Painting Fakes

While I'm on the subject of The Jesus Seminar , the various members of the Seminar are a great illustration of how it is possible to start at the same point and yet end up somewhere radically different.  Enter Marcus Borg , Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, prominent member of The Jesus Seminar and advocate of "progressive Christianity". Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time was published in 1994, just before the Jesus Seminar publication The Five Gospels (with whose contents Borg was intimately familiar) and two years before Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus .  Borg shares with Funk the basic presuppositions that drove the work of The Jesus Seminar - that the gospels are layered works in which it is necessary to peel back later additions to arrive at the true Jesus; that the earliest layers are those involving Jesus' distinctive parables and aphorisms, while later layers include his references to himse...

Enough of this frivolity!  After the bizarre speculations of Thiering and Pullman it's almost a relief to come to something as scholarly as Robert W Funk's Honest to Jesus. Robert Funk was a serious American scholar, lifelong academic and biblical historian.  His biggest claim to fame is as the driving force behind The Jesus Seminar , the work of which I have already alluded to in discussing James Robinson .  However he is also the founder and during his life the director of the Westar Institute , "a member-supported, non-profit research and educational institute founded in 1986 and dedicated to the advancement of religious literacy. Westar's twofold mission is to foster collaborative research in religious studies and to communicate the results of the scholarship of religion to a broad, non-specialist public" as it's own website says. The first and most famous (or notorious) publication of The Jesus Seminar, edited by Funk, was The Five Gospels , a critica...

Of course in writing about politicians who tried to delay their own funerals , I was thinking of Australians.  In actual fact it's pretty hard for an Australian politician to delay their own demise, what with free and fair elections and all. But how could I have ignored the world's best practice examples of the art from other countries?  Of course we've recently seen Hosni Mubarak deposed, a fading old man trying to hang on for another six months against the will of the people.  But I find myself wondering - how did the army commanders, who kept him in place for the past 30 years, suddenly become the heroes of democracy by deposing him and dissolving the parliament?  The king is dead, long live...? Others seem more able to escape.  Somehow Robert Mugabe, despite being even older than Mubarak and having caused economic collapse and widespread starvation in one of the most fertile countries in Africa, is still hanging onto the reins of power in Zimbabwe a...

It's often said of chronically tardy people like me that we would be late for our own funeral.  What I've always wondered is what could be wrong with this.  Politeness to ones friends and family can be taken too far.  After all, if its OK for the bride to be late for her own wedding, why shouldn't the guest of honour be late for that other great family occasion?  And what would be so bad if you missed it altogether?  No worse, surely, than Finnegan waking up in the middle of his. However, there's a broader sense in which we all need to learn to depart at the right time.  I often talk to organisations about this.  It's called "succession planning".  If you are a leader in an organisation - say, the President - then you should groom a successor, and then when they're ready to step up, you should step down and let them get on with it.  This ensures that the organisation doesn't go stale, and that new ideas and ways of doing things can flourish...

Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ wasn't part of my original plan for reviewing Lives of Jesus.  It just leapt off the library shelf and into my hand, so I had to take it home and read it.  Spooky! Pullman is, of course, not a noted Bible scholar but a famous novelist, best known for his fantasy writing.  He is also known for his distinct lack of enthusiasm for organised religion.  So of course he is the perfect choice for a secular publisher to commission to write a book about Jesus.  As Pullman himself says , "no-one has the right to go through their life without being shocked". Having read a lot of Lives of Jesus, I have to say that I wasn't as shocked as Pullman may have been hoping.  More bemused.  Pullman is in fact rather timid compared to, say, Jim Crace's daring fictional treatment of the subject in Quarantine .   In general, he has stuck fairly closely to the structure of the life of Jesus as outlined in th...

Some of my Facebook friends (or relatives to be more accurate) have been discussing British Prime Minister David Cameron's recent comments on the failure of "State multiculturalism".  Both Cameron's views, and those of my friends and family, are fascinating and enlightening.  Cameron particularly has some good ideas about building local cross-cultural relationships and promoting the ideals of democracy and free speech but for some reason seems to think this is different from multiculturalism.  Nor has he grappled with the implications of "liberal values".  It's easy to be liberal when everyone agrees, the challenge comes when someone spouts an idea you find offensive - how strong will your liberal values be then?  As an evaluator of social programs I also want to ask how the failure was judged.  What are the objectives of multiculturalism, and what evidence is there of its success or failure to acheive these objectives?  So often we use...

Sunnybank State School had a large collection of Readers Digest magazines.  They seemed to me to be already old by the time I read them in the early 1970s.  I was one of the most advanced readers in my class, so I spent plenty of time immersed in their pages while other classmates were still struggling with basic reading tasks like distinguishing was from saw . It was a strange world to inhabit and I still carry little bits of it around with me.  Many of the stories were childhood memoirs, written in the 1950s and 1960s about a time which seemed both harder and more innocent.  Children lived idyllic lives in small town America.  Their fathers went to work while their mothers stayed home and baked johnnycakes.  We never knew exactly what a johnnycake* was but this didn't prevent my friends from calling me "Cake" in the latter years of primary school. I suppose the stories were meant to strengthen our moral fibre, and God knows we needed it....

After the heady intellectualism of Schweitzer and Robinson , it is almost a relief to review something as plainly absurd as Barbara Thiering's Jesus the Man. Barbara Thiering is an Australian biblical scholar whose speciality is the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  For those who have spent the past 50 years in isolation, the Scrolls (discovered in the 1950s) are the large and intensely fascinating library of a strict Jewish Essene religious community based at Qumran on the banks of the Dead Sea.  As well as manuscripts of various Old Testament books, the documents include unique and previously unknown writings of the community itself, many referring to a struggle between a character called the Teacher of Righteousness (the community's leader/hero) and his opponent dubbed the Wicked Priest or Man of a Lie. Thiering's idea is that the events of the Gospels and the life of Jesus describe the other side of this conflict, and that Jesus is the Man of a Lie.  To arrive...

I've previously mentioned my enjoyment of Richard Beck's Experimental Theology blog.  His latest post deals with the idea of "theological worlds" which he takes from Paul Jones.  I haven't read Jones' book, but I love the idea.  To summarise his summary, each person has their own obsessio, the question that drives their life and keeps them awake at night, the core problem that they need to solve.  They also have (or at least need) their own epiphania, the revelation or source of hope that helps them answer their obsessio .  Each person's obsessio is their own and they need to find their own epiphania to answer it.  The interplay of these two creates their "theological world".  In traditional Protestantism, the dominant obsessio is about guilt and sin, and hence the dominant epiphania  is the experience of God's grace and forgiveness, expressed through Jesus' sacrifice for us.  This is the dominant theological world of our Prote...

James M Robinson's A New Quest of the Historical Jesus is not so much a life of Jesus as an essay about the possibility of writing such a life.  It is also a serious scholarly work, which means I am completely unqualified to make any judgement on it.  However, because it is a reflection on the possibility of the Quest, and because it was written in 1959, 50 years after Schweitzer's work and before the more populist Lives I will review from here on, it provides a useful bridge between these works. Robinson is an American bible scholar but recieved part of his theological education in Germany and at the time of writing this book was immersed in German theology.  His starting point is that Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus marked the end of a stream of historical research.  This stream was based on a Enlightenment view of history as an objective pursuit of "what really happened".  While Schweitzer critiqued the various attempts at this task...

The explosion of "new folk" music is definitely a Good Thing.  My latest love along this line is Noah and the Whale's The First Days of Spring.  The album is a little on the gloomy side, being (what else?) a series of songs about lost love and the associated despair.  Cue lots of slow songs about loneliness and depression, before the final song climbs out to a kind of acceptance and hope. But now I'm free, Now I'm free, Now I'm free from all your pain. Well you have only let me down you have only, let me down but my door is always open yeah my door is always open. Like the album title says, the first days of spring.  At first listen the whole thing seems gloomy and a tad boring.  Repeated listens get you cued into the clever arrangements, the lush orchestration and memorable hooks, as well as the lyrical movement from despair towards hope. What's really got me buzzing, though, is that in the dead centre of this gloom and despair is an abso...

We moved back home on Friday, power reconnected.  Phone has been restored this afternoon along with our internet service and so except for an incredibly clean and empty downstairs to our house, we are close to being back to what passes for normal around here.  Our street, though, is eerily quiet.  The moderately loud neighbours on the upside haven't returned - perhaps they never will, being tenants.  The same with the tenants next to us on the down side with their young children and the dad with chronic sinus problems - they lost almost all their possessions and they're tenants too.  The man with the dogs next to them has lived here all his life and went through the 1974 flood here, so I guess he'll be back eventually but he had water almost to his roof.  The family over the road are having problems with their insurance company which is delaying their electrical repairs.  The shopping centre is still closed.  I'm guessing it could be months befo...