This morning Scot McKnight (Jesus Creed) mentions two books I've mentioned before: Skarsaune & Hvalvik's Jewish Believers in Jesus and Bowman & Komoszewski's Putting Jesus in His Place.

What I didn't know is that Jewish Believers in Jesus (amazon.com) has a web site at something called the Caspari Center. You can find more information there. Also, you can find more information on Putting Jesus in His Place (amazon.com) at http://www.deityofchrist.com.

I'd recommend them both, particularly Jewish Believers in Jesus (amazon.com).

One of the points that came up frequently in the discussion about both the so-called "James Ossuary" and the so-called "Jesus Tomb" was that the name "Jesus" was very common in the first century. It's a valid point. There are a few places to look for name occurrances, and ossuaries are a valuable source. But there are others.

I'm sure many have done this already, but have you ever searched the English translation of the Works of Josephus for the word "Jesus"? And then have you tracked down to see how many potential Jesuses are referred to therein?

Whiston's translation has 73 instances of "Jesus", though some of those are in footnotes so they don't really count. According to the index in Niese's critical Greek edition (the index is volume 7 in the print and can be very handy — and it will be included in the Logos edition of Josephus, which strives to reproduce Niese in its entirety) there are 20 different Jesuses in these 73 instances.*

Huh? 20 Jesuses? That's right. On the right side of this post you can see the index entry (Niese vol. 7 p. 41 cols 1-2) straight from Niese. Jesus Christ is #9 in the list. The citations are weird; straight roman numerals without a prefix indicate references to the Antiquities; the others use minimal italicised Latin-based prefixes (e.g. B for Wars, Vit for Life, etc.) for work names.

The primary instance that most NT scholars are interested in is the Testimonium Flavianum, found in Ant. 18.63-64:

(63) Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; (64) and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Josephus, F., & Whiston, W. (1996, c1987). The works of Josephus : Complete and unabridged. Includes index. (Ant 18.62-64). Peabody: Hendrickson. Emphasis added

One of the more interesting non-Jesus Jesus examples is Ant. 20.213:

This made him more than ordinarily hated by his subjects; because he took those things away that belonged to them, to adorn a foreign city; (213) and now Jesus, the son of Gamaliel, became the successor of Jesus, the son of Damneus, in the high priesthood, which the king had taken from the other; on which account a sedition arose between the high priests, with regard to one another; for they got together bodies of the boldest sort of the people, and frequently came, from reproaches, to throwing of stones at each other; but Ananias was too hard for the rest, by his riches,—which enabled him to gain those that were most ready to receive.
Josephus, F., & Whiston, W. (1996, c1987). The works of Josephus : Complete and unabridged. Includes index. (Ant 20.212-213). Peabody: Hendrickson. Emphasis added.

Another interesting one is found in Ant. 11.297-303, which Whiston's edition numbers as Ant. 11.7.1-2 (so, a separate chapter in Whiston). Whiston's chapter title? "HOW JOHN SLEW HIS BROTHER JESUS IN THE TEMPLE; AND HOW BAGOSES OFFERED MANY INJURIES TO THE JEWS; AND WHAT SANBALLAT DID". Read on:

(298) Now Jesus was the brother of John, and was a friend of Bagoses, who had promised to procure him the high priesthood. (299) In confidence of whose support, Jesus quarrelled with John in the temple, and so provoked his brother, that in his anger his brother slew him. Now it was a horrible thing for John when he was high priest, to perpetrate so great a crime, and so much the more horrible, that there never was so cruel and impious a thing done, neither by the Greeks nor Barbarians.
Josephus, F., & Whiston, W. (1996, c1987). The works of Josephus : Complete and unabridged. Includes index. (Ant 11.297-299). Peabody: Hendrickson. Emphasis added

There were lots of guys running around with the name Jesus. Heck, there were lots of Johns (17 according to Niese), a few Jameses (five) and even lots of Judases (13!).

Update (2007-10-03): Responding to John Augusten in the comments: of course I understand that the statistical argument was on the compilation and juxtaposition of names. (On refuting Jacobivici's statistical arguments, see here, here and here). My primary point here is not to argue about the ossuaries or validity of the so-called "Jesus Tomb" (though I do think Jacobivici is, to put it technically, full of hooey), or to argue statistics. My point was to show that in addition to ossuary evidence (Rahmani, et. al.) corpora from the era also have onomastic data that can be extracted. And, secondarily, that indexes with sense disambiguation are valuable even when one can do a comprehensive concordance search of a corpus.

* I did a lemma search of the in-development Logos edition, so results might not be accurate, but I located 124 instances of the lemma Ιησους. Why the discrepancy between the Greek and Whiston's translation? I'm guessing Whiston translated Ιησους as "Joshua" where he deemed appropriate (e.g. in OT historical sections).

I just realized that my previous post, Everything is Miscellaneous, Even Language, was picked up by David Weinberger himself on his Everything is Miscellaneous blog.

How cool is that? I dunno. But I'm certainly chuffed about it.

I've finally begun reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous (amazon.com). It's been on my to-read list for awhile but I've only recently gained access to a copy.

I've also been reading about Discourse Analysis and Discourse Grammar (the latter has more to say about what's going on at the sentence-clause level). One of the primary principles of Discourse Grammar is described by Stephen H. Levinsohn in his article The Relevance of Greek Discourse Studies to Exegesis. Here it is.

Jan Firbas, a Prague School linguist, was a pioneer in recognizing that, in the majority of sentences in a natural text, the order of non-verbal constituents tended to follow what has come to be called the "Principle of Natural Information Flow" (Comrie 1989; see Firbas 1964). According to this principle, non-verbal constituents that convey established information are placed before those that convey new or non-established information. (Levinsohn 14).

So, according to the principle of natural information flow, established information occurs first, and new information comes after.

Really, this is related to Weinberger's book (amazon.com). Trust me.

Here's Weinberger, in the chapter "The New Order of Order", subsection "Everything has its places".

The two processes by which new things are introduced into our homes are typical of how we handle information: we go through new arrivals and then we put them away. We go through the mail and file it in the special places we have for bills (the desk), cards from relatives (the refrigerator door), and junk mail (the trash). We go through bags of groceries and put the food away within minutes of bringing it into our house. We address these elements of disorder—unsorted mail in the mailbox, groceries sorted by relative weight into bags by a clerk in the store—with remarkable alacrity. (Weinberger 11)

We know how to sort our mail because it is ours. It is familiar. We go through the jumble of the mailbox, and certain things stand out: the electricity bill that needs to be paid; the envelope with the hand-written return address that looks like a card or letter (we open that one first because it is 'good mail'). The advertising circular that always comes on Tuesdays is likely plopped in the recycle bin on your way in the house because you know you already get the best price because you use your club card when you shop at that store.

Anyway, we process the information as we encounter it and filter it. We deal with the known (mail we recognize by some feature—size, color of envelope, type of postage, return sender, etc.) and move to the unknown. In so doing, some pieces of mail become prominent. We open those first because they're likely worthy of opening (except that clever junk mail in the manilla business-letter-sized envelope that looked like a check from the bank) and because we either have an inkling of what is inside or because it looks juicy but we don't really know what it is.

My flash of inspiration upon reading Weinberger after having read some papers on Discourse Analysis and Discourse Grammar — Reading involves the same process.

We do it innately with our native language because, like our mail, it is ours. We know how we've processed it in the past and we have lots of experience to filter through the new batches and determine what is promenent (the mail we open first) and what isn't (the flyers we throw in the recycle bin and the junk mail we rip up without even opening it). In our native language we naturally supply the known information and naturally note the new information and assimilate it into our further reading of the sentence/paragraph.

It is, however, much more difficult with a non-native language like Hellenistic Greek. We simply don't have enough experience "filtering the mail" to know which envelopes to open first, and which to throw out in the recycle bin. We can read the sentence/paragraph and get the gist of what's going on by assembling the words (more of a code/decode process) but we have problems picking out the salient bits because we haven't really internalized rules to tell us what is salient as we process the bag-o-words.

And this is what can be helpful in approaching the text of the NT from a Discourse Analysis and Discourse Grammar approach: we get some ideas on how to filter the mail. It gives us clues as to what to "open first" as we process a sentence or paragraph or an even larger discourse. It helps the prominent/salient bits become more evident, and this in turn helps our exegesis focus on what is necessary in order to properly handle the text.

I'm still thinking through this stuff; I'm interested to know what anyone thinks about this. Please use the comments if you have more to add to the discussion.

I've blogged about Jewish Believers in Jesus (amazon.com) a few times now. The more I read the book, the more I think it needs to be more widely read. Why, you ask? Not because it is perfect, or because I agree with everything in it. But it is a book that makes you think. It is not a re-hashing and presentation of current scholarship on the issue; instead it springboards from that, making assertions and connections between the data points that makes me think. And that's good — that's what reading and studying should be like.

Danny Zacharias of Deinde recently blogged about Jewish Believers as well. Danny's reaction? Pretty straightforward:

Earlier this year I made an authoritative declaration that every NT scholar ought to read Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (amazon.com). This is now my second binding authoritative declaration: Every NT scholar needs to have this book on his or her shelf.

Nijay Gupta (at his eponymous blog) also mentions Jewish Believers. (Apologies for being late with this one, I just heard of Nijay's blog from Mike Bird.) Nijay had the inside scoop; he apparently used to work for Hendrickson:

I just obtained a copy yesterday and it looks fantastic. I remember it was coming down the pipeline when I was working at Hendrickson and they did an excellent job. 

I agree. So heed both Danny and Nijay and get your copy now (amazon.com).

Today (Friday) was the annual Logos Soup Cookoff. I entered, but didn't win. In Logos Cookoff tradition, I made my own soup sign, so people would know what they were eating:

Here's the recipe, if you're interested. A little place just down the street from Logos, the La Vie en Rose bakery, has awesome soups for lunch. One soup they regularly serve is a Tomato-Sausage-Eggplant soup. That was my inspiration.

I was originally going to thicken the soup even more with feta cheese, but I put too much seasoning in as it was. I'd recommend using less sausage or add more tomato sauce/puree (or even more chicken stock) to tone it down a bit; then you could experiment with the feta as a thickener.

[NB: I originally got the title of the book wrong in the headline; I've changed it but it will likely mean the post will show up twice in your news readers. Apologies, RWB]

The kind folks at Hendrickson Publishers just today sent me a copy of Rodney Whitacre's A Patristic Greek Reader (amazon.com), and I must say it looks mighty fine — if you want to improve your Greek reading skills, then you need to read large chunks of unfamiliar text. A Patristic Greek Reader (amazon.com) looks to be an excellent way to do just this.

Here's the blurb from Hendrickson:

The heart of this book is a selection of Greek texts from early Christian writers, accompanied by notes so that a person with one year of Greek can read the texts. Basic translations of the texts are also provided so that readers can check their work. A list of words used 50+ times in the New Testament and the principal parts of several verbs is included.

The Greek selections represent a variety of styles and levels of difficulty. The notes also vary, with very extensive notes provided in some cases.

Passages that have played a major role in the history of Christian thought are included, as well as passages that contribute to matters of spirituality and pastoral care. Several passages are of more purely historical interest. The author includes an introduction to the writings of the early Church to help orient readers to the writings of the Fathers in general and also give the rationale for the particular selections included in the book. Each selection also has a brief introduction discussing its historical setting and content. A brief bibliography is included for the particular selections included and for the Greek reference works cited. However, the book would also be of interest to those studying the Classics and could be used by anyone as a brief introduction to some samples of early Christian thought. This may be the only book available that provides such translation notes for selections from the Greek fathers.

The contents (full TOC here) include the following writings (either in total or in part):

• The Didache (the whole thing)
• 1 Clement (in part)
• Ignatius to the Romans (the whole thing)
• Epistle to Diognetus (in part)
• Martydom of Polycarp (in part)
• Justin Martyr's First Apology (in part)
• Melito of Sardis, On Pascha (in part)
• Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies (partial)
• Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine (partial)
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation (partial)
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations (partial)
• Desert Fathers and Mothers, Apophthegmata Patrum (partial)
• John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum (partial)
• Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness (partial)
• Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns (partial)

You should really check out the sample chapter provided by Hendrickson. The text is the first five chaptes of the Didache, plus an introduction to the Didache (note I have a "phrasal interlinear" translation and some comments on the Didache available as well). You will get a good idea of how things are laid out and how the reading notes work. Everything is translated, but the translations are in a completely different section of the book, so there's no easy cribbing on the facing page.

I really like how the text notes provide the form in the text, followed by the dictionary form, followed by a short gloss and any other notes that Whitacre deemed necessary.

If you want to improve your Greek reading skills, you owe it to yourself to purchase and diligently work through this book. You'll get into non-familiar text, which means you'll stretch your reading muscle and learn a great deal along the way. The readings are even ranked and an appendix in the back (Appendix C) sorts out "Easiest", "Intermediate" and "Advanced" texts so you can pick your poison, or work up from "easy" to "advanced".

Finally, I got to see the ETS program book (thanks, Evangelical Textual Criticism) so now I know that my paper is on Wednesday afternoon at 4:10.

Garden Salon Two: New Testament
Wednesday, Nov 14 4:10-4:50
Richard W. Brannan (Logos Bible Software)
Richard Bauckham and Eyewitness Testimony: Does His Narrative Device Occur Outside of the Synoptics?

Hopefully my flight works out OK, I'm supposed to arrive in San Deigo at around 1:30 in the afternoon. I guess I'll have to go straight to the conference.

I'm also moderating a session on Friday morning. If any of the papers sound interesting to you (and even if they don't) do be sure to drop by and say "hello!"

Royal Palm Salon Five
NEW TESTAMENT
THEME: John
Moderator: Richard W. Brannan (Logos Bible Software)

9:00-9:40 AM
Donald E. Hartley (Dallas Theological Seminary)
Destined to Disobey: Isaiah 6:9-10 in John 12:37-40

9:50-10:30 AM
David Croteau (Liberty University)
Repentance Found? The Concept of Repentance in the Fourth Gospel

10:40-11:20 AM
Paul Hoskins (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary)
Freedom from Slavery to Sin: The Contribution of John 8:31-38 to the Passover Theme of the Gospel of John

11:30 AM-12:10 PM
Michael S. Heiser (Logos Bible Software)
Did Jesus Allow for Reincarnation? Assessing the Syntax of John 9:3-4