- Original contributions with substantive comment on issues relating to the early Hebrew/Jewish and Christian scriptures (and pseudepigraphia), as well as Syro-Palestinian archaeology. Blogs themselves need not be actually focused on such material, only the entries themselves.
- Non-sectarian bias.
- Showcasing the best of the Biblical Studies blogs.
- Anybody with a keen interest may contribute, not just the scholars. However, the material should be clearly argued and provide readers the ability to track down sources where cited.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Biblical Studies Carnival is up and running!
Joel Ng, who runs the Ebla Forum, has finally got his Biblical Studies Carnival Blog up and running! The blog summarizes the best of Bibliologs around the Net. Joel ideally wants:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Michael,
I want to offer my congratulations on the Carnival. I have been meaning to post a comment on your chiastic layout of the Gospel of Mark. As I told Joel Ng, I actually wrote 13 pages on Reading Luke Chiastically wherein I discussed over several pages whether or not a gospel could be a large chiasmus.
See below:
In the past twenty years, a number of scholars have shown that chiasmus is a structural tool of biblical rhetoric. Scholars readily acknowledge their prevalence even though they often find it hard to determine the shape of particular chiasmus. The documentation has not been persuasive because neither a good definition has been established nor a set of rules developed that can be uniformly applied. Consequently, chiastic structures that were apparent to ancient listeners are difficult for modern interpreters to define exactly even in the same pericopes. Furthermore, Ian Thomson has questioned whether chiastic structures can be shown to exist in macro settings which he defines as more than 15 verses. Thomson, Porter and Reed have asserted to date a convincing set of criteria for how to identify chiasm has not been developed. [footnotes omitted] [copyrighted 2005]
Consequently your achievement is quite impressive and I am especially happy the Carnival discussed this masterpiece but I think they did not appreciate the true value of your contributions. I plan to apply your rules to the Gospel of Luke and see if they assist me as much as they assisted you.
Keep up the good work.
Richard H. Anderson
Thanks so much, Richard! I'm hoping to get this published somehow next month.
On Macro-chiasms: I've been thinking about Mark as a giant chiasm, but after reconstructing the micro-chiasms I believe that there has been some significant alteration of the original order and the original chiasm is probably not recoverable. Specifically, I sometimes wonder whether the order of Mark 11 and 12 has been reversed. Further, the Bethsaida section contains material brought in from elsewhere in the Gospel and then altered, as well as invented material. I am thinking that Mark 7:1-23 once belonged in what is now Mark 10, probably at the famous deletion in 10:46. It makes no sense that the scribes go all the way from Jerusalem to Galilee to see Jesus and his disciples, but it does make sense if they are outside Jerusalem in Jericho or similar. Finally, the ending of Mark has gone AWOL.....
Thanks, again. Your words are very encouraging.
Post a Comment