New York Times features A.-J. Levine, Jewish Annotated New Testament

I just saw a New York Times article, published back in late November 2011, that features Amy-Jill Levine and focuses on the new Jewish Annotated New Testament:

This volume is thus for anybody interested in a Bible more attuned to Jewish sources. But it is of special interest to Jews who “may believe that any annotated New Testament is aimed at persuasion, if not conversion,” Drs. Levine and Brettler write in their preface. “This volume, edited and written by Jewish scholars, should not raise that suspicion.”

The article balances both commentary about Levine's lifelong interest in New Testament, as well as the current culture of Bible publication, with its preoccupation with "lifestyle" themed editions.

An extended interview with Bible translator Robert Alter

The Jewish Daily Forward has an interview with Robert Alter posted recently.

"Alter argues that the KJV is frequently inaccurate, and that both the King James and its successors fail to convey in English the refined narrative style and linguistic rhythms of the Hebrew original. It is an argument that is all the more persuasive because it is backed by groundbreaking contemporary scholarship on the literary artistry of the Bible — namely, his own."

Read the rest of the interview here.

Make a wish...

The other day my friend Maria and I were discussing what she called the "Magic 8 Ball" approach to the Bible - basically where you express magical thinking by assuming that whenever you open a Bible randomly, it will answer your question and tell you what to do.

So I was very pleased to run across this cartoon by David Hayward this morning:














You can see this image in its original post, and see other works by Hayward, by clicking here.

Bart Ehrman to speak at MTSU Friday, Feb 18th

If folks are in or near Murfreesboro (about 40 miles south of Nashville) this weekend, this will be worth your time.

The Middle Tennessee State University Department of Philosophy
is happy to announce a lecture by

Professor Bart D. Ehrman
"Misquoting Jesus: Scribes Who Changed the Bible and Readers Who May Never Know"

Friday, February 18 at 3:30
State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building

The lecture is free and open to the public. Professor Ehrman will be signing copies of his books immediately following his lecture.

Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Professor with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among Professor Ehrman's fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
He is the author of over twenty books. Among his most recent are a Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), an assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press), and three New York Times Bestsellers: Jesus Interrupted ( an account of scholarly views of the New Testament), God's Problem (an assessment of the biblical views of suffering), and Misquoting Jesus (an overview of the changes found in the surviving copies of the New Testament and of the scribes who produced them). His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

The lecture is part of the annual Applied Philosophy Lyceum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with appreciation to the Distinguished Lecture Committee.

The Book: The Bible Illuminated discussion at 2010 SBL

There will be a discussion of the Bible Illuminated series at this November's Society of Biblical Literature conference in Atlanta.

Ideology, Culture, and Translation/Bible and Visual Art (S22-321)
Monday, Nov 22, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Room: A701 - Marriott Marquis
This session will focus on the recently published Bible Illuminated (2008). Additional information and a sample chapter are available at http://illuminatedworld.com . Bible Illuminated is a bright, dynamic and evocative interpretation of the Bible. Intermixed with the text are vivid images, all meant to inspire discussion and instigate the interchange of perspectives.

Jesus Built my Hot Rod, Redux

A couple of years ago, when I got started analyzing the material aspects of Scripture, it was as a fun continuation of my work in my doctoral dissertation. I wrote the dissertation, in part, as a meditation on The Golfer's Bible, from Holman Christian Bible Publishers. I was intrigued then, as I am today, with the blatant (crass?) melding of American consumer recreation and lifestyle activities with the physical objects we call Bibles.

Now this is not the place to launch into a tirade about these practices. Maybe, in fact, these actions by publishers to make the Bible "more accessible" are not so bad. I have my opinions, obviously, but I will also admit that those opinions have shifted back and forth as I continue this research. So I will let the reader, ultimately, be her own judge on these matters.

But sometimes it gets hard to restrain myself.

So in earlier posts I have also alluded to the Mossy Oak Personal Size Giant Print Bible from Thomas Nelson. I also quoted a little from its introduction in the previous post. I will have more to say, in the coming months, about this particular Bible (it forms part of a chapter in my forthcoming book). For now, I will simply gesture to it again, saying it was a stranger find for me, at first, than the Golfer's Bible. For a long time, it was my favorite example of this phenomenon of "designer Scripture." Moreover, when I tell people what I do, they often respond by asking me, "So what's the best Bible?" or some variant of that question. Because I think that might be the wrong question to ask, for several months the Mossy Oak has been the Bible I recommended [1].

Let us thrust all that to the side, however. Ladies and gentlemen, do not doubt for a moment we cannot push the envelope. We can. Do not doubt for a moment that a Bible can become weirder, more absurd. It can. We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better. Stronger. Faster.

Ladies and gentleman, start your engines. I give you... The NASCAR Stock Car Racing Edition of the Holy Bible, from Zondervan publishers.

I first saw this Bible in the Memphis BookStar a few weeks before Christmas, and was going to write about it then, but I got distracted by the holidays and then the birth of my daughter. Now Hugh Pyper has written a really good piece analyzing the NASCAR Bible for the SBL Forum.

Read the full text of his column here.

One of the things you notice about the Bible, when leafing through it, is that the "inspirational" portions (which highlight various celebrities on the stock car racing circuit, along with some bromides about the role of various Gospel passages in inspiring them to greatness) are sort of randomly spaced throughout the book, leading to some interesting ideological juxtapositions.

Pyper then points out how these sections, printed as they are on a different paper stock from the "rest" of the Bible, give the Bible a strange tactile feel. He surmises that the publishers did not give much thought to the overall effect of these juxtapositions:

In the end, however, what is most striking about the SCR version is how little interaction there is between the inserts and the text. The full-color glossy inserts contrast with the plain printed texts and tend to be the points at which the Bible falls open. The distribution of the articles appears to be random and mechanical, spaced equally throughout the Old and New Testaments. Although the inserts include some, but surprisingly few, biblical references, they seldom urge the reader to refer to wider passages in the Bible and certainly give no advice on how to tackle the more difficult texts that surround them.

This observation about the materiality of the product is exactly right, as far as I am concerned. When we examine these sorts of Bibles, we should be asking precisely these questions. How does the overall effect, visual, tactile, and ideological, influence the reader's possible reading sof the "bare text"?

At the end, Pyper offers a scathing conclusion: "What this version represents, almost in spite of itself, then, is the relevance of the Bible as symbol in the continuing debate over the nature of American identity, and the irrelevance of much of the Bible as text in that debate."

While I am quite certain, trends being what they are, that this will by no means be the weirdest Bible we shall ever see, it is the current reigning champion. In their race to reach all manner of audiences among the "unchurched," I am waiting for the publishers to come out with versions of Scripture targeted on other popular lifestyle demographics, like the readers of Soldier of Fortune and Penthouse. Though I am usually not one for slippery slopes, given what is on offer already on the bookshelves, I fear we will not have all that long to wait.


[1] I should, and probably will, devote a post in the near future to this phenomenon. I hang out a lot in the Bible sections of bookstores, and it makes sense that the people I run into might be looking for guidance from knowledgeable folks like me or the bookstore clearks to help them choose. But this question also comes up in some stranger settings (like my dissertation defense, for example). I'd like to explore the desire that lives at the heart of readers to have the "right" Bible or the "best" Bible. My short answer, then as now as always, comes back to where I consistently find authority and "rightness" to dwell: not in any Bible itself, but in the institutions and interpretations that surround a given Bible. So, kids, if you want to know the best Bible to read, go ask your priest.


Note: Material Scripture blog is an Amazon Marketplace Affiliate. If you choose to purchase an item through the links in this post, we will receive a modest commission.

Solar Powered Audio Bibles deployed in Haiti

An evangelical organization known as Faith Comes by Hearing has been getting press in these past weeks because of their involvement in getting a number of solar-powered audio Bibles into Haiti as part of the relief efforts sent in the wake of the earthquakes.

This is certainly not the first audio Bible. There are pocket sized MP3 Bibles like the Go Bible that have been on the market for several years. The solar powered angle, however, is a new and intriguing feature.

The main Bible is known as "The Proclaimer," and their website describes it like this:

We consider the Proclaimer to be a gift from God. Why? Because the inspiration for it came during three days of fasting and prayer by the entire staff of Faith Comes By Hearing. The Proclaimer is a digital player dedicated to playing God's Word in the local heart language.

The organization also sells "BibleSticks" - basically MP3 players that contain files for the audio Bible. They currently are marketing a regular version (in white) and a military version (in black).

There are a couple of stories about this on NPR, one for All Tech Considered, and a short blurb from the business news bloc (which was where I first heard about this).

The organization boasts the world's largest catalog of audio Bibles. In looking over their website, they seem to be scrupulous in not letting on their denominational affiliations (although one can discern a bit of this through their links and partners page).

They offer a fair selection of English versions to choose from (including a New American Bible version, which I found surprising at first), as well as a vast array of "heart languages," which are indigenous dialects from around the globe.

The King James Bible: If It Was Good Enough for Jesus, It's Good Enough for CBS

I was skimming the web for references to "black bonded Bibles" just now -- you know, those staid, traditional, non-flashy and quite sober behemoths of days gone by. Heirloom Bibles of stitched and fragrant Genuine Moroccan Leather. Gift Bibles given and given and given from year to everlasting year. What the President gets sworn in with. You know, those kind of Bibles

I had originally intended this to be a short post about the video I came across, which I have embedded below, where Denzel Washington is discussing his involvement in the 2007 audio Bible, The Bible Experience, which apparently has been a runaway bestseller.



After watching the video, however, I began to read the article, from CBS News Online, accompanying it. And, well. suddenly this post became a little more pointed.

The article is largely about the increasing trend of recent years to publish "designer Bibles," something that I certainly enjoy seeing reported. My trouble with the article, though, concerns several grossly misleading and inaccurate statements made by its author, Caitlin A. Johnson.

Let's take this one, for example, from right at the start of the piece:

In the beginning, there was the King James Bible: 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses — usually bound in sober black leather. The King James Bible was the English language standard for more than 400 years.

Okay. Hold on. Never mind the versions in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, used by the Church for over a millennium. A statement like this also manages to erase the long (and thorny) history of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and a host of other lesser-known, but no less influential, predecessors to the King James Version in English.

Now yes, Johnson is partially correct in her characterization of the influence and importance of the King James. If this were the only such statement in the article, and if the article otherwise had carefully-researched claims, I might have let it slide. Not so. Johnson later makes the statement, "For more than 400 years, the King James version was the first — and for many, the only — Bible. "

The first alternative noted in the article does not occur until "September 1966, [when] an alternative was created with today's English version, known as 'Good News for Modern Man,' published by the non-profit American Bible society."

These statements reflect the popular misconceptions surrounding Bible "origins." The notion, as the article asserts, that the Bible has been available for sale "year after year...for 2,000 years" (as Sara Nelson, of Publishers Weekly, claims) is patently untrue. While you can say that commodities that begin to look like what we call a Bible have been part of commerce since before the invention of the movable type press, it is really not until the late 17th century that you can locate the beginnings of "book trade," in the manner that Nelson means.

The last bone of contention I have with the piece comes in response to this:

"It's the best seller of all times," Abyssinian Baptist pastor Dr. Calvin Butts said. "It has to be. It's got everything you would want in a book: sex, violence, intrigue, mystery, the supernatural — it's all here."

The "it has to be" that Dr. Butts asserts is a pretty common sentiment among laypeople in the West. We assume the hegemony of the Bible to be a worldwide phenomenon that simply cannot be touched by any other book.

However, while the Bible is definitely high up there on the list of bestsellers of all time (and the list is, admittedly, a hard one to tabulate - after all, are we talking sales, or copies in print, or...) there is a good chance that another book written in response to a charismatic individual, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, actually holds the title.

Unfortunately, the historical, exegetical, and political complexities that arise in the wake of this tension between Jesus and Mao seem far beyond the ken of the writers and "newspeople" associated with CBS, who cannot even seem to get the facts about the King James right. Shame.