Antiquitopia

I just saw that Larry Hurtado has a good-length initial review of Bart Ehrman's new book, How Jesus Became God , on his blog here .  He says he will have a fuller review in Christian Century.  I haven't read Ehrman's newest, but the review seemed fairly balanced.

I must have passed this passage by before, but today it jumped out at me: according to Hippolytus Ulysses (a.k.a. Odysseus), the trickster par excellence (though Jacob gives him a run for his money) is a model for the Christian resisting the temptation of the siren call of heresy.  He writes (using the most available, ANF translation): The pupils of these men, when they perceive the doctrines of the heretics to be like unto the ocean when tossed into waves by violence of the winds, ought to sail past in quest of the tranquil haven.  For a sea of this description is both infested with wild beasts and difficult of navigation, like, as we may say, the Sicilian (Sea), in which the legend reports were Cyclops, and Charybdis, and Scylla, and the rock of the Sirens.  Now, the poets of the Greeks allege that Ulysses sailed through (this channel), adroitly using (to his own purpose) the terribleness of these strange monsters.  For the savage cruelty (in the aspect) of these...

I have known for a while now that David M. Carr's 2011 book, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible , included most likely the very first citation of anything I wrote - in this case, my dissertation.  Luckily, this past year, someone bought me a copy of the book (it is a bit pricy), and I have been slowly working through it.  I finally got the part where he discusses the implications of my work on the relationship between the Sabbath and the Sanctuary (in the Hebrew Bible, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and the Epistle to the Hebrews) specifically for how I characterize the Holiness materials.  He writes: Consider, for example, the strong focus in H materials (as in Ezekiel) on Sabbath that has been outlined with particular clarity in a recent dissertation by Jared Calaway.  Resonating with similar Sabbath foci in Ezekiel, Exod 31:12-17 makes the Sabbath "covenant" a central focus of the P Sinai episode, applying to it concepts of profanation previously reserved f...

So, for Mother's Day, we've watched several musicals in a row.  One of them was Chicago.  In it, Billy Flynn, the unscrupulous lawyer who can get your off on murder (played by Richard Gere in the film version) says: "I don't mean to toot my own horn, but if Jesus Christ lived in Chicago today, and he had come to me and he had five thousand dollars, let's just say things would have turned out differently." Indeed!