Painting Fakes

I thought it would be interesting to write a series of reviews on some of the "lives of Jesus" that I've read over the last few years.  One of the reasons I thought it would be interesting is because there are so many.  This photo is only the ones on my shelf.  There's more in the local library plus a couple on my computer.  Another reason is that they all say something different - often radically different.  Why that's interesting is that they're all looking at the same evidence.  There are essentially three sources for a "life of Jesus".  There are the written gospels, including the four in the Bible plus a number of non-canonical versions of the story.  There are the references to Jesus and to early Christians in contemporary Roman and Jewish sources.  And finally, there is contextual information - documentary and archaeological information about life in Palestine in the first century which can throw light on the written materials.  Two th

Happy New Year, everyone. I've been thinking for a while now about something that happened in school when I was about nine or ten.  One of my classmates was having some problems with his writing, and our teacher decided that he wasn't trying hard enough and a bit of public humiliation might sharpen him up.  So he stood him up and read out one of his essays to the class in a tone of biting sarcasm.  The rest of us squirmed in embarassment, torn between feeling sorry for him and being glad it wasn't us.  He may have cried, I can't remember that detail.  Nor can I remember the actual content of the essay but I clearly remember the problem.  It went something like this. "I walked down the street and there I was a red car.  I saw very excited to see it." You will imediately understand what was going on.  My classmate had dyslexia.  He mixed up his was and saw because he couldn't tell the difference.  It wouldn't matter how hard he tried, and how much

Just before Christmas we had great footage of chaos in European airports as snowstorms left travellers stranded in mid-Christmas journey.  Yesterday we had a lucky escape from the Australian version as storms saw planes turned back from Brisbane airport all morning.  Fortunately we flew in the evening and were only an hour late, but there was chaos in Sydney airport as passengers queued for hours and airline staff desperately pleaded for Sydney residents to go home and try again the next day. The British government is talking about whether it might have to upgrade its airports to make them snow-proof.  I don't think you can do the same for tropical storms.  There's no protection from wind, thunder and lightening except to stay indoors and wait it out.  If it blows hard enough even that doesn't help. In any case, I wonder how temporary this will all be.  It's not too many years ago that we would spend 24 hours on a bus to Sydney because the plane was so expensive.  N

It's nearly Christmas.  Most of us are getting ready to hang out with our extended family, while those of us who are a long way from family are most likely lining up surrogates to stave off the loneliness.  This has come to be what Christmas is about for most Australians.  So with that in mind, here's a little Christmas gem from Kenneth Bailey's marvellous book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes . In our traditional view of the Christmas story, based on Luke 2:1-7, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethelehem.  When they arrive, however, the inn is full and they are forced to sleep out in the stable, where Jesus is born.  The story has become a symbol of Jesus' poverty and his status as a social outcast.  In Bailey's view it is also very European, and is a very unlikely scenario in the context of Middle Eastern culture.  Firstly, Joseph was a descendent of David, going to the City of David.  Hence he almost certainly had relatives in town and these would have been hono

For my last birthday my daughter gave me a selection  of booklets from the Penguin "Great Ideas" series.  They're extended extracts (100 or so pages each) from great works of literature or philosophy.  In my little pile are extracts from Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky and this selection of essays by George Orwell.  Both Penguin and my daughter know me well - a full volume of Kant would wait on my shelf for years, but I can promise you the 100 page version will be read pretty soon.  They're also good for plane flights.  I read about half the Orwell on a flight to Sydney last week.   Orwell would have been a great blogger - he doesn't waste words, he draws you into the world he describes, he is prepared to live his art not just read about it, and he is interested in a wide range of things.   Here's something I thought was especially clever.  One of the essays is called The Art of Donald McGill.   McGill was a designer of comic postcards and the

Everyone who's on Facebook knows (I hope) that anything you post can become public property.  You may think that your privacy setting will protect you, but if you'd be embarassed to see that photo in your local newspaper, then don't post it. What's clear from the unfolding Wikileaks saga is that the same applies to diplomatic correspondence.  You may think your cables are confidential and sent through a secure network, but electronic data is so easily transportable that you have to expect that sooner or later it will get out. This is part of the reason why the focus on Julian Assange is misplaced.  You will have noticed that even though Assange is in prison, the leaks are still being published.  The internet is a dispersed medium, definitively a network, and if you cut off one person from it you damage that person, but the network just finds another pathway.  In response to the push in the US and elsewhere to prosecute Assange, many jounalists have pointed out tha

On the ABC News this evening we heard the Republican leader in the US Senate declaring that Julian Assange is a "hi-tech terrorist" and should be treated as an "enemy combatant".  Of course since we've been fighting a "war on terror" it's become a lot easier to say such things.  But just who is Assange and his Wiki-leaks army terrorising? Well, although new bombshells are exploding every day they seem to be entirely of the metaphorical sort, and I don't recall anyone ever being killed by a metaphor.  Of couse, it's possible that amongst the material there is confidential information which might compromise the safety of, say, an intelligence operative or informer, and this would be of some concern.  Australian Observer , a former senior Defence and Foreign Affairs official, strongly doubts it - the security of such contacts is much tighter than that. It seems that the main people being terrorised are diplomats and politicians, quaking i