Painting Fakes

Bart Ehrman is that most valuable type of person, a serious scholar who loves to explain his complex field in plain English for non-specialists.  He has an extremely fancy academic title - the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina.  He is an expert on early Christian texts, including the New Testament and various other early writings that were not included in the canon of scripture. His spiritual journey is like that of so many sceptical Biblical scholars and writers.  He started on the path of Christian fundamentalism, heading off to Moody Bible Institute straight from high school to study scripture, then wending his way through the slightly less conservative Wheaton College before finally heading for the quite sceptical faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary.  Along the way he became adept at Greek and Hebrew and developed a passion for analysing original texts of ancient documents. I've been reading his 2005 book on

I really enjoyed the recently completed Brisbane Ashes Test , especially since Australia won so convincingly after such a long drought.  I certainly enjoyed seeing the Australians dominate Jonathan Trott, a player who has scored plenty of runs against them in previous series. However, I'm not enjoying the aftermath, with Trott returning home with a "stress-related illness".  Naturally I feel sad that Trott is unwell, and hope his recovery is swift and complete.  I also feel disturbed by the euphemistic description of his illness and the hush-hush way in which everyone seems to talk about it. Cricketers, like other elite sportspeople, are prone to frequent physical injuries.  It's the nature of elite sport, where people push themselves to the limit of their physical capabilities.  We hear about these injuries in forensic detail.  Everyone who cares about cricket knows all about Michael Clarke's degenerative disc, Kevin Pietersen's chronic knee problem,

It's been a little while since I posted anything, what with being busy and all.  By way of apology here's something very pleasant.  At least I think so. It's become fashionable in recent years for big-time stadium rock stars to venture out into more mellow acoustic territory.  Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, has teamed up with Alison Krauss to play bluegrass music.  Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder has recorded an album of songs with voice and ukulele.  Sting, already converted into a smooth jazz-fusion singer, has made an album of renaissance music with lute player Edin Karamazov. It shouldn't surprise us.  These guys are rich enough to do what they like.  Playing the same riffs over and over again and screaming at the top of their lungs can get boring.  They love the experience of playing for small audiences and being able to hear themselves and their band-mates.  They also tend to be accomplished musicians and they like to show people that they are not just on

Speaking of annoying songs , here's one that's really annoying. Two days past eighteen He was waiting for the bus in his army greens Sat down in a booth in a cafe there Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair He's a little shy so she gives him a smile And he said would you mind sittin' down for a while And talking to me? I'm feeling a little low She said I'm off in an hour and I know where we can go So they went down and they sat on the pier He said I bet you got a boyfriend but I don't care I got no one to send a letter to Would you mind if I sent one back here to you? I cried, never gonna hold the hand of another guy Too young for him they told her Waitin' for the love of a travelin' soldier Our love will never end Waitin' for the soldier to come back again Never more to be alone when the letter said A soldier's coming home So the letters came from an army camp In California then Vietnam And he told he

Misdirection is a technique used by people such as stage magicians and pickpockets to distract their audience, or their victim, from what they are actually doing.  They might make a loud noise, wave their hands or their wand flamboyantly, talk fast, have an accomplice distract you, while they perform their trick.  If they are a magician you will be amazed.  If they are a pickpocket you won't notice a thing until sometime later when you discover you are unable to pay for the coffee you have just drunk. Apropos of which... On the 15 October this year the Queensland Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie introduced three acts into the Queensland Legislative Assembly, and they were passed the same day.  The Criminal Law (Criminal Organisations Disruption) Amendment Bill 2013 gives the Minister power to declare an organisation a criminal organisation through the Criminal Code (Criminal Organisations) Regulation 2013. This regulation, which was declared as soon as the law was passed, cont

My grown-up daughter accidentally left a flash drive on my desk with lots of backed-up music files.  Since I'm a musical bowerbird I've been listening my way through it, picking up on all sorts of stuff I haven't heard before or haven't really listened to. One of the real gems is this little song, released in 1997 by the Danish-Norwegian bubble gum pop group Aqua. Of course I've heard this song before.  How could I not have?  My first memory of it is around 1999 when we visited the UK and our pre-adolescent nieces were listening to it.  I wonder what they make of it now?  The song is a regular feature on lists of "Most Annoying Songs of All Time".  I doubt the group members care, given it means they never have to worry about how they will pay the rent. However, listening to it properly and hearing the words, as opposed to being annoyed by it, is quite a revelation because it really is a very clever song. I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie wor

After looking at the Wisdom writings in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha , it happens that at church we've started a sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount.  Last Sunday was the Beatitudes.  For once I'm not going to have a whinge, because it tied in very nicely with what I'd been thinking about the Wisdom books. As I mentioned, the Wisdom writers faced a problem.  Why do those who do wrong seem to prosper while those who do right suffer?  They had two answers.  The writer of Ecclesiastes advocated humble submission - we don't know what God is doing or thinking, all we can do is carry out the tasks he has given us and enjoy our life as we can.  The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon was more confident - the righteous may appear to die unrewarded, but God will reward them in the life to come. Jesus develops this theme further in the poem that begins the Sermon on the Mount, the eight lines we call the Beatitudes from the Latin term which means "blessed",

Right then, back to something more esoteric after all this grumpy politics.  It's been a while since I wrote anything on the Apocrypha , so time I stopped procrastinating and wrote about the Wisdom books. I find Wisdom literature hard for a number of reasons.  The collections of sayings can be a bit mind-numbing, and often the content is repetitive.  Much of it also seems self-evident - why bang on about what is so obvious?  How to write about literature that doesn't hold my interest very well?  Yet here it is, in the Jewish sacred writings as well as in the writings of other traditions, so perhaps I've been missing something. Then it occurred to me that a good way of thinking about the Wisdom tradition is to see it in the context of the Law.  The five books of Moses are, in a sense, the primary source documents for Jewish faith.  They provide a set of laws by which the nation of Israel was supposed to be governed as the people of God.  They cover the whole range - the

As usual I'm late catching up with my periodicals and so I've just read the Spring 2013 edition of Zadok Perspectives, an edition focused on the election we just had.  Too late to help me make up my mind about the election, but it did help focus my mind on something I've been thinking about since the election, which I call (perhaps not originally) The Paradox of Power.  Two articles helped focus my thoughts - Gordon Preece's editorial on Kevin Rudd's Christian socialism, and Bruce Wearne's extensive review of Lindsay Tanner's book Politics with Purpose. The Paradox of Power is especially strong in democracies although it also affects people in other political systems, and can be expressed in a few different ways.  The more political power you have, the less able you are to use it.  The higher you climb the tree the less freedom you have to act on your convictions.  A visionary in opposition becomes a cautious conservative in office. No-one illustrates

One of the most persistent images in our culture is that of the "primitive" Aborigine, wandering naked across the face of Australia, living off the produce of nature and having little or no impact on the land they lived in.  This is one of the key images behind the convenient concept of terra nullius, Australia as a land which nobody owned. I've known for a long time that this image is misleading.  From my time at Uni I learnt that Aboriginal people have a close connection with their country, that their travels are far from random and that they carefully monitored and husbanded resources.  Historian Geoffrey Blainey's book Triumph of the Nomads, first published in 1975, showed how extensive Aboriginal burning of country was and how big an impact this had on Australia's ecology. In Blainey's depiction this burning is somewhat indiscriminate, a huge impact but not necessarily purposeful in a strategic sense.  Bill Gammage's 2011 book  The Biggest Estat

As I've been reading Reza Aslan over the last couple of weeks, Larry Norman's 'The Outlaw' has been going round and round in my head.  Larry Norman is definitely not a Jesus scholar, nor a scholar of any kind.  He is a singer and songwriter, a pioneer of gospel rock and one of the more interesting characters to grace the Christian music scene.  'The Outlaw' is one of the pithiest summaries of the debate about Jesus I've ever heard, five short stanzas which say more, and are much easier to understand, than many of the thousand learned tomes written on the subject.  The song first appeared on Norman's 1972 album Only Visiting this Planet .  Here's a suitably antique recording. Some say he was an outlaw, that he roamed across the land, With a band of unschooled ruffians and few young fishermen, No one knew just where he came from, or exactly what he'd done, But they said it must be something bad that kept him on the run. Some say he wa

It's been a while since I reviewed a Life of Jesus, but I did promise to review more recent samples of the genre so here, hot off the press, is Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  I first heard of Aslan's book via a scathing review by John Dickson .  A couple of weeks later, the book itself was staring at me from the new acquisitions display in my local library, so here is my own (rather less scathing) review. Aslan was born in Iran in 1972 and fled to the US with his family in 1979 following the Iranian revolution.  After a period as an evangelical Christian in his teens he shifted back to Islam as a young adult.  He has a doctorate in religious studies and teaches creative writing and religion at various universities.  Apparently Zealot has caused quite a stir in the US and he has not just been criticised for the content of his book, but had his credentials and his character impugned on national television in a way that makes Dickson's d