|
Mark Panel | Vuong
| Brownlee
Lecture |
Richlin | De
Troyer
The 2008
Spring Public Lecture Series
Thursday,
28 February, 7:30 p.m.: Panel Discussion
The Secret Gospel of Mark: Find or
Forgery?
Dennis R. MacDonald,
Presiding;
ALBRECHT
AUDITORIUM
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MacDonald |
Pearson |
Dart |
Robinson |
Meyer |
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Presiding over the panel and
analyzing the text from a literary perspective, Dennis MacDonald contributes
to the panel his wealth of understanding of both Christian scriptures and classical
texts, especially on topics related to Christian apocryphal writings and
imitations of Homer in ancient
Jewish & Christian writings. MacDonald is
director of the IAC and John Wesley Professor of New Testament at CST and
Professor of Religion at CGU. He also directs the IAC project Mimesis in
Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature. |
Birger Pearson is director
of the IAC's
Roots of Egyptian Christianity Project, and professor emeritus
at UC-Santa Barbara. His most recent work is Ancient Gnosticism:
Traditions and Literature (2007). In it, he "situates the advent of
Gnosticism within the Greco-Roman religious world and critically appraises
the sources." |
John Dart is
Christian Century News
editor (and former Religion News Reporter at the LA Times) and author
of the 2003 work, Decoding Mark, which Dart calls "the story of a
lifetime." In his book, Dart shows that the two-part "beloved young
man" episode was one of Mark's typical stories sandwiched around a
contrasting incident (here Mark 10:35-45). This and other literary
techniques tied to the episode belie claims that Morton Smith pulled a hoax. |
A respected biblical
scholar and coptologist, Gesine Robinson has years of experience working with
original texts and knows firsthand the complexities of preserving and
translating them, as well as answering questions of authenticity. Robinson
is director of the
Coptic Texts Editing Project at the IAC and teaches New
Testament at the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont. |
As translator of the
Tchacos codex
and member of the National Geographic team that made the Gospel of Judas
public, as well as one of the leading authorities on the Nag Hammadi texts,
Marvin Meyer brings a wealth of scholarship and experience to his views on
Secret Mark. Meyer is director of the IAC
Coptic Magical Texts project and Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University where
he also directs the
Albert Schweitzer Institute. |
Morton Smith’s publication of
Clement of
Alexandria and A Secret Gospel of Mark
in 1973 ignited a firestorm of
controversy among New Testament scholars that continues to rage thirty five
years later. At the core of his book is his claim to have discovered,
transcribed in the covers of a seventeenth-century edition of the letters of
Ignatius of Antioch, an authentic letter of Clement of Alexandria to a Theodore,
who had asked him about an esoteric version of the Gospel of Mark used to
instruct catechumens. Clement replied that there was such a document and
provided brief excerpts of it, one of which mentions a youth who was naked
except for a linen cloth and who spent the night with Jesus. Scholarly opinion
oscillates between those who consider the putative secret Gospel the earliest
version of Mark and those who consider Smith’s alleged text a forgery. Others
argue that even if Smith’s text is authentic, it only witnesses to a later
version of the Gospel interpolated by Christian libertines.
The IAC panel
represents
scholars at both extremes and in the middle. At stake are issues of modern
manuscript discoveries and forgeries, New Testament textual criticism, and the
literary sophistication of the Gospel of Mark.
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Tuesday, 25 March, 6:00 p.m., Visiting
Scholar Lily Vuong
Mary, the Temple, and Ritual
Purity in the Protevangelium of James
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Lily Vuong is a PhD candidate
at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, and is presently a visiting
researcher/scholar at Claremont Graduate University where she is finishing
up her dissertation entitled Accessing the Virgin: Gender and Purity in
the Protevangelium of James. Her area of study is in Early Christianity
with a special interest in New Testament Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal
writings.
Gender studies have also
played an important role in her research, especially in terms of its
construction and interpretation in early Christian literature. Other topics
of interest include the relationships between Judaism, Christianity, and
Greco-Roman culture and the formation of Jewish and Christian identities in
Late Antiquity.
This lecture is
co-sponsored by the IAC and the Women's Studies in Religion Program at the
CGU School of Religion. |
Lily Vuong |
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Thursday, 27 March, 7:30 p.m., Professor
Lester L. Grabbe
BROWNLEE LECTURE
(in Albrecht Auditorium)
Exit David and Solomon?:
The Current Debate on the
History of Ancient Israel
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Lester Grabbe
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CGU Alum
and student of WH Brownlee Lester L. Grabbe is head of the Department of
Theology at the University of Hull, UK, where he is also Professor of Hebrew
Bible and Early Judaism. Grabbe has authored numerous texts, including,
Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-historical Study of Religious
Specialists in Ancient Israel (1995) and the recent Ancient Israel: What
Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (2007). A frequent guest on both Viking
Radio and Radio Humberside to discuss such topics as: the Ten Commandments, the
Jewish festivals, the 4th of July, and Nostradamus and the millennium, Grabbe
has also lectured at both York and Lincoln Cathedrals. |
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Thursday, 17 April, 7:30 p.m., Professor Amy
Richlin
Looking East: Roman Comedy and
the Geo-Politics of Slavery
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Amy Richlin teaches
Latin Literature, History of Sexuality, and Feminist Theory as Professor
and Graduate Advisor in the Department of Classics at UCLA. Author of
The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (Yale
1983; rev. Oxford 1992), editor of Pornography and Representation in
Greece and Rome (Oxford 1992), and co-editor, with Nancy Sorkin
Rabinowitz, of Feminist Theory and the Classics (Routledge 1993),
Richlin recently saw her translation of Plautus' Rudens brought to
life onstage at the Getty Villa as the play Tug of War. That
translation is one of three in her 2005 work, Rome and the Mysterious
Orient, translations of three plays by Plautus with notes and
introductions, focusing on Roman attitudes to the Near East and Africa.
Her most recent work is Marcus Aurelius in Love (Univ of Chicago
Press 2007). In addition to her
30+ years of teaching and writing, Richlin founded women's crew at
Princeton while an undergrad there and on graduation won the Class of 1916
Cup, "awarded each year to the Princeton varsity letterman who continuing
in competition in his senior year achieved at graduation the highest
academic standing." |
Amy Richlin
photo credit:
Phil Channing, courtesy
of USC College Magazine
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Monday,
28 April, 7:30 p.m., Professor Kristin De Troyer
From Esther to Samuel:
Reflections on 10 years in Claremont
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Kristin De Troyer |
Kristin De
Troyer, director of the
TRANSLATION
AND INTERPRETATION
IN THE GREEK
ESDRAS
TRADITION
IAC Research Project, is Professor of Hebrew Bible at
Claremont School of
Theology and Professor of Religion at
Claremont Graduate University. De Troyer
focuses on the Second Temple Period and has developed a special interest in the
history of the Biblical Text, its translations and their hermeneutical aspects.
She has published books and articles on the different texts of the Book of
Esther and is currently writing a commentary on the Greek text of Esther.
Together with Professor Rosario Pintaudi (Florence, Italy) she is preparing the
edition of an Old Greek Joshua and Leviticus papyrus from the Schøyen
collection. Her other interests are hermeneutics and gender studies, as
evidenced by her recent work, Wholly Woman-Holy Blood: A Feminist Critique of
Purity and Impurity (TPI, 2003). De Troyer's lecture is co-sponsored by the
Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center and will be held on the CST campus, Butler
201. |
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Unless otherwise noted, all lectures begin at 7:30 p.m.
in the Library of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity
Lectures are free and open to the public.
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