BiblioBloggers on Spring Break
Ben posted Biblical Studies Carnival 193 on his Amateur Exegete blog, highlighting the best and brightest BiblioBlog Posts for March 2022. Ben did a great job collecting links to a wide range of quality biblical and theological posts. Ben also points out the passing of Burton Mack, Norman Gottwald, and Joseph Blenkinsopp. Ben is a podcaster and active blogger, and he will argue with you on Twitter if you want. So click the fool and read through Ben’s Biblical Studies Carnival. Click all the links and show Ben some love for his hard work.
Looking ahead to the April 2022 carnival (Due May 1), Brent Niedergall will be the host. You can send him suggestions via Twitter, @BrentNiedergall. For May 2022 (Due June 1), Bob MacDonald will host at his blog Dust. He is also on Twitter, @drmacdonald. If you would like to be a part of the Carnival in the future, contact me via email plong42@gmail.com or DM on Twitter (plong42) to discuss hosting a carnival in 2022. If you are a new BiblioBlogger, this is a good way to get your blog some recognition. Feel free to contact me with any questions about hosting a Biblical Studies Carnival this summer. Check out the Biblical Studies Carnival Master List at the top of this page to visit past carnivals.
Here is something that happened in the last week, tangentially related to biblical studies blogging. In March, Jacob Cerone noticed a familiar review published by Panayotis Coutsoumpos in the Review of Biblical Literature. It was obviously plagiarized from a review Cerone had written. He reported this to RBL, and the review was quickly withdrawn. But that was blood in the water to the twitter-verse. Isaac T. Soon, PhD started examining other reviews Coutsoumpos published, and it appears he regularly plagiarized book reviews, including a review of Frank Thielman’s Romans commentary from Reading Acts. The review was published in Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture, and as of April 1, the review is still on the Sage Journals website.
I did not know about any of this until Alex Aamodt from Spectrum Magazine contacted me. I did a quick phone interview with him, and his article was published on March 30, about the same time Sarah Einselen at The Roys Report ran a story with the improbable headline “Biblical Academia Rocked by Scholar’s Pattern of Plagiarism.” I doubt the vast majority of the biblical academic world had any idea who Panayotis Coutsoumpos was before last week, and the slight-less-than-vast majority still don’t know who is today.
Plagiarism is nothing new, and there have been some high-profile examples in recent years in academic writing. Some of those were unfortunate but, in some ways, understandable. In most cases, the scholar was not trying to steal and cheat; they made some lazy decisions and got caught. But Coutsoumpos consciously tried to cheat by claiming work that was not his own.
Academic book reviews are not high-stakes academics, and I doubt any book review editor has the time to run reviews through a website to check for plagiarism.