I got the sad news last night at 7:51pm. It beeped in as a CNN bulletin on my iPhone. Steve Jobs, legendary founder of Apple computer, and inspiration behind Mac computers, the mouse, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, the AirBook, and most recently the iPad, had died of pancreatic cancer at age 56.

Friends began to shoot me e-mails and text messages. Posts began to appear on Facebook and Twitter and last night Twitter was so jammed, with people posting tributes, you could not get on for over an hour. Steve’s creative genius and love of elegance, his independent spirit and commitment to “whole earth” thinking, his hard work and determination, has truly transformed our world. From music, to photos, to the Web, to writing, e-mail, and a host of amazing “millennial” applications, my world intersects with Steve Job’s creations every day. I wrote all my books on my MacBook and can hardly remember what life was like without these Apple products that have so enriched our pleasure in using technology and brought it to our desk, lap, and hand in such a lovely and convenient way.  Even the PC/Microsoft users, Android people, and a host of other knock offs are largely using products adapted and copied from the original Macintosh, iPhone, or iPod. Jobs was neither engineer or technician. He was a dreamer. But he combined those dreams, and their elegant sense of “taste” and beauty, with hard work, persistence, and a self-demanding style that would never give up. His life, like all of us, was a complex tangle of starts and stops, of breakthroughs and disappointments, but always his bright spirit prevailed in the end.

We will all miss him and I believe our new millennial world will continue to be transformed by his innovations in ways we can only dream of today.

The NYTimes has some amazing coverage this morning if you want to browse a bit, beginning with the front page story by John Markoff. There is lots more in the links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/business/steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html?_r=1&hp

James, signing off on his MacBook Pro

We still have a few spaces left on the Israel tour but we will have to close it out soon. The price will likely never be cheaper. We have also added a “slimmed down” version of the Petra/Jordan ad-on at much less money.  The cost is $475 now and includes 2 extras nights at Tamar and 2 day trips (October 29-30), one to Petra in Jordan and the other to the spectacular Mitzpa Ramon Crater in the Beersheva area with the final day in Jerusalem (October 31st), flying overnight and arriving back November 1st.

I am your personal guide on this tour and everyone who goes has personal access to both Dr. Coxen and me the entire time. The itinerary speaks for itself, it is not the average “Holy Land” tour, though we of course do see all the main sites–we just do a lot extra that tours almost never do. See link and pricing options here, and you can register and hold your place with a deposit immediately here.

I have made forty-four trips to Israel since 1990 but I have only led two tours. One was a private group from my university; the second, last year, I opened to the public–primarily various readers of my books who had followed some of my career as a biblical scholar. This is not the standard “Holy Land” tour. I have shaped the special itinerary myself, teaming up with Dewayne Coxen, as I did last year. Dr. Coxen has traveled to Israel over 150 times over the past 50 years–I think he has actually lost count. In addition to this rich experience he also provides us with our connection to the archaeological site of biblical Tamar, in the Negev desert, one of the centerpieces of this tour. Not only do I want to give participants a survey of the Land of Israel, from “Dan to Beersheva,” quite literally–and everything in between–but I want them to have a chance to get their hands dirty actually working for a day at an archaeological site. One could not find a better opportunity for this than Tamar, not to mention the inspiring experience of staying two nights in the Desert.

My idea on this tour is to take a limited group of 45 people together on one bus and give them an overview of the archaeological and historical side of my work as a Biblical scholar–and particularly one who has worked on the historical Jesus and the Origins of Christianity for the past 40 years. We are also doing our best to hold the prices down, despite rising airline and hotel costs. Neither Dr. Coxen or I charge a fee for leading this tour. We both do what we do because of a love of history, a fascination with our research, and the satisfaction of introducing others to the Land of Israel.

Many readers will remember the sensational story that broke into the news in March of this year regarding a series of “lead codices,” that some had claimed dated back to the 1st century and might prove to be some of our earliest Christian documents. Since that time much has been revealed about these artifacts and it appears the preponderance of evidence by qualified experts is these items are fake. As one of the few academics who did not jump on the bandwagon labeling the James ossuary inscription as fake (and indeed it appears it will be vindicated as genuine) I hasten to add that to me these artifacts appeared to be as phony as a three-dollar bill from day one. Nothing I saw, read, or heard about them added up. My initial reaction, without even knowing the whole story, was that they appeared to be fake and whether fake or genuine there was not a chance they could be dated to the 1st century CE.

I wanted to call attention to three items that will bring folks up to date with some of the latest evaluations by scholars:

1) A YouTube video, The Lead Codices that was put together by a team of scholars and “bibliobloggers” who have followed the story.

2) An extensive article by Tom Verenna at the Web site The Bible  and Interpretation, which, I might add, is well worth browsing on many related topics. The site has a good search feature, try “Talpiot tomb” or “James ossuary” for example.

3) An article nicely written, comprehensive article by Prof. Philip Davies published in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly 143, 2 (2011), 79–86, see: PEQDaviesLeadCodices.

I think July, 2010 might be the only blank month in my blogging history that goes back to The Jesus Dynasty Blog that I began with the publication of my book by that name in April, 2006. So why the hiatus? I wanted to take time to explain to my loyal readers who might have stopped by the site numerous times, only to find “nothing new” posted since late June.

The answer is a simple one. Essentially I “went underground” from about June 17 through August 17 writing almost nonstop to complete  my new book on Paul, with trips to Rome and Jerusalem included. As some of you know, Paul has been in the news of late, with stories about his tomb in Rome being validated, as well as the newly uncovered portrait of Paul in the catacomb of St. Tekla. I have been working on the Paul book since late 2008 when I signed a contract with Simon & Schuster. There was a time when I expected it might be out by Spring, 2010 but as I got deeper into my work I began to develop my ideas in directions I had not originally anticipated, so I have ended up taking most of 2010 to complete the manuscript. The book has been listed on Amazon now for over a year with the fetching title: Paul Untitled and still no cover image. I know many of my readers have pre-ordered it, and I appreciate your patience. The pre-orders do count, and when the book is released they can give it a great send-off, so if any of you are willing to “stand in that Amazon line,” I thank you for it. My editors and I are still talking about a final decision on a title, as well as the cover art, and I hope it will appear soon. I will let everyone know.

What I think I can safely say is that the book will be worth the wait! I don’t know of another book on Paul by a scholar in the field that is like this one, either in ideas, approach, or style. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul at the University of Chicago (1982), directed by the incomparable Jonathan Z. Smith. It was published as a monograph in the Brown University Judaic Studies series in 1985 titled Things Unutterable. It has long ago gone out of print though an unbound facsimile edition is available on Amazon. For the past 30 years, teaching at three universities (Notre Dame, William & Mary, UNC Charlotte) I have continued to think deeply about Paul, covering him in my courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

So far as books on Paul go, I think they must outnumber the books on Jesus, but almost without exception the academic study of Paul is pretty much an “in-house” enterprise with most of the scholars who specialize and write about Paul producing endless books primarily intended for their colleagues.  Most of the writings on Paul are highly technical, very theological in orientation, and full of jargon particular to the field. “Pauline Studies,” is such a vast field right now it is impossible for all but the most devoted, who rarely work on anything else, to keep up. I am not one of those people and though I have published and written about Paul along the way.  My concentration has been much broader–namely trying to analyze the many ways of understanding “salvation” in ancient Mediterranean religions, particularly in late 2nd Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity–with apocalypticism as my main focus. Such a general description certainly pulls in Paul, but in a broader way that most Pauline scholars deal with him.

What I hope I have produced is a readable and accessible book on Paul, but one that offers an analysis of his mission and message that I have not seen anywhere else. Mine is neither a Paul-bashing nor a Paul-applauding book. I guess you might call it “Paul in His Own Words,” in that I try as best I can to let Paul speak for himself, based on the seven “authentic” letters we have from his hand. And speak he does! I think I have succeeded, at least on an introductory level, to offer readers a clear, refreshing, and provocative look at the Apostle.

I thought I would paste the Table of Contents in here, just to whet a few appetites, and I plan to begin a series of blog posts over the next few weeks that will explore various aspects of Paul and his thinking–as a kind of prelude to the book itself–so check back here often.

Preface: Discovering Paul

Introduction: Paul and Jesus

The Quest for the Historical Paul                                                           

Chapter 1: After the Cross

Chapter 2: Reading the New Testament Backwards

Chapter 3: A Forgotten Brother, A Lost Christianity

Chapter 4: A Cosmic Family and a Heavenly Kingdom

Chapter 5: A Mystical Union with Christ

Chapter 6: Already but Not Yet

Chapter 7: The Torah of Christ

Chapter 8: The Battle of the Apostles

Conclusion: Does God Care for Oxen?

This wonderful tribute to Moshe Greenberg, who died yesterday, on Shabbat, is well worth reading as we contemplate some of the amazing accomplishments and insights of this master of the Hebrew Bible, surely one of the greatest in our generation…

Thanks to Jeffrey Tigay who wrote it some time ago but it captures the spirit of this great scholar’s work…

www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtigay/MGbio.doc

MOSHE GREENBERG

Moshe Greenberg was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1928.  Raised in a Hebrew-speaking, Zionist home, he studied Bible and Hebrew literature from his youth. At the University of Pennsylva nia, where he received his Ph.D. in 1954, he studied Bible and Assyriology with E.A. Speiser; simultaneously, he studied post biblical Judaica at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Strongly influenced by the comparative Biblical-Assyriological approach of Speiser and by the studies of the Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann in Biblical thought and religion, Greenberg’s scholarship is characterized by the critical integration of ancient Near Eastern and Jewish materials in his explication of the Bible.

Greenberg taught Bible and Judaica at the University of Pennsylvania from 1964-1970 and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1970-1996. The first Jewish Biblical scholar appointed to a position in a secular university after World War II, Greenberg has had an important influence on the development of Biblical scholarship, particularly, but not limited to, Jewish Biblical scholarship. He has devoted most of his attention to the phenomenology of biblical religion and  law, the theory and practice of interpreting biblical texts, and the role of  the Bible in Jewish thought.

In the area of prayer, Greenberg traced the development of Biblical petition  and  praise away from their roots in the conception that the deity  literally needs to be informed of the worshiper’s plight and  propitiated by flattery, into “a vehicle of humility, an expression of  un-selfsufficiency, which in biblical thought, is the proper stance  of  humans before God” (Studies, 75-108). In Biblical Prose Prayer he showed that the prose prayers embedded in Biblical narratives reflect the piety of commoners. He reasoned that the frequency of spontaneous prayer must have sustained  a constant sense of God’s presence and strengthened the egalitarian tendency of Israelite religion which led to the establishment  of  the  synagogue. The fact that prayer was  conceived  as  analogous to  a social transaction  between  persons fostered an emphasis  on sincerity, and may lie at the root of the classical-prophetic view of  worship as a  gesture  whose acceptance depends  on   adherence to the values of God. In  his  “Reflections on Job’s Theology” (Studies, 327-333) Greenberg observes  that Job’s experience of God’s inex plicable enmity  could  not  wipe  out his knowledge of God’s benignity gained  from  his earlier  experience,  and  hence he became  confused  instead of simply  rejecting God. Accordingly, the fact that the  Bible  retains Job as well as the Torah, Prophets, and Proverbs reflects the capacity of the  religious sensibility to affirm both experiences: “No single key unlocks the mystery of  destiny.”

In the  area  of biblical law, Greenberg argued that “the law [is] the expression of underlying postulates or  values of culture” and that differences  between  Biblical and ancient Near Eastern laws  were not reflections  of  different stages of social  development  but  of different underlying legal and religious principles (Studies, 25-41). Analyzing economic, social,  political,  and religious laws in the Torah, he showed that their thrust was to disperse authority and prestige through out society and prevent the monopolization of prestige and  power by narrow elite groups (Studies, 51-61).

In his commentaries on Exodus (1969) and Ezekiel  (1983, 1997), Greenberg developed  his “holistic”  method  of  exegesis. While  building on the  source-critical  achievements  of  earli er  scholarship, the holistic method redirects attention from the text’s  “hypothetically  reconstructed  elements”  to the  bibli cal  books  as integral  wholes,  as  the products of  thoughtful  and  artistic design  conveying  messages  of  their  own. This approach recalls scholarly  attention to  the “received text [which] is the only historically  attested datum;  it  alone has had demonstrable effects; it alone  is  the undoubted  product of Israelite creativity.” In this connection argues that since  midrashic and later pre-critical Jewish exegesis  operated on the assumption of unitary authorship, they have many  insights to offer the holistic commentator.

Greenberg’s studies of Jewish thought include important studies of the  intellectual  achievements  of  medieval  Jewish   exegesis (1988 lecture, forthcoming), investigations  of Rabbinic  reflections on defying illegal orders (Studies, 395-403), and  attitudes toward members of other  religions  (Studies, 369-393; “A Problematic Heritage”).  In the latter he argues that a  Scripture-based  religion can and must avoid fundamentalism by being selective and critical in its reliance on tradition and by re-prioritizing values. In “Jewish Conceptions of the Human Factor  in Biblical Prophecy” (Studies, 405-419), Greenberg shows that from the Talmud  to the Renaissance, classical Jewish exe getes and thinkers who never doubted  the divine inspiration and authorship of the Torah and other  prophetic writings neverthe less acknowledged the  literary evidence of human shaping of the text.

WORKS

The Hab/piru. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1955

The Religion of Israel, abridged English translation of vols. 1-7 Yehezkel Kaufmann’s Toldot

ha’Emuna ha-Yisre’lit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960

Introduction to Hebrew. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965

Understanding Exodus New York: Behrman House, 1969

Ezekiel 1-20 and Ezekiel 21-37 (Anchor Bible. Garden City: Doubleday, 1983, 1997)

Biblical Prose Prayer.  University of California, 1983

Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995) includes

many of Greenberg’s essays. Most notable are the following:

·      “Three Conceptions of the Torah in Hebrew Scriptures.”

·      “Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law.”

·      “Biblical Attitudes toward Power: Ideal and Reality in Law  and Prophets”

·      “On the Refinement of the Conception of Prayer in Hebrew Scriptures.”

·      Religion: Stability and Ferment.”

·      “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible: Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert.”

·      “The Use of the Ancient Versions for Interpreting the Hebrew Text.”

·      “Reflections on Interpretation.”

·      “To Whom and For What Should a Bible Commentator Be Respon sible.”

·      “Another Look at Rachel’s Theft of the Teraphim.”

·      “The Decalogue Tradition Critically Examined.”

·      “Reflections on Job’s Theology.”

·      “Rabbinic Reflections on Defying Illegal Orders: Amasa, Abner, and Joab.”

·      “Jewish Conceptions of the Human Factor in Biblical Prophe cy.”

·      “Bible Interpretation as Exhibited in the First Book of Maimonides’ Code.”

·      See also:

·      “Prophecy in Hebrew Scripture.” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).  3:657-664.

·      “Biblical Judaism (20th-4th centuries BCE).” Encyclopaedia Bri tannica: Macropaedia. 15th ed. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974. 10: 303-310.

·      “A Problematic Heritage: The Attitude Toward the gentile in the Jewish Tradition — An Israel Perspective,” Conservative Judaism 48/2 (Winter, 1996):23-35.

·      Articles in Encyclopaedia Judaica  (Jerusalem:  Keter, and New York: Macmillan), 1972:  “Decalogue” (5:1435-1446), “Herem” (8:345-350), “Sabbath” (14:557-562).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Moshe Greenberg: An Appreciation,” and “Bibliography of the Writings of Moshe Greenberg,” pp.

ix-xxxviii in M. Cogan, B.L. Eichler, and J.H. Tigay, eds., Tehilla le-Moshe. Biblical and Judaic

Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbraun’s, 1997

S.D. Sperling, ed., Students of the Covenant: A History of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North

America (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), index s.v. “Greenberg, Moshe.”

Peras Yisra’el 5754 (Israel Prizes, 1994). Israel: Ministry of Science and Arts; Ministry of

Education, Culture, and Sports, 1994), pp. 5-7 (in Hebrew)

By Jeffrey H. Tigay

University of Pennsylvania