Notes from the Blogosphere
November 17th, 2009 by Andrew Bernhard under Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Thomas, Secret Gospel of Mark. No Comments.
I know things have been a little quiet here recently, but don’t think that gospels.net is being neglected! I’ve been hard at work on some significant back-end restructuring of the site that should enable me to accomplish my goals much more efficiently and effectively (in the new year).
I regret that I haven’t had time to make many posts recently, as I’ve come across plenty of information circulating in the blogosphere during the past month and a half that is quite relevant to this blog. Some of the major highlights include:
- The NT Blog. The ever-industrious Mark Goodacre has posted some great stuff on the Gospel of Thomas recently. He has shared some reflections about whether the existence of a sayings gospel, such as Thomas, provides a legitimate argument for the existence of the hypothetical synoptic sayings source Q (full post), called attention to the (often overlooked) beginning of the modern study of the Gospel of Thomas with the discovery of the Greek fragments at Oxyrhynchus around the end of the twentieth century (post 1; post 2; podcast), and discussed various details of and contradictions in accounts about the discovery of a full copy of the text at Nag Hammadi in 1945 (post 1; post 2; post 3; post 4; post 5; post 6). He has also shared a few comments (and dug up an intriguing youtube clip) about Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark (post).
- The Forbidden Gospels Blog. April DeConick has announced that an important new publication about the Gospel of Judas will be out by the end of the year (post). Edited by Dr. DeConick, the new, more than 600-page book, The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex Held at Rice University, Houston Texas, March 13-16, 2008 is now listed on Brill’s website. I look forward to seeing the table of contents, as this volume promises to be a fascinating and informative resource about the ongoing debate about the significance of the Gospel of Judas.
- Apocryphicity. At the start of November, Tony Burke resumed his useful blog with notes about some of his recent activities (post). Most notably, he announced that his long-awaited critical edition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas will be published in 2010. I’m not exactly sure what to make of his remark that he spent the summer translating a “well-known text from the OT pseudepigrapha from Syriac into English for a top-secret publication that should appear in the Spring or Summer of 2010,” but I suppose I’ll find out next summer. Regardless, Dr. Burke has also called attention to a new blog on Secret Mark entitled Salainen evankelista by Timo S. Paananen (a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki), and he has also begun a weekly feature of different websites of interest (part 1, part 2)
- Peje Iesous. Christopher Skinner has launched his new blog well this fall, sharing not only his own thoughts about various gospel-related topics but also presenting interviews with different scholars studying the Gospel of Thomas: Nicholas Perrin (part 1, part 2) and Stevan Davies (part 1, part 2, part 3).
- BAR on Secret Mark. As noted on several blogs, the most recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review is dedicated to The Secret Gospel of Mark. It contains four articles on the topic: “An Amazing Discovery” by Charles Hedrick, “Morton Smith – Forger” by Hershal Shanks, “Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool” by Helmut Koester, and “Restoring a Dead Scholar’s Reputation” by Hershel Shanks. I must confess that I find it a little odd that the folks at BAR were able to solicit articles from Charles Hedrick and Helmut Koester, but none of the scholars who have questioned the authenticity of the text (editor Hersal Shanks ended up merely summarizing the arguments that the text is a forgery). I suppose there could be various explanations for this.
