Gegraptai

I just want to throw this out there — I’m very grateful that WordPress has a spam filter for comments. I just deleted 28 disgusting spam comments from the queue, and I’m really glad they never made it onto my blog.

This is just too funny not to pass on.

Thanks to Ben Witherington for finding it first.

Anybody out there have any experience with GRE test-prep materials? Which ones are best? Or are they even worth it?

I just came across this article at the blog of Nijay Gupta, a PhD student at Durham University. It’s subjective, as is any advice concerning getting into PhD programs, but it is the most helpful, informative, and thorough bit of information on the subject that I’ve come across. Check it out!

Here are a few things I’ve come across recently that may be of interest to someone else, in no particular order or organization:

• A fine article by Bishop Wright in Christianity Today, “Heaven Is Not Our Home.” It is, more or less, a summary of the his latest book (which I’m currently reading), Surprised By Hope, which, I might note, is so far the best book I’ve read in a while.
• I just came across the Pandora Radio the other day. Enter an artist or song you like, and it will play music that sounds similar. I heard about this thing a few years ago, and forgot about it. Now that I’ve found it again, I’m hooked!
• Anybody seen Perseus 4.0 yet? I like it! Now, if they can just somehow make the site faster…
• An interesting post by Randall Buth at Evangelical Textual Criticism on TC in synoptic studies and the case of ευθυς.
• Eric at Archaic Christianity has found out that the University of Wales Lampeter offers a distance education graduate program in Classics. Very useful information. I wonder if I could take a course or two in Latin as a non degree-seeker…
• Chris Tilling has just posted a list of academic lectures dealing with biblical studies which are available (for free, I take it) on iTunes.
  
• Frankly, I’m beginning to get tired of hearing about the Presidential candidates all day, day in and day out, in every branch of the media. But this article from the Onion really cracked me up.
  
• The latest Biblical Studies Carnival is here.

While I was in Greenville, NC earlier this week for Bill Dever’s lecture at ECU (which was quite good, by the way), I went by Barnes & Noble to kill some time and picked up N. T. Wright’s latest book, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I read Part I yesterday and hope to finish reading it and blog my reactions before Reading Week is over. Unfortunately, I have just been reminded that I have two mid-terms to complete by next week, and I have yet to translate from Thucydides (which takes forever!) for my meeting on Tuesday, so don’t be too surprised if I don’t get around to finishing before the week ends.

One thing that I like about Wright’s work is that it is accessible—he writes in such a way that is understandable and engaging to most lay people, yet without sacrificing depth of scholarship. His books are thus more leisurely to read (if that is the right word) than many more technical yet not more important books. Surprised By Hope is no different; and as I begin, I am quickly coming to understand why some are calling it Wright’s best and most important book yet.

Chapter 1: “All Dressed Up and No Place to Go?”

Death, ironically, is a part of life. It will happen to us all sooner or later. But what, exactly, happens to human beings after we die? Is there any hope beyond this life? If one was to survey even a handful of people on this matter, I imagine one would find that confusion abounds—not only among Christians, but also among those of other religions and even those of no religion at all. Three views dominate, none of which corresponds to orthodox Christianity: (1) Annihilation, that is, the complete denial of any future life; (2) Reincarnation, which Wright rightly points out permeates more of our world than we may realize via New Age thought and the like; and (3) Spiritualism, that is, the belief in ghosts and the possibility of communication with the dead.

So, Wright offers two questions which will shape the book and, he hopes, clear up the “muddle” (which, I’m learning, is a key word in this book) concerned with the orthodox Christian belief of the future hope: First, What is the ultimate Christian hope? And second, What hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? Wright knows that many answer the first in terms of “going to heaven,” and thus consider the second question irrelevant and unrelated to the first. But, Wright responds,

if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth,” and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is answering the other. (5)

Chapter 2: “Puzzled About Paradise?”

Next time you go to a funeral, pay attention and you will likely see just how “muddled” people’s understandings about death often are. Most likely, you will hear people saying things such as, “He’s in a better place now,” as though death is a good thing, an occasion that ought to be celebrated because the deceased has left this dreadful world and his decrepit body and has moved on to a disembodied spiritual bliss. “One could put it like this: if someone came to these funeral services with no idea of the classic Jewish and Christian teaching on the subject, the funeral services would do little to enlighten them and plenty to mislead them or confirm them in their existing muddle” (25).

Somehow, Christian thought has oscillated between seeing death as a vile enemy and a welcome friend. But this is not what the New Testament teaches. Death, in fact, is an enemy—but it is a defeated enemy. The central New Testament belief about death, according to Wright, is

that at the last, death will be not simply redefined but defeated. God’s intention is not to let death have its way with us. If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies [and "go to heaven"], then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of  death itself, seen from one angle. (15)

Wright shows how the effects of this muddled understanding plays out in the hymns we sing, the Christian year, and funerals. I won’t provide examples for the sake of time and space, but the examples Wright gives of hymns are especially enlightening, though in a few examples I fail to see any explicitly bad theology, and I wonder if Wright might be drawing things out of some of these hymns that are in fact not there. But that is not terrifically important or relevant.

Wright argues that Evangelicals gave up believing in the urgent imperative to improve society about the same time they gave up believing strongly in the resurrection and instead settled for a disembodied heaven.

Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.” … If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth. (25)

He’s right, I think.

Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting

This is the best chapter in Part I, in which Wright elegantly and eloquently summarizes his famous and massive study The Resurrection of the Son of God. He begins with a tale about the two great philosophers Wittgenstein and Popper, whose debate one evening at Cambridge fell apart when things got heated and Wittgenstein pulled out the fire poker, waved it around, and then left the room. Rumors quickly went around the world, and no one knows precisely what happened that night, though everyone agrees that the meeting took place and that Wittgenstein waved the poker around and then left abruptly.  Wright’s point, of course, is that the same is true of the resurrection accounts. They may not agree on all the details, but they do agree on this: something happened, and the Christians called it resurrection.

As far as the ancient pagan world was concerned, there was no such thing as the resurrection of the dead. For the Jews, resurrection was something that would happen collectively in the last day, and no one had done so or would do so until then. Within either of these contexts in the ancient world, though, the word “resurrection” was never used to speak of life after death; it was used to denote new bodily life after life after death. (The key word here is “bodily.” Always.) So,

when the early Christians said that Jesus had risen from the dead, they knew they were saying that something had happened to him that had happened to nobody else and that nobody had expected to happen. They were not talking about Jesus’s soul going into heavenly bliss. Nor were they saying, confusedly, that Jesus had now become divine. That is simply not what the words meant. (37)

And here is Wright’s understanding of the early Christian future hope: “the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world” (41). And while this belief is, relative to paganism, as Jewish as you can get, it is quite new in seven ways:

1.  There is no spectrum of belief about life after death among Christians. Apart from a few minor debates, Christians were overwhelmingly unanimous on the nature of resurrection until the late second century.
2. In second-temple Judaism, resurrection is important, but not that important; but in early Christianity, resurrection moved from the circumference to the center.
3. In Judaism, it was always left somewhat vague as to what sort of body the resurrected will possess; but in early Christianity it is clear that the body will be a transformed body.
4. The resurrection has split into two: first Jesus, and then God’s people at the end of history.
5. God has called his people to anticipate the final resurrection in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.
6. Metaphorically, resurrection no longer indicated the renewal of Israel, but the renewal of human beings in general.
7. Resurrection became associated with messiahship.

Chapter 4: “The Strange Story of Easter”

Wright presents four features of the accounts of Easter in the canonical gospels which, he suggests, compel us to take them seriously as very early accounts and not as later inventions:

1. All four accounts are strangely silent with respect to biblical quotations. Since all four evangelists have drawn heavily upon biblical quotation and allusion up to the point of Jesus’ death and burial, their silence in the Easter stories must indicate that these stories go back to very early oral tradition which was set firmly in the memories of storytellers before there was any time for biblical reflection.
2. Women, who were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world, are presented as the principal witnesses to the Resurrection. This is an apologetically embarrassing element that would certainly not be present if the Easter stories had been invented.
3. The portrait of the risen Jesus painted by the evangelists is quite unlike the kind of resurrected body predicted by the biblical texts. “No speculative theology had laid this trail for the evangelists to follow” (55).
4. None of the four accounts mention the future Christian hope. Here I will let Wright speak for himself, because his words are too potent to paraphrase:

Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is life after death,” let alone, “Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die.” Nor even, in a more authentic first-century Christian way, do they say, “Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised from the dead after the sleep of death.” No. Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world’s true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God’s new creation has begun—and we, his followers, have a job to do! (56)

Had the Easter accounts of the gospels been later inventions, we would surely expect for them to mention the final resurrection of all God’s people. “They don’t,” Wright says, “because they weren’t” (57).

I’ve been really busy for the past few weeks, which is why my blog has been neglected. But, my big project for Archaeology class, which is what I’ve been spending every minute of my time working on lately, is now finally finished. Also, it’s Reading Week.

So, I am bound and determined to post a few things this week now that I have a bit of free time, including continuing my reading of Ignatius’ Epistle to the Romans. Keep an eye out this week.