I am always looking for volunteers to host upcoming Biblical Studies carnivals on your website. People are doing really good work on podcasts and YouTube. It would be great if someone did a carnival featuring some of the best academic podcasts.
What does a Carnival look like? Alert readers will notice that this month’s carnival focused on the Hebrew Bible and and New Testament blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. If you are more interested in Theology and Church History, I would love to have you curate a list of the best posts in these categories. Here is the November 2023 Carnival. Contact me (email, plong42 @ gmail.com). You can follow me on Twitter and DM me if that is your style. I am on Threads @plong42; feel free to follow me there, too.
Ben the Amateur Exegete posted the Biblical Studies Carnival #215 for February 2024. Ben has hosted before and as usual he has done a great job. What I appreciate about Ben’s carnivals is that he is much more aware of podcasts than I am. I do not listen to very many, and certainly not with any regularity. But there were a few on Ben’s list that caught my eye (or, I guess, my ear). and follow him on Twitter (or X, or whatever it is called these days).
Jim West is up for the March carnival, posting on April 1. Feel free to contact him with suggestions.
I always look for volunteers to host upcoming Biblical Studies carnivals on your website. People are doing really good work on podcasts and YouTube. It would be great if someone did a carnival featuring some of the best academic podcasts.
What does a Carnival look like? Ben’s Carnival is a great example, and here is the November 2023 Carnival. Contact me (email, plong42 @ gmail.com). You can follow me on Twitter and DM me if that is your style. I am on threads with the same name, but it is quiet there.
Jacob Prahlow hosts the Biblical Studies Carnival #214 for January 2024 at Pursuing Veritas. Jacob is the founder and editor of The Conciliar Post and has been blogging for many years. His carnival starts with a re-telling of Lord of the Rings…with slightly messianic overtones. The first time I met Jacob (in real life) was at a Midwest ETS at Moody in Chicago. He was giving a paper in Clement of Rome (I think I recall that right). I had a student interested in Clement at the time, so he and I showed up for Jacob’s paper, and we were the only two who came. When we walked into the room, Jacob was sitting there by himself, looking so very sad and lonely. But it was a good paper; my student used some of it in a class he was working on for me.
I am always looking for volunteers to host upcoming Biblical Studies carnivals on your website. People are doing really good work on podcasts and YouTube. It would be great if someone did a carnival featuring some of the best academic podcasts. What does a Carnival look like? Jacob’s current carnival is a great example, and here is the November 2023 Carnival. Contact me (email, plong42 @ gmail.com). You can follow me on Twitter (or whatever it is called these days), @plong42. I am on threads with the same name, but it is really quiet there.
Once upon a time, many many years ago, there was nothing. And then Jim Davila and Mark Goodacre started things called ‘blogs’. These were places where they shared news and insights into things Hebrew Bible and New Testament (respectively). Then a third joined the fun and a blog for the whole Bible was born. Given birth, in fact, by yours truly. The history of the movement is described in a 2010 essay and made available here. If you’re interested in the birth of bible blogs.
Next month, long-time blogger Jacob Prahlow will host the carnival at Pursuing Veritas. Jacob is the founder and editor of The Conciliar Post. I would love to talk with you about hosting a Biblical Studies Carnival on your website. There are people doing really good work on podcasts and YouTube, it would be great if someone did a carnival featuring some of the best academic podcasts. What does a Carnival look like? Look over Jim’s for this month and here is The November 2023 Carnival, featuring the best of November 2023. Then contact me (email, plong42 @ gmail.com).
Welcome to Biblical Studies Carnival #212 for November 2023. For most of 2023, Jim West and I have been trading off carnivals. We both enjoy doing the carnivals (it is hard to know what Jim thinks, he is so shy about sharing his feelings). But I really want to have a few more volunteers in 2024 to keep the Biblical Studies Carnivals going.
Contributors at A Place for Truth started a nice series on the Minor Prophets, “Majoring on the Minors.” Here is Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Jonah, Nahum. Subscribe to their blog for the rest of the series in December.
For the entire month of November, Bob MacDonald has worked through the Psalms (starting here with Psalm 62:10). He calls these posts a “PsalmTweet.” Following his method of creating music for the Psalms, these are fascinating snippets of his larger project. Follow him on Twitter (or whatever they are calling it these days), @drmacdonald.
Tommy Wasserman revisits Peter Head’s 2009 SBL paper on “The Marginalia of Codex Vaticanus: Putting the Distigmai (Formerly known as ‘Umlauts’) in Their Place.” He summarizes Ira Rabin’s SBL 2023 paper. He concludes: “To come full circle, we are back to Peter Head’s paper from SBL in 2009, in which he presented a comparison of the location of the distigmai with the published text of Erasmus reflecting MSS available in his time and he had found that in the gospels there was a 92% match between Erasmus edition and the distigmai”
Tony Burke, “What More Do You Need? The Next Wave in Christian Apocrypha Texts and Translations”. This is Burke’s paper presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. This paper assesses the impact of the More New Testament Apocrypha series (Volume Two, reviewed here; Volume Three, reviewed here). “Will there be an MNTA 4 or 5 or, God help us, 6?” Burke teases us with a list of possible apocrypha to appear in future volumes. Burke also posted a list of Christian Apocrypha sessions at the 2o23 SBL sessions.
David Swartz celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Declaration, the evangelical left’s founding document with many links to Ron Sider-related articles. Follow the link, read the list of signees, and ask yourself if any name on that list would be considered an evangelical in today’s America.
Lynneth Renberg on Israel, Palestine, and Medieval Bias in Modern Headlines. This is an excellent essay tracing medieval discrimination like blood libel and Bernard of Clairvaux. De Laude Novae Militiae, which argued Muslims were malefactors– agents of evil.
Jacob Randolph has a timely two-part essay: “What About the Palestinians? Southern Baptists vs. Southern Baptist Missionaries.” Part One and Part Two. The article is on the history of Southern Baptist perceptions of Palestinians after the creation of the state of Israel.
Megan S. Nutzman. Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine. Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Reviewed by Mika Ahuvia).
Steven D. Fraade, The Damascus Document, Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Tianruo Jiang).
Oscar E. Jiménez. Metaphors in the Narrative of Ephesians 2:11–22: Motion towards Maximal Proximity and Higher Status. Linguistic Biblical Studies 20. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Review by Kai Akagi.
Constantine Campbell, The Letter to the Ephesians, Pillar New Testament Commentary; Eerdmans 2023. Reviewed by Thomas Creedy. Creedy also overspent at ETS/SBL.
Jim West has a new book coming on Beza (here is a link to the cover so you can prepare yourself to buy several copies).
A Few Open Access Academic Resources
When Jim West isn’t making Luther memes, he posts some valuable links to open-access resources. This means you can download a PDF copy of a very expensive volume for free. Here are a few highlights from this month:
Michael Bird reviews his week at ETS and SBL. I appreciate that he overlooked me when I ran into him in a restaurant. I nearly knocked him into a table of appetizers. #SorryMichael
