The influence of E.P. Sanders

Mark Goodacre has described E. P. Sanders as "the greatest living New Testament Scholar" (here and here). Joshua Schwartz says something similar in his review of a festschrift in Sander's honour:

Most of us in academia hope to come up with a few new and original ideas that will impact upon scholars and scholarship. If we are lucky and this happens, we might remain in the eye of scholarship for a generation or two, but after that most of us and our work fade into various levels of academic oblivion. Only very few scholars produce work of such monumental importance that it becomes benchmarks not only for colleagues but for anyone wishing to study a particular field. Sanders has done this in not one or even two but in three centrally important areas of New Testament study: Judaism, Jesus, and Paul. Moreover, even if one does not study Christianity or Jesus, it is still impossible today to work on the Second Temple period without Sanders, and obviously this is the case regarding Jesus and Paul. This has been true for decades and will undoubtedly continue to be so for the coming ones. Few scholars have been able to bend, as it were, the not always pliant study of religious traditions and to form it into something new. Not all agree with him; his work has sometimes aroused opposition and criticism, but we cannot make do without it. The present volume is a fitting accolade for an outstanding scholar. - Joshua Schwartz, review of Fabian E. Udoh, Susannah Heschel, Mark A. Chancey, and Gregory Tatum, eds., Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) [http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/7140_7760.pdf].

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I was about to announce that גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב is officially on ice until further notice, but then I came across a few unfinished posts in my draft folder that seemed worth saving. The above quote was one of them. 

And I thought I was busy...

John Wesley "started his day at 4:00 a.m. and packed it with ceaseless activity. According to informed estimates, he preached over 40,000 times, traveled in excess of 250,000 miles, and produced more than 200 written works"  - William Baird, History of New Testament Research Volume 1: From Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 81.

Matera on the Spirit

"If contemporary believers find this Pauline teaching [on the Spirit] foreign, the fault does not lie so much with the apostle's theology as it does with the absence of an experience of the Spirit that often characterizes contemporary Christianity. For just as this experience of the Spirit accounts for the amazing growth and vitality of the early church, so the absence of this experience accounts for the malaise that afflicts much of contemporary Christianity." - Frank J. Matera, Romans (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2010), 210.

Asher Lev on integrity, artistic ... and academic?

"The painting did not say fully what I had wanted to say; it did not reflect fully the anguish and torment I had wanted to put into it. Within myself, a warning voice spoke soundlessly of fraud. I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness. . . . Only I would have known. But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that?" - Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (New York: Fawcett, 1972), 328.

Robert Morgan's must-read C.K. Barrett obituary

I break my blogging silence to mention Robert Morgan's must-read obituary of C.K. Barrett, who--says Morgan--tied with C.H. Dodd as "the greatest British New Testament scholar of the 20th century":

Barrett's natural gifts were reinforced by a robust constitution and formidable capacity for hard work. ... Each night [during his time as a pastor], the hours from 10pm to 2am were set aside for research. The lectureship at Durham in 1945, and chair in 1958, allowed him to settle into a more reasonable 14-hour day, which he carried into retirement.

Do read the whole thing. (HT: Mark Goodacre)

Here is another obituary in the Telegraph, whose author obviously missed Barrett's sense of humour.

My own reflections on Barrett are here.

A timely reminder of my most important vocation

When I arrived at my office this morning to prepare for the first class of the school year, I noticed an illustration from one of Shoshana's favourite children's stories on my door. It took me a while to realize that my name tag had been changed too!

Click on the image for a close-up of the illustration and of my fall semester class schedule:

And here is Shoshana anxiously waiting to head off to preschool for the first time this afternoon:

C.E.B Cranfield on the writing of commentaries, the history of interpretation, and long sentences

Take a deep breath, and then read the following sentence aloud:

"But to gain something more than an altogether superficial knowledge of the course of the tradition is to learn a deep respect and affection for, and gratitude to, those who have laboured in the field before one, irrespective of the barriers between different confessions, theological and critical viewpoints, nations and epochs; to learn to admire the engagement with Paul's thought of some of the greatest minds from the third to the twentieth century, but also to be humbled by the discover that even the weakest and least perceptive have from time to time something worth while to contribute; to learn that it is naïve to imagine that old commentaries are simply superseded by new ones, since, even the good commentator, while he will have some new insights of his own and will be able to correct some errors and make good some deficiencies of the past, will also have his own particular blind spots and will see less clearly, or even miss altogether, some things which some one before him has seen clearly; and, above all, to learn that all commentators (including those who in the next few pages will be most highly praised and also--and this is perhaps the most difficult lesson for any commentator to grasp--oneself) have feet of clay, and that therefore both slavish deference to any of them and also presumptuous self-confidence must alike be eschewed." - C.E.B. Cranfield, Romans 1.31-32.

Breathe.

(Brilliant stuff, really.)