Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):
“De omnibus dubitandum.”
Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you [...]

How the Biblical texts became Holy Scripture

After reading Bible scholar James Kugel’s great book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now I was thrilled to find his lecture Can The Torah Make Its Peace With Modern Biblical Scholarship? (website). Kugel was formally a star lecturer at Harvard where his courses were routinely packed, and he now [...]

Web resources on early Christianity

Here’s a round-up of some interesting lectures and podcasts about early Christianity available around the web.
The Early Christian Church (website), David Miano, UCSD.
This course gives the historical background to the rise of Christianity, and historical sources on the life of Jesus. I especially recommend lectures 6 and 7, which analyze the synoptic Gospels, and [...]

Pondering a leap of faith

If you’ve been following UC Berkeley Professor Ron Hendel’s excellent course The Bible in Western Culture (feed), you know that he’s been looking at understandings of the Bible, beginning in ancient times and moving through the Middle Ages into modernity. In the last couple of weeks we watched as Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza and Herder [...]

Dreaming of the Apocalypse

Have you heard the news that the world will end in the year 2011? It’s one more example, says UC Berkeley Professor Ronald Hendel, of apocalyptic thinking: a mode of biblical interpretation that began sometime around the third century BCE and continues today.
Week 3 of Hendel’s course The Bible in Western Culture (feed) explores apocalyptic [...]

The Bible Through Literary Eyes

When we are accustomed to a literary genre, such as the Western, we have certain expectations. We expect that a manly hero, who is good with a gun, will defeat some dastardly foe. A writer of the Western can then play with these expectations for dramatic or comic effects.
But what about the Bible? Does [...]

More Jewish studies resourses

Here are some more Jewish studies resources I’ve recently discovered.

From Israelite to Jew (iTunes, website), Michael Satlow, Brown University.
Satlow, a professor of Religious and Judaic Studies, covers the history of ancient Israel in the Biblical period in these podcasts, which are not classroom lectures, but instead have the feel of chapters in an audio book. [...]

The World of the Hebrew Bible

We know a lot about the ancient Israelites because an anthology of their literature, the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, is still part of our culture.
But who were the writers of these ancient texts and why did they shape their stories the way they did? What was the mental world of their listeners, their background [...]

Knowledge tidbits

I often chance upon tasty tidbits of knowledge as I browse the web’s buffet of podcasts, academic courses and blogs. In this new feature I will serve up some of these intellectual hors d’oeuvres. I invite you to serve up your own tidbits in the comments. I only ask that you provide a reference [...]

The Bible’s Buried Secrets on TV & YouTube

In the past 50 years archaeologists have done much to illuminate the world of the Bible and challenge traditional notions of how the Bible was written.
Last month PBS broadcast The Bible’s Buried Secrets, a special two-hour edition of its award-winning science program NOVA,  which presented a summary of that research in dramatic form for a [...]