taurobolium,” Classical Philology 19: 363–365.

Rutter, Jeremy B. 1968. “The Three Phases of the Taurobolium,”Phoenix 22: 226–249.

Stoholski, Mark. 2007. “‘Welcome to Heaven, Please Watch Your Step’: The ‘Mithras Liturgy’ and the Homeric Quotations in the Paris Papyrus,” Helios 34.1: 69–95.

Swerdlow, N. M. 1991. “On the Cosmical Mysteries of Mithras,” Classical Philology 86: 48–63.

Wiens, D. H. 1980. “Mystery Concepts in Primitive Christianity and its Environment,” ARNW II.23.2: 1248–1284.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Paul’s Invention of the Eucharist

In 1 Corinthians 11:23–26, we have Paul’s account of the institution of the Eucharist, or what he calls the “Lord’s Supper”:
Ἐγὼ γὰρ παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου, ὃ καὶ παρέδωκα ὑμῖν, ὅτι ὁ κύριος Ἰησοῦς ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ ᾗ παρεδίδετο ἔλαβεν ἄρτον καὶ εὐχαριστήσας ἔκλασεν καὶ εἶπεν, τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν• τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν. ὡσαύτως καὶ τὸ ποτήριον μετὰ τὸ δειπνῆσαι, λέγων, τοῦτο τὸ ποτήριον ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη ἐστὶν ἐν τῷ ἐμῷ αἵματι• τοῦτο ποιεῖτε, ὁσάκις ἐὰν πίνητε, εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν. ὁσάκις γὰρ ἐὰν ἐσθίητε τὸν ἄρτον τοῦτον καὶ τὸ ποτήριον πίνητε, τὸν θάνατον τοῦ κυρίου καταγγέλλετε ἄχρις οὗ ἔλθῃ.

“For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was delivered up, took bread and, having given thanks, broke it and said: ‘this is my body for your sake; do this in remembrance of me.’ Similarly, with the cup after supper, saying, ‘this cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this as often as you drink it, for my remembrance.’ For as often as you eat the bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord, until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:23–26).
The Eucharist described by Paul, in this cultic form, places the emphasis on Jesus’s body and blood as bread and wine consumed by Christians, and this is made explicit in 1 Corinthians 10:16–17:
τὸ ποτήριον τῆς εὐλογίας ὃ εὐλογοῦμεν, οὐχὶ κοινωνία ἐστὶν τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ; τὸν ἄρτον ὃν κλῶμεν, οὐχὶ κοινωνία τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐστιν; ὅτι εἷς ἄρτος, ἓν σῶμα οἱ πολλοί ἐσμεν, οἱ γὰρ πάντες ἐκ τοῦ ἑνὸς ἄρτου μετέχομεν.

“the cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we the many are in the body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (1 Corinthians 10:16–17)
There are a number of scholars who think that Paul is the author of the Eucharist (Lietzmann 1979: 208; Loisy 1948: 230–235), and that, in this form in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26, it does not go back to the historical Jesus.

Most notably, Hyam Maccoby revived this thesis in his work on the apostle Paul (Maccoby 1991a and 1991b).

There are a number of reasons why it is convincing, as follows:
(1) the verb παρέλαβον means “received” and, despite arguments to the contrary, can refer either to
(1) receiving something by revelation or vision, or
(2) from human beings by instruction.
To see that even Paul uses παρέλαβον in the sense of “receiving” something by revelation, we need only look at Galatians 1:11–12:
Γνωρίζω δὲ ὑμῖν, ἀδελφοί, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τὸ εὐαγγελισθὲν ὑπ᾽ ἐμοῦ ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν κατὰ ἄνθρωπον• οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐγὼ παρὰ ἀνθρώπου παρέλαβον αὐτό, οὔτε ἐδιδάχθην, ἀλλὰ δι᾽ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

For I make known to you, brothers, that the gospel preached by me is not according to man, nor did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but [sc. I received it] through a revelation of Jesus Christ. (Galatians 1:11–12)
In the last part of the passage, we have three clauses:
(1) οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐγὼ παρὰ ἀνθρώπου παρέλαβον αὐτό,
(2) οὔτε ἐδιδάχθην,
(3) ἀλλὰ δι᾽ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ [sc. παρέλαβον αὐτό].

(1) nor did I receive it from man,
(2) nor was I taught it
(3) but [sc. I received it] through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
The main verb in the first clause is παρέλαβον, the same verb used in 1 Corinthians 11:23.

Paul says “nor did I receive it [sc. my gospel] from man,” and it is obvious that, although he does not repeat the verb in the final clause, it is omitted (that is, this last part of Galatians 1:12 has no verb and is elliptical), and is to be understood as the verb of the last sentence by ellipsis: “but [sc. I received it] through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (see Boer 2011: 82).

Therefore Paul is perfectly capable of using παρέλαβον in the sense of revelation directly from the risen Jesus. The verb παρέλαβον seems to have been used in the Mystery religions for receiving mysteries and revelations as well (Maccoby 1991: 248; Schweitzer 1967: 266).

(2) Apologists argue that the Greek preposition apo (“from”) in the phrase “For I received from (apo) the Lord” indicates an indirect or remote source of information, while para indicates a direct and immediate source.

But the fact is that neither usage is some absolute rule never broken: the author of Colossians 1:17 uses apo in his statement “as you learned from Epaphras,” and Matthew 11:29 uses apo in “learn from me” (Maccoby 1991: 247).

The meaning of the passage should be quite clear: Paul is saying he received in a vision or revelation from Jesus what follows concerning the Eucharist.

(3) When Jesus says, “this cup is the new covenant in my blood,” this must be understood as requiring Paul’s gospel of salvation by faith and the abolition of the Torah (the Mosaic law). The Greek word diatheke (διαθήκη) or “covenant” is the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) translation of the Hebrew word berith (“covenant”). Paul refers to the Mosaic law as the “old covenant” at 2 Corinthians 12:14, and he says it has been done away with in Christ (that is, in Paul’s new gospel). At 2 Corinthians 3:6 we read that Christians are
διακόνους καινῆς διαθήκης, οὐ γράμματος ἀλλὰ πνεύματος• τὸ γὰρ γράμμα ἀποκτέννει, τὸ δὲ πνεῦμα ζῳοποιεῖ.

“servants of a new covenant, not of one written in letters, but in the spirit: for the written [sc. covenant] kills, but the spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
This is a juxtaposition of the written Mosaic law/Torah (which the Jerusalem church still followed and thought was indispensable to make the Jewish Christians just) with the new covenant of freedom from the Torah in Paul’s gospel of justification by faith and abolition of the Mosaic law by Christ’s death on the cross.

Paul’s use of he kaine diatheke (“the new covenant”) is a clear reference to the new covenant Paul thinks God has made through Jesus’s death and resurrection, and proclaimed in Paul’s own original gospel of freedom from the Mosaic law, part of which he laid before the “Pillars” (the Jewish disciples of Jesus) in Jerusalem (Gal. 2:1–2). This passage, then, and the Eucharistic words of Jesus presuppose the radical Pauline gospel which the Pillars had not even heard when Paul presented it to them as described in Galatians 2:1–2. The Pillars had known of no such gospel from the historical Jesus, and they remained observant Jews as the Acts of the Apostles makes clear.
It is highly unlikely that the historical Jesus ever said any of the words Paul attributes to him, especially with their cannibalistic overtones, which would have been anathema to Torah observant Jews.

This strongly supports the view that Paul was the inventor of the Eucharist. Paul did not simply “invent” the Eucharist by borrowing the rite from the pagan mystery religions, however. He created it from some imagined, deluded “vision” from what he thought was the heavenly Jesus (whether this “vision” was a mere dream or oral and visual hallucination we cannot say).

If there was any influence from paganism, this must have been an “unconscious” influence on Paul, and I mean “unconscious” without any questionable and ridiculous Freudian concepts here. Paul lived and breathed in the ancient pagan cities of the eastern Mediterranean with their mystery religion rites, where pagans had their own “Lord’s suppers.” In Paul’s own home city of Tarsus, there was a cult centre of Mithras worship, in which initiates would be bathed in the blood of the bull as a rite (Wilson 1998: 25–26; cf. Coutsoumpos 2005: 19–20). Who knows how exposure to this world could have affected Paul’s mind when he dreamed or hallucinated?


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boer, Martinus C. de. 2011. Galatians: A Commentary, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Ky.

Casey, M. 1993, “No Cannibals at Passover,” Theology 96: 199–205.

Coutsoumpos, Panayotis. 2005. Paul and the Lord's Supper: A Socio-Historical Investigation, Peter Lang, New York and Oxford.

Goulder, M. D. 1995, St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions, Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY.

Hoffman, D. L. 1998, “Ignatius and Early Anti-Docetic Realism in the Eucharist,” Fides et Historia 30: 74–88.

Lietzmann, Hans. 1979. Mass and Lord’s Supper: A Study in the History of the Liturgy (trans. D. H. G. Reeve), Brill, Leiden.

Loisy, A. F. 1948. The Birth of the Christian Religion (trans. L. P. Jacks), G. Allen & Unwin, London.

Maccoby, H. 1986. The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1st edn.), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

Maccoby, H., 1991a. “Paul and the Eucharist,” New Testament Studies 37: 247–269.

Maccoby, H. 1991b. Paul and Hellenism, SCM Press, London.

Schweitzer, Albert. 1967. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (trans. W. Montgomery; 2nd edn.), Black, London.

Wilson, A. N. 1998. Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London.

Bibliography of Lexicons and Grammars for Classical Latin

There are good surveys in David M. Schaps, Handbook for Classical Research, (Routledge, London and New York, 2011); and Fred W. Jenkins, Classical Studies: A Guide to the Reference Literature (2nd edn.; Libraries Unlimited, Westport, Conn. and London, 2006).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Latin Lexicons and Dictionaries
I.1 Etymological Dictionaries

Ernout, Alfred and Alfred Meillet. 2001. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: histoire des mots (repr. of 4th edn. with additions and corrections), Klincksieck, Paris.

Vaan, Michiel Arnoud Cor de. 2008. Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, Brill, Leiden and Boston.
This is now the standard work on Latin etymology.

Walde, Alois. 1938–1956. Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (3 vols.; 3rd edn. by J. B. Hofmann), Winter, Heidelberg.

I.2 Classical and Late Latin Lexicons and Dictionaries

Axelson, Bertil. 1945. Unpoetische Wörter: ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der lateinischen Dichtersprache, H.Ohlssons boktryckeri, Lund.

Estienne, Robert, 1543. Dictionarium: seu Latinae Linguae Thesaurus (2nd. edn.), ex officina Roberti Stephani, Paris.
An old work by Robert Estienne, which is available online at Gallica.

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, 1900– , B. G. Teubner, Leipzig
v.1. A–Amyzon; vol. 2. an–Byzeres; vol. 3. C–comus; vol. 4. con–cyulus; vol. 5. D–E; vol. 6. F–H; vol. 7. I-L; vol. 8. M; vol. 9.2. O; vol. 10. P–Praemonenda.
The TLL most detailed, authoritative work for Latin. It was begun 100 years ago and is up to the letter “p,” with etymologies, definitions, all attested spellings, what authors use the word, and specialised definitions. It is written in Latin.

Glare, P. G. W. (ed.). 1996. Oxford Latin Dictionary (repr. with corrections), Clarendon, Oxford.

Glare, P. G. W. (ed.). 2012. Oxford Latin Dictionary (2nd edn.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
The most recent edition.

Glossa, A Latin Dictionary (based on Lewis and Short)
http://athirdway.com/glossa/

An online version of Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary

Lewis, Charlton T. 1999. An Elementary Latin Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. 1998. A Latin Dictionary (based Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin dictionary), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Simpson, D. P. 1977. Cassell’s Latin Dictionary: Latin–English, English–Latin, Macmillan, New York.

Smith, William and Theophilus D. Hall. 2000. Smith’s English-Latin Dictionary, Bolchazy-Carducci, Wauconda, Illinois.

Souter, Alexander. 1957. A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A. D. (corr. edn.), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Souter, Alexander. 1996. A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A. D. (special edition), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Quicherat, Louis and Émile Chatelain. 1967 [1922]. Thesaurus Poeticus Linguae Latinae, Georg Olms, Hildesheim.

I.3 Medieval Latin Lexicons and Dictionaries

Blatt, Franz. 1957– . Novum Glossarium mediae Latinitatis: ab anno DCCC usque MCC Munksgaard, Hafniae.
One of the two best, most recent works for medieval Latin, but not yet complete. See also Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch bis zum ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert.

du Cange, Charles du Fresne. 1883–1887. Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis (10 vols; exp. edn), Niort.
An older work for medieval Latin.

Forcellini, Egidio et al. 1771. Totius Latinitatis Lexicon, Typis Seminarii, Padua

Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch bis zum ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert, 1959– . Beck, Munich.
One of the two best, most recent works for medieval Latin, but not yet complete. See also Blatt (1957– ).

Niermeyer, J. F. and C. van de Kieft. 2002. Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon minus (2 vols.; 2nd rev. edn by J. W. J. Burgers), Brill, Leiden.

Scheller, I. J. G. 1835. Lexicon Totius Latinitatis: A Dictionary of the Latin Language (based on orig. German edn. by I. J. G. Scheller; rev. and trans. into English by J. E. Riddle), University Press, Oxford 1835.

II. Latin Grammar and Syntax
II.1 Latin Grammars

Allen, J. H. and J. B. Greenough. 2006. Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar, Dover Publications, Mineola, N.Y. 2006.

Bennett, Charles E. 1918. New Latin Grammar, Allyn and Bacon, Boston.

Latin Word Study Tool
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?lang=la

An online resource to parse Latin words.

William Whitaker’s Words
http://archives.nd.edu/words.html

A parsing website with basic dictionary.

Devine, A. M. and Laurence D. Stephens. 2006. Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information, Oxford University Press, New York.

Gildersleeve, Basil L. and Gonzalez Lodge. 1997. Latin Grammar (3rd rev. edn. rev.), Bristol Classical Press, London.

Goldman, Norma W. 2004. English Grammar for Students of Latin: The Study Guide for Those Learning Latin (3rd edn.), Olivia and Hill Press, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Hale, William Gardner and Carl Darling Buck. 1966. A Latin Grammar, U.P., Alabama.

Hale, William Gardner and Carl Darling Buck. 2010. A Latin Grammar, Nabu Press.
A recent reprinting.

Krebs, Johann Philipp. 1962. Antibarbarus der lateinischen Sprache (2 vols.), B. Schwabe, Basel.
A book on the nuances of Latin words.

Kühner, Raphael and Carl Stegmann. 1912. Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache (2nd edn.), Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover.
This is considered by many to be the best, most detailed Latin grammar.

Leumann, M., Hofmann, J. B. and A. Szantyr. 1977. Lateinische Grammatik (2 vols.), Beck, Munich.

Menge, Hermann. 2007. Lehrbuch der lateinischen Syntax und Semantik (3rd edn.), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt.

Moreland, Floyd L. and Rita M. Fleischer. 1990. Latin: An Intensive Course (9th pr. with corrections), University of California Press, Berkeley and London.

Schad, Samantha. 2007. A Lexicon of Latin Grammatical Terminology, Fabrizio Serra, Pisa.

Stearn, W. T. 2004. Botanical Latin: History, Grammar, Syntax, Terminology, and Vocabulary (4th edn), Newton Abbot : Portland, Ore.

Woodcock, E. C. 1985. A New Latin Syntax, Bristol Classical Press, Bristol.

II.2 Comparative Grammars

Buck, Carl. 1962. Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, University Press, Chicago.
Now out of date.

Sihler, Andrew L. 2008. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
The best modern treatment.

III. Latin Pronunciation
Allen, W. S. 2004. Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (2nd edn), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Barsby, J. A. 1983. “The Pronunciation of Latin,” Classicum 9.1, 14–16.

Brittain, F. 1955. Latin in Church: The History of its Pronunciation (rev. edn.), Mowbray for the Alcuin Club, London.

Copeman, H. 1996. Singing in Latin, or, Pronunciation Explor’d (rev. edn), H. Copeman, Oxford.

Sargeaunt, J., and Bradley, H. 1920. The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin, Oxford.

Walker, John. 1798. A Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names, London.

Walker, J. 1831. A Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names (rev. edn. by W. Trollope), London.

Westaway, F. W. 1930. Quantity and Accent in Latin: An Introduction to the Reading of Latin Aloud (2nd edn.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

IV. Websites
Textkit
www.textkit.com

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

How Did Jesus Become “Son of God”?

In the Bible and ancient Jewish writings, the title “son of god” has a number of senses (see Fossum 1995), as follows:
(1) angels are sometimes called “sons of god” (Job 38.7);

(2) the people of Israel are sometimes metaphorically called son of god (Hos. 11:1), and

(3) the Israelite king is spoken of as god’s son (2 Sam. 7:14; see Cooke 1961 and Mettinger 1976: 259-275). Psalm 2 was an important example of this, in which the king of Israel is son of god at his enthronement:
“I will tell of the decree of the Lord: he said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten you”. (Psalm 2.7).
This was part of Israelite royal ideology: the king became god’s son at his coronation (Goulder 1995: 147). It is also possible that the fragmentary Qumran document 4Q246 is a Messianic text calling the Messiah (which means “anointed/chosen one”) the “son of god,” in the Israelite royal sense, an expected future king of Israel who will be son of god in this way (Collins 1993; cf. Fitzmyer 1993).
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, there appears to be a pre-Pauline Christology where this idea is also attested:
εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ, ὃ προεπηγγείλατο διὰ τῶν προφητῶν αὐτοῦ ἐν γραφαῖς ἁγίαις, περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα, τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ θεοῦ ἐν δυνάμει κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν, Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν …

“[the] gospel of god, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy writings, concerning his son Jesus Christ our Lord, born/come from the seed of David according to the flesh, and designated son of god in power according to the spirit of holiness, by resurrection from the dead …” (Romans 1.1–4).
Paul probably inherited the Christology of Romans 1.1–4 from earlier Jewish Christians, and we can deduce that their Christology was like this:
(1) Jesus was the Messiah, the long awaited king, and at some point the earliest Christians came to believe that Jesus must have been a descendent of king David, because the Messiah was thought to be of his dynasty (Goulder 1995: 99-100). This the Messiah could be called “son of David” in a figurative sense as his descendant (as in Mark 10:47). But at this stage the early Christians had probably not invented a Davidic genealogy for Jesus, as in the gospel of Matthew 1:6–16.

(2) in believing that Jesus was the Messiah, or king of Israel, the earliest Jewish Christians took over the Israelite royal ideology that held that the king, at his coronation, was “god’s son”: what is fascinating is that in this pre-Pauline Christology Jesus appears to have been made god’s son at his resurrection, which suggests that Jesus’s messiahship formally began at his resurrection as well. In fact, this is not that strange, as many scholars have concluded that the proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah by his disciples happened after his death: this was the theory of William Wrede in his ground-breaking study The Messianic Secret (Wrede 1971; see also Wells 1996: 122; Tuckett 1983 and Räisänen 1990). This idea is also attested in Luke 24:44–45, Acts 13:33, Acts 2:32 and 2:36.

Thus there is considerable doubt whether the historical Jesus ever claimed to be the Messiah during his lifetime. One might speculate that, at the end of his ministry, during the Passover events in Jerusalem many of Jesus’s followers and ordinary people in Jerusalem might have started to think he was Messiah, but whether Jesus explicitly denied this or, alternatively, “tacitly” accepted it is not known.

(3) The phrase used by Paul τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα (“come/born from the seed of David according to the flesh”) strongly suggests that at this stage the Jewish Christians thought Jesus was a real descendant of David in the natural human sense of descent through his father. The word γενομένου (which should be understood in the sense of born/conceived) implies Jesus was fathered by a normal human father, because by the contemporary Jewish conception of birth it was the father who created the child through his seed/sperm, not the mother (Goulder 1995: 102). The ancients were ignorant of DNA and genetics: they did not understand women contributed genetic material to the child. In their view, it was the father who made his child, who grew out of the male seed. Therefore the earliest Jewish Christian belief (deduced from the proclamation of Jesus as risen Messiah) was that he really had been born from his father naturally as a descendant of king David, and this is still reflected in 2 Tim. 2.8 and Ignatius, Ephes. 18. At this stage, the virgin birth story had yet to be invented.
The title “son of god,” then, was held to be a title of Jesus by his Jewish disciples only after his death and imagined resurrection, and it reflects Israelite royal ideology, not the belief that he was divine.

After Paul took over this earlier, primitive Jewish Christology, he appears to have developed it further, by inventing the notion of the pre-existence of Jesus, which is attested in Philippians (written in the mid-50s or early 60s AD):
… Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων
οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ,
ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών,
ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος•
καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος
ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου,
θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ.

“…. Christ Jesus
who, being in the form of God,
did not deem the being equal with God a prize,
but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave
born/becoming in the form of men,
and having appeared (or having been found) in shape as a man
he humbled himself, becoming obedient until death,
and death on a cross.” (Phil. 2.6–8).
Of course, there is already a huge literature on the interpretation of Philippians 2:5–11 (see Marshall 1968. Martin and Dodd 1998; Wright 1986; Burk 2004). Many think that this “Christ hymn” was a pre-Pauline creed, but the arguments adduced are not very convincing: there is no reason why Paul could not have composed this in a language and style different from the prosaic style of his letters (for a review of arguments see Martin 2005). I would contend that this is Paul’s own composition, reflecting his Christological innovations.

According to Paul, after his resurrection God bestowed on Jesus the name that is above every other name: the title “Lord,” or kurios in Greek (Phil. 2.8–11), which is the regular title of god in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

For Paul, Jesus has now become an eternal, first-born semi-divine being, even though Paul may possibly shrink from saying that Jesus wanted to be an absolute equal of god (see Philippians 2:6: “[sc. Jesus] did not deem the being equal with God a prize,” which of course does presuppose some kind of equality). At this point, the title “son of god” has become a semi-divine title for Paul and Pauline Christians referring to Jesus as the first born “son of god” before creation (Goulder 1995: 102) and a type of cosmic king, not simply a reflection of Israelite/Messianic royal ideology. Already the Pauline gospel of Mark written c. 70 AD uses the “son of god” as a semi-divine title, reflecting Paul’s Christology: Mark has already transcended the primitive use of “son of god” in the royal ideological sense.

In other Jewish Christian communities, a different doctrine was developed: the virgin birth, which is never stated by Paul and was probably unknown to him.

The author of the gospel of Matthew was from a liberal Jewish Christian community, possibly in Antioch in Syria, which believed that Jesus was Messiah and “son of god” in the royal sense at his resurrection. Matthew wrote his gospel after 70 AD (possibly in the late 70s AD), and certainly after the gospel of Mark (which he uses as a source). In time, these communities were unsatisfied with the idea that Jesus was Messiah only after his death and the messiahship was retrojected back onto Jesus’s life and ministry. The term “son of god” was also given a new interpretation. Many Christians poured over the Old Testament looking for passages that they imagined prophesied Jesus. When they read such passages many will have believed that the holy spirit entered into them, and that they read these passages with divine inspiration, so that prophecies about Jesus were revealed to them by revelation. Once they had found some text they thought was a prophesy, it was a natural step to write some story about Jesus they thought must have happened to fulfil the prophecy (because their thinking will have been something like this: “if the holy spirit has revealed some passage with a prophecy about Jesus, surely it must have happened”). Thus many stories about Jesus in the gospels have been created in this way (perhaps not as conscious fraud, but as the deluded midrash of early Christians), and it follows, of course, that many such stories never really happened. The virgin birth is one of these.

It is likely that some Jewish Christian (possibly the author of Matthew himself) read Isaiah 7:14 in the Greek Septuagint (or LXX = Septuaginta) in this way and imagined he had found a prophecy of Jesus’s birth:
διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον• ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ …

“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign:
behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb, and will bring forth a son,
and you will call his name Emmanuel ...” (Isaiah 7:14; the Greek text follows Rahlfs 1971 [1935]).
This passage in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew text of the Old Testament) was originally meant to be nothing more than a prophecy of the Israelite king Hezekiah, son of Ahaz. Even a Catholic scholar like Raymond Brown admits that Isaiah 7:14 originally referred to a sign that was just a normal birth: “The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably Davidic, but naturally conceived, who would illustrate God’s providential care for his people” (Brown 1999: 148).

The idea of a “virgin” giving birth is not really even in the original Hebrew text. In the Hebrew, the crucial word is almah, meaning either (1) a young unmarried woman (possibly a virgin) or (2) a recently married young woman (but not a virgin):
לכן יתן אדני הוא לכם אות הנה העלמה הרה וילדת בן וקראת שמו עמנו אל
[note this is the Hebrew text without diacriticals].

לָכֵן יִתֵּן אֲדֹנָי הוּא לָכֶם אוֹת: הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן וְקָרָאת שְׁמוֹ עִמָּנוּ אֵל
[note this is the Hebrew text with diacriticals; to read Hebrew one starts at the end of the first line and reads backwards, then goes to the end of the second line and reads backwards].

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.
See! the young woman [almah in Hebrew] is with child
and the one bearing a son
will call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14).
The Greek Septuagint translated almah (העלמה) with the word parthenos (παρθένος), which is easier to understand in the sense of “virgin.” The Greek word parthenos could mean:
(1) a maiden or girl, often with the sense of virgin, e.g., ἡ Παρθένος (“the Virgin”) was the title of the goddess Athena at Athens; the sacred παρθένοι was used to describe the Vestal virgins at Rome.

(2) unmarried women who are not virgins.
(Liddell and Scott 1996, s.v. parthenos, p. 1339).
The Jewish Christian (as I noted, possibly the author of Matthew himself) read this text in the Greek and understood parthenos as “virgin” and thought it was a prophecy of Jesus’s birth (Goulder 1995: 103; for more on this, see the discussion here by Richard Carrier). How, then, was Jesus conceived? As the passage was turned over in his mind, he thought that Jesus must have been “conceived” in a miracle by god: hence the origin of the virgin birth story in Matthew and the idea of Jesus being “god’s son” in a more literal sense than merely the metaphorical sense of “son of god” as king of Israel at his resurrection, which had been the earlier view (Goulder 1995: 149).


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Raymond Edward. 1999. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (updated edn.), Doubleday, New York, N.Y.

Burk, D. “On the Articular Infinitive in Philippians 2:6: A Grammatical Note with Christological Implications,” Tyndale Bulletin 55.2: 253-274.

Carrier, Richard. 2003. “The Problem of the Virgin Birth Prophecy,” The Secular Web
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html

Collins, J. J. 1993. “The Son of God Text from Qumran,” in M. C. De Boer (ed.), From Jesus to John: Essays on Jesus and New Testament Christology in Honour of Marinus de Jonge, JSOT Press, Sheffield. 65–82.

Cooke, Gerald A. 1961. “The Israelite King as Son of God,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 73: 202-225.

Fitzmyer, J. 1993. “4Q246. The ‘Son of God’ Document from Qumran,” Biblica 74: 153–174.

Fossum. Jarl. 1995. “Son of God,” in Karel van der Toom, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, EJ Brill, Leiden. 1485–1497.

Goulder, M. D. 1995. St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions, Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY.

Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon (9th edn.; rev. and augm. by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie, with rev. supplement), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Marshall, I. Howard. 1968. “The Christ-Hymn in Philippians,” Tyndale Bulletin 19: 104–127.

Martin, James D. 2005. Carmen Christi: Philippians ii. 5-11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Martin, Ralph P. and Brian J. Dodd (eds). 1998. Where Christology Began: Essays on Philippians 2, Westminster John Knox, Louisville, KY.

Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. 1976. King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite Kings, LiberLaromedel/Gleerup, Lund.

Rahlfs, A. (ed.). 1971 [1935]. Septuaginta: Id est Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX interpretes (9th edn.), Württembergische Bibelanstalt Stuttgart, Stuttgart.

Räisänen, Heikki. 1990. The “Messianic Secret” in Mark (trans. Christopher Tuckett), T & T Clark, Edinburgh.

Tuckett, Christopher (ed.). 1983. The Messianic Secret, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, Pa. and London.

Wells, G. A. 1996. The Jesus Legend, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Ill.

Wrede, William. 1971. The Messianic Secret (trans. J. C. G. Greig), Attic Press, Greenwood, S.C.

Wright, N. T. 1986. “άρπαγμός and the Meaning of Philippians 2:5–11,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 n.s.: 321–352.

Monday, May 14, 2012

How Did Early Christianity Develop?

Here is my theory, for what it is worth. I will sketch it here, and it is based on the work of reputable New Testament scholars and historians of Christianity.

The full divinity of Jesus (the Trinity) does not come until much later on.

In my opinion, what the earliest Jewish Christians believed (and I could cite the specialist literature here) is the following:
(1) during most of his lifetime Jesus was a human prophet, born of ordinary parents (no virgin birth, no incarnation, and no divinity) prophesying the imminent arrival of the “kingdom of god”: the end times where Israel would get its Messiah and be freed from the bloody and cruel tyranny of Rome. Jesus was thought to be a miracle working prophet, just like Old Testament prophetic figures who possessed the holy spirit (see M. D. Goulder, “A Poor Man’s Christology,” New Testament Studies 45 [1999]: 332-348).

(2) by the time of the Jerusalem passover events, possibly Jesus either (a) now thought of himself as the Messiah or (b) many of his followers and ordinary people in Jerusalem thought he was Messiah (whether Jesus explicitly denied this or “tacitly” accepted it and allowed it, who knows?); he was killed by the Romans as a Messianic pretender, for disturbing the peace and for treason (what the Romans called the crime of maiestas).

(3) the movement collapsed after Jesus’s death and the disciples fled back to Galilee (this appears to be the earliest tradition implied in Mark and Matthew). There they had visions of Jesus and think he has been resurrected. Later they appear in Jerusalem proclaiming this.

(4) Jesus is now proclaimed Messiah - Israel’s king - and resurrected “son of god” (that is, as the Israelite kings were “sons of god” - but not in a divine sense). Jesus is now like the exalted prophet Elijah (the OT imagines Elijah being exalted to heaven to become a heavenly being), except he died and was raised to heaven.

(5) Jesus is now a heavenly king and Messiah, who will return soon, an exalted figure and god’s chief agent.

The early Christians do call Jesus “lord” and no doubt this title began as a merely earthly title for teacher or “rabbi.” But now when used of the exalted Jesus it starts to have a quasi-blasphemous ring to it to non-Christian Jewish contemporaries, for “Lord” is also the proper title for god.

Nevertheless, Jesus is not, strictly speaking, divine for early Jewish Christians: there is only one god, and Jesus is not in the same category.

(6) I suspect that the apostle Paul creates the notion of Jesus’s pre-existence: certainly he teaches this (he needs it for his new gospel of freedom from the Mosaic law), and probably Paul assimilated Jesus to personified attributes of god like “wisdom” or the “logos” or a first-born, angelic chief agent, ideas actually common in 1st century Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism.

See the excellent book of Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord, which shows how second temple Judaism had exalted heavenly figures like personified divine attributes (wisdom, the logos), exalted patriarchs, and chief agents/angels.

Paul invents the notion of the incarnation (though not the virgin birth) but makes it clear that Jesus, as a pre-existent heavenly being, does not want equality with god (full divinity) in Philippians 2.6–8:
… Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος• καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ.

“…. Christ Jesus
who, being in the form of God did not deem it a prize to be equal with God,
but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave
born/becoming in the form of men,
and having appeared (or having been found) in shape as a man
he humbled himself, becoming obedient until death
and death on a cross.” (Phil 2.6–8).
Nevertheless, by this stage Paul’s Jesus is looking quasi-divine.

(7) by the time of the gospel of Matthew (c. 80 AD), a liberal Jewish Christian invents the virgin birth from a garbled reading of Isaiah.

(8) By the time of the gospel of John c. 90-100 AD, you have Jesus as a pre-existent, first-born god: “in the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with god, and the Word was god” (John 1:1). This is a development of Philippians 2.6–8 making explicit what Paul seems to deny (“Christ Jesus ... did not deem it a prize to be equal with God”).

(9) A few centuries later we have the Trinity, and so on. Christianity has become a religion for Greeks and Romans: Jesus is just another saviour god like Mithras, except his incarnation and death occurred in the recent past.

Jewish Christianity survives and seems to be reject Paul’s quasi-divine view of Jesus: Origen (Contra Celsum 5.65.5) tells us that “there are some sects who do not accept the epistles of the apostle Paul, such as the two kinds of Ebionites [= Jewish Christians].” And Eusebius tells us that both sects of Ebionites rejected Jesus’s pre-existence.
We also have to remember that Messianic movements could develop in extraordinary ways, even in modern times: we need only think of Sabbatai Zevi in the 1600s.

There is evidence that he actually signed letters with what was to many members of the Jewish community the most blasphemous phrase:
“the Lord, your God, Sabbatai Zevi” (Heinrich Graetz and Bella Lowy, History of the Jews, Vol. V, p. 143).
Yet Sabbatai Zevi still attracted a vast Jewish following during his lifetime.

And this was not after he died and his disciples claimed he had been resurrected, but when he lived!

Bibliography of Lexicons and Grammars for Classical and New Testament Greek

In any type of textual and historical work on earliest Christianity, it is necessary to be able to translate the original texts, which are written in New Testament (or koine) Greek. This was a demotic type of Greek that developed from classical Attic, and was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean after the time of Alexander the Great. Hence I post this bibliography below of works on all aspects of both Classical and koine Greek.

There are good surveys in David M. Schaps, Handbook for Classical Research, (Routledge, London and New York, 2011); and Fred W. Jenkins, Classical Studies: A Guide to the Reference Literature (2nd edn.; Libraries Unlimited, Westport, Conn. and London, 2006) for starting reference works.

A brief overview of the ancient Greek language can be found in S. Hawkins, 2010. “The Greek Language,” in M. Gagarin and E. Fantham (eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Volume 1. Academy-Bible. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford. pp. 356–360.

In short, these are very important works:
Danker, Frederick W. 2000. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd edn.; rev. and ed. by F. W. Danker), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
This is the standard New Testament lexicon for many English speaking scholars.

Blass, F. and A. Debrunner. 1961. A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (trans. and rev. of 9th-10th German edn. with notes of A. Debrunner by R. W. Funk), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Probably the standard New Testament grammar for many English speaking scholars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Lexicons and Dictionaries


I.1 Etymological Dictionaries
Beekes, R. S. P. 2010. Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, Leiden.

Chantraine, Pierre. 1999. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots (with a supplement), Klincksieck, Paris.

Frisk, Hjalmar, 1954–1972. Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (3 vols.), C. Winter, Heidelberg.

I.2 General and Classical Greek Lexicons
Adrados, Francisco R., Gangutia, Elvira et al. 1980– . Diccionario griego-español (6 vols.), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid.
This is still incomplete, but some information is online.

Bodoh, John J. 1984. An Index of Greek Verb Forms, Olms, Hildesheim.

Denniston, J. D. 1954. The Greek Particles, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Estienne, Henri. 1572. Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (5 vols.), Paris.
The original edition of the Thesaurus Graecae Linguae was written by Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus, 1531–1598). All cognate words are arranged under the single root word. This can now be accessed online.

Estienne, Henri. 1831–1865. Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (8 vols.; ed. Karl Wilhelm Dindorf [Guilelmus Dindorfius] and Ludwig August Dindorf [Ludovicus Dindorfius]), Ambroise Firmin Didot, Paris.
This should not be confused with the original edition by Henri Estienne. This edition was updated by scholars led by the brothers Dindorf. Entries are in alphabetical order.

Estienne, Henri. 1816–1828. Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (14 vols.; ed. A. J. Valpy), Aedibus Valpianis, London.
This updated version of Henri Estienne’s original work was done by British scholars under E. H. Barker.

Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon (9th edn.; rev. and augm. by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie, with rev. supplement), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. 2010. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (7th edn. of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon), Benediction Classics, Oxford.

Marinone, Nino. 1985. All the Greek Verbs, Duckworth, London.

Rijksbaron, Albert. 1997. New Approaches to Greek Particles, J.C. Gieben, Amsterdam.

Woodhouse, S. C. 1964. English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Greek Lexicon Project
http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/greek_lexicon/
Classicists at Cambridge are currently creating a new intermediate Ancient Greek-English lexicon. It will be available through the Perseus Project at Tufts University as well.

I.3 New Testament Greek Lexicons
Bauer, Walter. 1979. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (2nd edn.; rev. and aug. by F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker from Walter Bauer’s 5th edn.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
This is superceded by Danker 2000.

Danker, Frederick W. 2000. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd edn.; rev. and ed. by F. W. Danker), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
This is the standard New Testament lexicon for many English speaking scholars.

Lampe, G. W. H. 1961. A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Moulton, James Hope and George Milligan. 1952. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament: Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources, Hodder and Stoughton, London.

II. Grammars

II.1 General and Attic/Classical Greek
Betts, Gavin and Alan Henry. 1993. Ancient Greek: A Complete Course, NTC Pub. Group, Lincolnwood, Ill.
[the earlier edn. of Gavin and Henry 2003]

Betts, Gavin and Alan Henry. 2003. Ancient Greek (new edn.), Hodder Headline, London.

Buck, C. D. 1968. The Greek Dialects. Grammar, Selected Inscriptions, Glossary (new edn.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Cooper, Guy L. and K. W. Krueger. 1998-2002. Attic Greek Prose Syntax (2 vols.), University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Cooper, Guy L. and K. W. Krueger. 2002. Greek Syntax: Early Greek Poetic and Herodotean Syntax (2 vols.), University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
To be used with caution.

Dik, Helma. 1995. Word Order in Ancient Greek: A Pragmatic Account of Word Order Variation in Herodotus, Gieben, Amsterdam.

Dover, K. J. 2000. Greek Word Order, Bristol Classical Press, London.

Gignac, Francis T. 1976–1981. A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (2 vols.), Istituto editoriale cisalpino-La goliardica, Milan.

Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau. 1900–1911. Syntax of Classical Greek from Homer to Demosthenes (2 vols.), American Book Company, New York and Chicago.

Goodwin, William Watson. 1912. Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb, Macmillan, London.

Goodwin, William Watson. 1965 [1889]. Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (rev. edn.), Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, London and New York.

Goodwin, William Watson. 1997. Greek Grammar (repr. of the 1894 rev. edn.), Bristol Classical Press, London.

Kühner, Raphael and Bernhard Gerth. 1955. Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache (4th edn. based on the 3rd; 2 vols.), Hahn, Hannover.

Mastronarde, Donald J. 1993. Introduction to Attic Greek, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Mayser, Edwin. 1970. Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit: mit Einschluss der gleichzeitigen Ostraka und der in Agypten verfassten inschriften (2nd edn.; 2 v. in 6), W. de Gruyter, Berlin.

Morwood, James. 2001. Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Pratt, Louise H. 2010. The Essentials of Greek Grammar: A Reference for Intermediate Readers of Attic Greek, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Rijksbaron, Albert. 2006. The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek: An Introduction (3rd edn.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Schwyzer, Eduard and Albert Debrunner. 1988. Griechische Grammatik: auf der Grundlage von Karl Brugmanns Griechischer Grammatik (5th edn.), Beck, Munich.

Smyth, Herbert Weir. 1984 [1916]. Greek Grammar (rev. edn.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Thompson, G. S. 1999 [1955]. Greek Prose Usage: A Companion to Greek Prose Composition, Bristol Classical Press, Bristol.

Threatte, Leslie. 1980–1996. The Grammar of Attic Inscriptions, W. de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.

II.2 Comparative Grammars
Buck, Carl. 1962. Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, University Press, Chicago.
Now out of date.

Sihler, Andrew L. 2008. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
The best modern treatment.

II.3 New Testament/Koine Greek
Blass, F. and A. Debrunner. 1961. A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (trans. and rev. of 9th-10th German edn. with notes of A. Debrunner by R. W. Funk), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Probably the standard New Testament grammar for many English speaking scholars.

Blass, F. and A. Debrunner. 2001. Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch (18th edn.; ed. Friedrich Rehkopf), Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Göttingen.

Brooks, James A. and Winbery, Carlton L. 1994. A Morphology of New Testament Greek: A Review and Reference Grammar, University Press of America, Lanham, Md.

Burton, Ernest de Witt, 1973. Syntax of the Moods and Tenses in New Testament Greek (3rd edn.), Clark, Edinburgh.

Fanning, Buist M. 1990. Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Funk, Robert Walter. 1973. A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek (2nd edn.), Society of Biblical Literature, Missoula, Mont.

McKay, K. L. 1992. “Time and Aspect in New Testament Greek,” Novum Testamentum 34.3: 209-228.

McKay, K. L. 1994. A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek: An Aspectual Approach, P. Lang, New York.

Moule, C. F. D. 1975. An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek (2nd edn. 6th impression), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Moulton, James Hope. 1976 [1863–1917]. A Grammar of New Testament Greek (4 vols.), Clark, Edinburgh.
An older but respected standard New Testament grammar.

Mounce, William D. 1993. The Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament, Zondervan Pub. House, Grand Rapids, Mich.

Mounce, William D. 1994. The Morphology of Biblical Greek: A Companion to Basics of Biblical Greek and the Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament, Zondervan Pub. House, Grand Rapids, MI.

Porter, Stanley E. 1993. Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament: With Reference to Tense and Mood, P. Lang, New York.

Porter, Stanley E. 1994. Idioms of the Greek New Testament (2nd edn.), Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield.

Robertson, A. T. 1934. A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (4th edn.), Broadman Press, Nashville.

Robertson, A. T. and W. Hersey Davis. 1977. A New Short Grammar of the Greek New Testament (10th edn.), Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Mich.

Stagg, Frank. 1972. “The Abused Aorist,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91.2: 222-231.

Wallace, Daniel B. 1996. Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Mich.
An intermediate grammar for students.

III. History of the Greek Language


Bakker, Egbert J. 2010. A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester.

Christidis, A.-F. 2007. A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, (rev. and exp. trans.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Adrados, Francisco Rodríguez. 2005. A History of the Greek Language: From its Origins to the Present (trans. Francisca Rojas del Canto), Brill, Leiden.

Palmer, Leonard R. 1995. The Greek Language, Bristol Classical Press, London.

IV. Greek Pronunciation

IV.I Classical Pronunciation
Allen, William Sidney. 1978. Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek (2nd edn.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Now superseded by Allen 1987.

Allen, William Sidney. 1987. Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek (3rd edn.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
The most recent edition.

Sommerstein, Alan H. 1973. The Sound Pattern of Ancient Greek, Blackwell, Oxford.

IV.2 Pronunciation of New Testament/Koine Greek
Christidis, A.-F. 2007. A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, (rev. and exp. trans.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 599ff.

Teodorsson, S. T. 1977. The Phonology of Ptolemaic Koine, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Goeteborg.

Rife, J. M. 1982. “Greek Language of the NT,” in Geoffrey W. Bromiley (ed.), The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. E–J (rev. edn.), Paternoster, Grand Rapids and Exeter 1982. 568–573, at pp. 568–569.


V. Accentuation

Chandler, Henry W. 1881. A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation (2nd edn.), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Lukinovich, Alessandra and Steinrück, Martin. 2009. Introduction à l’accentuation grecque ancienne, Georg, Chêne-Bourg.

Postgate, John P. 1924. A Short Guide to the Accentuation of Ancient Greek, University Press of Liverpool, London.

Probert, Philomen. 2003. A New Short Guide to the Accentuation of Ancient Greek, Bristol Classical, Bristol.

Probert, Philomen. 2006. Ancient Greek Accentuation: Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.

Voyles, J. B. 1974. “Ancient Greek Accentuation,” Glotta 52: 65–91.

VI. Web Resources

New Testament Greek Grammar Books: A List of Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced N.T. Greek Grammars
http://www.ntgreek.org/books/grambook.htm


Extended Bibliography
Pronunciation
Brodotskaya, Anastassia. 1997. “Notes to the Reconstruction of the Ancient Greek Pronunciation offered by S. G. Daitz,” Hyperboreus 3.2: 353–361.

Daitz S. G. 1984. The Pronunciation and Reading of Ancient Greek. A Practical Guide, Norton, Guilford, CT. (20 pp. 2 cassettes).

Daitz, Stephen G. 2001–2002. “Further Notes on the Pronunciation of Ancient Greek,” Classical World 95.4: 411–412.

Dillon, Matthew. 2000-2001. “The Erasmian Pronunciation of Ancient Greek: A New Perspective,” Classical World 94.4: 323–334.

Else, Gerald F. 1967. “The Pronunciation of Classical Names and Words in English,” Classical Journal 62.5: 210–214.

Hatch, Norman L. 1969. “The Pronunciation of Aeschylus, Etc., in English,” Classical Journal 64.5: 213–215.

Miller, Walter. 1935. “The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin Proper Names in English,” Classical Journal 30.6: 325–334.

Skiles, Jonah W. D. 1948. “The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin,” Classical Journal 43.4: 222.

Grammar
De Jong, Jan R. and Laan, Nancy M. “A Grammar for Greek Verse,” in Research in Humanities Computing. 4, Selected papers from the ALLC/AHC Conference, Christ Church, Oxford, April 1992. 171–184 (details on a metrical analysis computer program).

Funk, R. W. 1973. A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek, I: Sight and sound. Nominal System. Verbal System, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA.

Gignac, F. T. 1970. “The Language of the Non-Literary Greek Papyri,” in D. H. Samuel (ed.), Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Papyrology, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 12–17 August 1968, Hakkert, Toronto and Amsterdam. 139–152.

Rydbeck, L. 1975. “What Happened to New Testament Greek Grammar after Albert Debrunner?,” New Testament Studies 21: 424–427.

Wahlgren, Staffan. 2002. “Towards a Grammar of Byzantine Greek,” Symbolae Osloenses 77: 201–204.

Wouters, A. 1977. “A Greek Grammar and a Graeco-Latin lexicon on St. Paul (Rom., 2 Cor., Gal., Eph.). A Note on E. A. Lowe, C.L.A., Supplement N° 1683,” Scriptorium 31: 240–242.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

A Bibliography of Recent Work on Resurrection in First Century Judaism

I have compiled a bibliography below on recent work on the history of the idea of resurrection in Judaism of the early Roman Empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avery-Peck, Alan J. 2009. “Resurrection of the Body in Early Rabbinic Judaism,” in T. Nicklas, F. V. Reiterer, and J. Verheyden (eds), The Human Body in Death and Resurrection, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 243–266.

Collins, Adela. 1993. “The Empty Tomb in the Gospel According to Mark,” in Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint (eds.), Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, In. 107–140.

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 2009. “Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark,” in T. K. Seim and J. Okland (eds.), Metamorphoses. Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 41–58.

Collins, John J. 2007. “Conceptions of Afterlife in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in M. Labahn und M. Lang (eds.), Lebendige Hoffnung – ewiger Tod?!: Jenseitsvorstellungen im Hellenismus, Judentum und Christentum, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig. 103–125.

Collins, John J. 2009. “The Angelic Life,” in Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Okland (eds.), Metamorphoses. Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 291–310.

Flusser, David. 2000. “Resurrection and Angels in Rabbinic Judaism, Early Christianity, and Qumran,” in Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam (eds.), The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years After Their Discovery. Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997, Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem. 568–572.

Habermas, Gary R. 2005. “Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What are Critical Scholars Saying?” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3.2: 135–153.

Hogeterp, Albert L.A. 2009. “Belief in Resurrection and its Religious Settings in Qumran and the New Testament,” in Florentino García Martínez (ed.), Echoes from the Caves: Qumran and the New Testament, Brill, Leiden and Boston. 299–320.

Hutter, Manfred. 2009. “The Impurity of the Corpse (nasa) and the Future Body (tan i pasen): Death and Afterlife in Zoroastrianism,” in Tobias Nicklas, Friedrich V. Reiterer, and Joseph Verheyden (eds.), The Human Body in Death and Resurrection, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 13–26.

Labahn, M. and M. Lang (eds.), Lebendige Hoffnung – ewiger Tod?!: Jenseitsvorstellungen im Hellenismus, Judentum und Christentum, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig.

Lehtipuu, Outi. 2009. “‘Flesh and Blood Cannot Inherit the Kingdom of God:’ The Transformation of the Flesh in the Early Christian Debates Concerning Resurrection,” in Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Okland (eds.), Metamorphoses. Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 147–168.

Martin, Michael. 2011. “Skeptical Perspectives on Jesus’ Resurrection,” in Delbert Burkett (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, Wiley – Blackwell, Malden, MA. 285–300.

Nickelsburg, George W. E. 2006. Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity (exp. edn.), Trinity Pr. International, Valley Forge, Pa.

Osborne, Grant R. 2009. “Jesus’ Empty Tomb and his Appearance in Jerusalem,” in Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb (eds.), Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus. A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. 775–824.

Popovic, Mladen. 2009. “Bones, Bodies and Resurrection in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Tobias Nicklas, Friedrich V. Reiterer, and Joseph Verheyden (eds.), The Human Body in Death and Resurrection, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 221–242.

Segal, Alan F. 1998. “Paul’s Thinking about Resurrection in its Jewish Context,” New Testament Studies 44.3: 400–419.

Setzer, Claudia J. 2004. Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition, Brill, Leiden and Boston, Mass.

Van der Kooij, Arie. 2007. “Ideas about Afterlife in the Septuagint,” in M. Labahn und M. Lang (eds.), Lebendige Hoffnung – ewiger Tod?!: Jenseitsvorstellungen im Hellenismus, Judentum und Christentum, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig. 87–102.

Wright, Nicholas Thomas. 2003. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, London.