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 [...]

History of the Early Christian Church lives on

Here’s some good news for ancient history fans. David Miano, teacher of UCSD’s The History of the Early Christian Church has made the lectures available on his own website, giving a second chance for those of you who failed to grab the course before UCSD removed the lectures from its website at the [...]

St. Augustine and the Jews

Boston University historian Paula Fredriksen, a specialist in the history of early Christianity, is a longtime fan of the fourth century theologian Augustine of Hippo, a.k.a. St. Augustine. Her new book, Augustine and the Jews , is the fruit of almost 15 years of thinking about Augustine and his world.
In ‘All Israel will be Saved’: [...]

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 [...]