Sad news

I was saddened to hear that Professor Allen Verhey of Duke Divinity School passed away today (see the schools news here). He was the Robert Earl Cushman Professor of Christian Theology at Duke and his field of expertise was in Christian ethics (he was the recent president of The Society of Christian Ethics). I took a seminar on Christian Ethics & Scripture with him which was co-taught by Stephen Chapman, and while I did not know him well, he seemed to me to be a very careful thinker and a teacher who demonstrated genuine concern for the students at Duke Div. I'm sure his presence will be sorely missed.

Talk @ Emory

Prof. Shaun Casey who is heading up the State Department's new Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives gave a talk here at Emory just over a week ago. Check it out:

 

QOTD: Bernhard Weiss

In my history of interpretation seminar, we just reviewed some material on historical Jesus research, and I saw this quote from Bernhard Weiss (1827-1918). This comes from chapter 12 ("The Historical Representation of the Life of Jesus") of his 2-volume (or 3, in English) The Life of Christ, first published in 1882. Notice his confidence and rhetoric, probably very typical of 19th century German scholarship:

"The difficulty is not that entire freedom from presupposition is necessary for a scientific portraiture of the history of Jesus, and that it is impossible without presuppositions to proceed with the history of Jesus. Even by Strauss that requirement has long been recognized as equally warranted and unattainable. The nature of the case yields presumptions from which historical criticism neither can nor dare free itself ... To demand that this history be treated only according to the rules observed in the examination of the history of other religions, is unjustifiable because unpracticable. According as the Christian religion is regarded as one religion among many, or as the true, the perfect one; according as one has found in it full satisfaction for his religious needs, or takes up towards it a skeptical or antagonistic attitude, must another standard necessarily be applied to the history of its origin. It is impossible for the Christian to recede from the assumption that the history through which the completion of true religion in humanity is introduced, is in its nature plainly unique ... The Gentile and Jew, or he who has broken with the Christian religion, could as little write a history of Jesus, which in its deepest essence shall be a just one, as a blind man could write a history of painting, or a deaf man a history of music. A scientific standpoint which should occupy a place above both these contradictions is an empty illusion."

Mystery Solved!

I was interested to see that the most recent issue of Clinical Toxicology had an article devoted entirely to the death of the figure depicted above, Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE. I don't think this is a journal that most ancient historians would run to to find any discussions about figures from antiquity, but I found it interesting nonetheless. The authors of the article present their own answer to the mystery of how this great Macedonian conqueror died.

Here is the abstract:

To investigate the death of Alexander the Great to determine if he died from natural causes or was poisoned and, if the latter, what was the most likely poison. Methods. OVID MEDLINE (January 1950–May 2013) and ISI Web of Science (1900–May 2013) databases were searched and bibliographies of identified articles were screened for additional relevant studies. These searches identified 53 relevant citations. Classical literature associated with Alexander's death. There are two divergent accounts of Alexander's death. The first has its origins in the Royal Diary, allegedly kept in Alexander's court. The second account survives in various versions of the Alexander Romance. Nature of the terminal illness. The Royal Diary describes a gradual onset of fever, with a progressive inability to walk, leading to Alexander's death, without offering a cause of his demise. In contrast, the Romance implies that members of Alexander's inner circle conspired to poison him. The various medical hypotheses include cumulative debilitation from his previous wounds, the complications of alcohol imbibing (resulting in alcohol hepatitis, acute pancreatitis, or perforated peptic ulcer), grief, a congenital abnormality, and an unhealthy environment in Babylon possibly exacerbated by malaria, typhoid fever, or some other parasitic or viral illness. Was it poisoning? Of all the chemical and botanical poisons reviewed, we believe the alkaloids present in the various Veratrum species, notably Veratrum album, were capable of killing Alexander with comparable symptoms to those Alexander reportedly experienced over the 12 days of his illness. Veratrum poisoning is heralded by the sudden onset of epigastric and substernal pain, which may also be accompanied by nausea and vomiting, followed by bradycardia and hypotension with severe muscular weakness. Alexander suffered similar features for the duration of his illness. Conclusion. If Alexander the Great was poisoned, Veratrum album offers a more plausible cause than arsenic, strychnine, and other botanical poisons.

Go check it out here.

Philo's Etymology

I'm entering into my final week of the semester and am in the process of finishing two more final papers. One of them is for my Jewish milieu seminar where my teacher has given us a variety of choices for our final exam, which is really a written exam that he gave us about 10 days ago. I've chosen to look at Barrett's The New Testament Background and critique it in a constructive/comprehensive way given all that we have discussed in the semester.

I'm currently on Barrett's section on Philo and I thought his excerpt from De Abrahamo 81-3 was quite interesting:

"What has been said is attested by the alteration and change in his name, for his original name was Abram, but afterwards he was addressed as Abraham [Greek, Abraam]. To the ear there was but the duplication of one letter, alpha, but in fact and in the truth conveyed this duplication showed a change of great importance. Abram is by interpretation 'uplifted father'; Abraham, 'elect father of sound'. The former signifies one called astrologer and meteorologist, one who takes care of the Chaldean tenets as a father would of his children. The latter signifies the Sage, for he uses 'sound' as a figure for spoken thought and 'father' for the ruling mind, since the inward thought is by its nature father of the uttered, being senior to it, the secret begetter of what it has to say. 'Elect' signifies the man of worth, for the worthless character is random and confused, while the good is elect, chosen out of all for his merits."

Fun stuff.

Carmichael-Walling Lectures

One of my teachers here, Carl Holladay, recently gave a set of lectures, the Carmichael-Walling lectures at Abilene Christian University. These lectures are quite distinguished, as they have invited other well respected scholars from the guild such as Margaret Mitchell, Luke Timothy Johnson (another Emory prof.), J.D.G. Dunn, Gail O'Day, James VanderKam, etc.

He gave two lectures a few weeks ago, "The Church of the Spirit" and "The Spirit of the Church."

Check them out below:

Scholarly Lingo

As I continue to read more and more journals, books, monographs, etc., that are more "technical" in nature, I can't help but notice the tiresome way that certain "academic lingo" insert themselves into the prose. That is, some words or phrases just get repeated over and over... I'm not so against using the words/phrases per se, but sometimes it seems rather unnecessary and even downright confuses/weakens the argument. I'm all for attempting to write eloquently, but sometimes there is value in brevity + clarity.

Here is my short list thus far (with variables inserted):

1. a is "part and parcel" of b

2. the "Scylla" of c and "Charybdis" of d

3. "indeed" e
4. f can "cut the Gordian knot"

I recall reading a blog post by Marc Cortez (here) with a graphic showing the average length of dissertations by discipline. I for one do not want to write a 500 page dissertation. This might mean that I'll have to cut the fat in terms of rhetorical flourish, but so be it (plus I doubt my doktorvater and committee members would want to read 500 pages anyway...)

Have you come across any other phrases I could add to this list?