Comments on NT Blog: The Strangeness of Biblical and Apocryphal Texts

Would it be possible to get a copy of the list you...

2007-08-11T17:51:00.000+01:00

Would it be possible to get a copy of the list you give your students? Or perhaps you could post it on the blog =)

Thanks for the comments, Mark. I have done a simil...

2007-08-10T15:04:00.000+01:00

Thanks for the comments, Mark. I have done a similar exercise. The text that my students have uniformly considered non-canonical is an except from Hebrews ch. 1.

Any assessment of bizarreness has to make use of o...

2007-08-10T14:58:00.000+01:00

Any assessment of bizarreness has to make use of one's knowledge and experience of what's commonplace versus unusual in our present day and age. Hence present-century events such as miracle healings that leave doctors totally perplexed, life-saving premonitions, documented yet unbelieved feats by yogi masters, need to be taken into account.

Sometimes, when I'm teaching deutero-Pauline texts...

2007-08-10T14:26:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, when I'm teaching deutero-Pauline texts, I assign my students to try to write a pseudo-Pauline epistle.

The results illuminate many dimensions of such a class: the complexity of attempting to simulate Pauline authorship, the students' relative unfamiliarity with Pauline style, their difficulties in writing in a particular style.

This is a very valuable exercise. For example, I h...

2007-08-10T12:51:00.000+01:00

This is a very valuable exercise. For example, I have always wondered whether my instinct that GThomas is (by any meaning of the word) thoroughly uninspired, containing imbalanced sayings, bathos, the sort of portentous drivel that the pious are imagined to say, etc...is this instinct informed or uninformed? I have refused to give this instinctive reaction any authority until I have quantifed it or (as may happen) failed to do so.