The end of the year sees me bringing together a medley of mortality, some more famous in their deaths than in their lives, some deaths sudden, shocking and early, others coming as a 'natural' end. These struck me for a variety of reasons.
Two First World War veterans, whose lives had been, at the Whitehall Remembrance Day parade, an annual reminder of the lunacy let upon the world by WWI, and the ghoulish visions of the battlefields of France:
Henry Allingham, who died on July 18, aged 113, the last known survivor of the RNAS to serve at sea and abroad during WWI; and Henry J ('Harry') Patch, who died onJuly 25, aged 111, the last "Tommy" of WWI.
One single symbolic death, utterly different in kind and context, the news - or rather, the video - of whose death spread round the world like a bushfire via the internet, despite the 'best' efforts of the Iranian censors to block it:
'Neda' (Neda Salehi Agha Soltan), who died on 22 June, aged 27, shot in the heart during the demonstrations in Tehran against the the recent elections. She would have been a year or so older than our own youngest daughter.
http://nedasvoice.com/
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/.../article6557858.ece - 6 hours ago
http://www.france24.com/en/20090622-death-neda-becomes-face-protest-iran-opposition-tehran-video-footage
Googling 'Neda' and 'crucifix' will take you to at least a couple of web-sites - cornerstone-forum.blogspot.com/2009/07 (Reflections on Faith and Culture) for 6 July, and newcitizenship.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archiv... (Politeia) - which take seriously the suggestion, on the basis of photos of her apparently wearing a crucifix, that Neda was a Christian. Others argue that her name does not allow that conclusion to be drawn, since it is not one of those regularly known as denoting Christian religious affiliation.
Three New Testament scholars:
Martin Hengel, who died on 2 July, 2009, (sic: not, of course, 2010, as incorrectly and regrettably entered on my earlier blog!), was one of - if not the - most oustanding New Testament scholar and theologian of early Christianity, indeed of the whole of the ancient Graeco-Roman Hellenistic world;
Graham Stanton, Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University from 1998 to 2007, and for over twenty years before that, Professor of New Testament and King's Colege, London, who died on 18 July, aged 69. Though much of his professional work was done on St Matthew's Gospel, his major contribution was to re-engage with the topic and language of 'Gospel' in a scholarly way, it having been ignored as a serious topic of Historical-Jesus study for decades. His The Gospels and Jesus (2002, 2nd ed.), but much more his Jesus and Gospel (2004) and the Festschrift The Written Gospel, edited (2005) by Markus Bockmuehl and Donald Hagner in his honour, all bear testimony to years of study, hard work and positive contributions in this area;
www.telegraph.co.uk/.../obituaries/...obituaries/.../Graham-Stanton.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/graham-stanton-obituary
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6800946.ece -
John Sweet, Fellow and Chaplain of Selwyn College, Cambridge, from 1958, and a well-known figure in the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University, and well beyond, who died on July 2, aged 82. A delightful, unassuming man, the encouragement of his life is to know that you do not have to write many books to be a scholar. His 1979 Pelican Commentary on Revelation is a gem of precision, simplicity and lack of pretention.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6795017.ece
www.telegraph.co.uk/.../obituaries/...obituaries/.../Canon-John-Sweet.html -
Two outstanding modern contemporary dance choreographers:
Merce Cunningham, 'the outstanding figure of contemporary dance,' who died on July 26, aged 90; and Pina Bausch, another outstanding creative interpreter and choreogapher, who died on 30 June, at 68, a mere five days after being diagnosed with cancer. Having been for many years inolved with the Tanztheater Wuppertal, she explored virtually the whole range of artistic expression, from the extreme brutality and violence of Bluebeard through the provocative but less offensive mid-ground Rite of Spring to the recent quasi-innocent Nelken(Carnations). These two were acknowledged giants in their field.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/01/pina-bausch-obituary-dance
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture.../Pina-Bausch.html
In the world of music, the sadness of the death of Richard Hickox, aged only 60, last November (24 November, 2008), still resounds. He was a doyen among conductors of an extraordinary range of music, and in particular left a 'progidious recorded legacy of British music,' having been widely loved and appreciated throughout the musical world.
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/.../obituary-richard-hickox
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5225000.ece
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/richard-hickox-conductor-who-left-a-prodigious-recorded-legacy-of-british-music-1033825.html
Then,this year, two female sopranos:
Hildegard Behrens, the German lyric-dramatic operatic soprano and magnificent exponent of the Wagner-Strauss repertoire, who died on 18 August, aged 72;
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6802369.ece
www.guardian.co.uk/music/.../obituary-hildegard-behrens
www.independent.co.uk › News ›
and Elisabeth Soderstrom, who died on 20 November, aged 82, leaving behind a legacy of a fabulous lyric soprano voice across a whole range of music.
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/.../elisabeth-soderstrom-obituary
www.telegraph.co.uk/.../obituaries/...obituaries/...obituaries/.../Elisabeth-Soderstrom.html
www.independent.co.uk/.../obituaries/elisabeth-sderstrm-soprano-admired-in-britain-for-her-interpretations-of-richard-strauss-1826471.html
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6927434.ece
Sic transit gloria mundi. And/ but: deo gratias. 'So...whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God' (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Thursday, 31 December 2009
Monday, 21 December 2009
Tribute to Martin Hengel
Before the year ends, and before Christmas begins, I want to honour the memory of Martin Hengel, without doubt one of the greatest New Testament scholars of the past century, if not of several centuries, who in many ways has re-written major areas of NT sholarship. His particular contribution was to underline the very early development of Christology in a fundamentally Jewish matrix, as against the previous view that it was a late development in a Hellenistic milieu.
Martin Hengel died on 2 July, 2010, at the age of 82. I visited him during my brief sabbatical in Tuebingen in January/ February 2006, and sat in one of his studies, a room perhaps 30' long and 10' high, lined with books. Peter Stuhlmacher, a colleague of his at Tuebingen, said that he had 'perhaps the finest private library in Europe.'
In 1974 (!), his Judaism and Hellenism (two volumes: one of text, one of notes) instantly blew apart the long-held distinction between the two supposedly quite distinct categories of thought which had so long dominated NT research. Instead, he noted that the Palestine of Jesus had been under Hellenistic rule for over 350 years, and in consequence that 'Jewish Galilee was not more but less Hellenized than Jerusalem (Between Jesus and Paul, 1983, 7), that 'Syria... had the strongest Jewish Diaspora,' and that 'virtually all the Gentile-Christian missionaries of the first twenty-five years were Jewish Christians' (Between Jesus ahnd Paul, 45).
His monographs The Son of God (1976), Crucifixion (1977) and The Atonement (1981) are all brief stunning scholarly works. 'Paul's conception of the Son of God...was certainly not his own creation but goes back to earlier community tradition' (Son of God, 15). 'In the Son, God himself came to men and was involved with their deepest distress, therein to reveal his love to all creatures. Only as the broken figure on the cross was Jesus - paradoxically - the exalted one...' (76)
Crucifixion is a detailed historical study of a barbaric form of execution -the 'supreme Roman penalty' (and reportedly being used currently against Christians in Sudan). 'The heart of the Christian message...ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people' (Crucifixion, 5). 'The one thing which made Paul's preaching the offensive 'word of the cross' was the fact that in it the apostle interpreted the death of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. of a specific man, on the cross, as the death of the incarnate Son of God and Kyrios, proclaiming the event as the eschatological event of salvation for all men' (20). On p. 50 he quotes Quintilian to the effect that crosses ought to be set up on the busiest roads as a blunt, obscene deterrent to everyone. 'That this crucified Jew, Jesus Christ, could truly be a divine being sent on earth, God's Son, the Lord of all and the coming judge of the world, must inevitably have been thought by any educated man to be utter "madness" and presumptuousness' (83).
The Atonement considers ancient forms of self-sacrifice, both Greek and Jewish. Hengel then investigates the origins of the doctrine in the NT, particularly with reference to Isaiah 53, and writes: 'That the man Jesus died meant little, for many men were crucified in Jewish Palestine at that time; incomparably more astonishing was the confession that this man Jesus, executed as a criminal, was raised by God' (40).
Taking up elements of his major early study of The Zealots (ET 1989; original German 1961, revd. ed. 1976!) in his The Pre-Christian Paul (1991), Hengel rejected another false split (that between politics and religion) by showing that Pharisaism was easily combined with zealotry, indeed that Pharisaism (in aspects of its origins), as a movement for the purifying of the land ('the ritual sanctification of everyday life in Eretz Israel', 30), was precisely the foundation and motivation of Paul's own persecution of the early believers in Jesus. The 'typically Palestinian phenomenon' of 'zeal for the law' 'between the time of the Maccabees and 70CE' 'is...attested in our sources only for Jewish Palestine' (41). The zealots - like the Taliban - intentionally combined theology and politics. This required Paul's theology and politics alike to be radically overthrown by the appearance of the risen Jesus to him.
In his essays in Between Jesus and Paul (1983), Hengel continued to press back the origins of early Christology. In one of his most significant sentences he writes (39-40): 'the christological development from Jesus as far as Paul took place within about eighteen years, a short space of time for such an intellectual process. In essentials more happened in christology within these few years than in the whole subequent seven hundred years of church history.' 'The multiplicity of christological titles does not mean a multiplicity of exclusive "christologies" but an accumulative glorification of Jesus' (41). And so: 'It is astonishing how quickly the post-Easter christology of the Greek-speaking community...interpreted this "sending" of Jesus in terms of an eschatological sending of "the Son of God" (Gal. 4:4f., Rom. 8:3f). This is a pre-Pauline formula...which probably already developed in the first ten years of earliest Christian history (178, n. 76).
His Studies in Early Christology (1995) includes a long esay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' (1-72) in which he overturns the assumptions of a century and more concerning the 'non-Messianic' nature of Jesus' ministry and 'self-consciousness'. For him, Paul's understanding of God and Christ did not originate with Paul, but is 'ultimately rooted in Jesus' own self-understanding' (ix). Before Jesus, there was no firmly-established conception of what the Messiah would do or be (33) - only a whole range of ideas based on different passages from the Old Testament. Additionally, 'Jewish eschatology knows no genuine "transcendence", one might also say, no clear distinction betwen "immanence" and "transcendence". The earthly and heavenly world formed one continuum, were bound together and continually influenced one another.' (35-6)
(A recent volume by Michael Bird: Are You the One Who Is To Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question (Baker, 2009) is at least partly indebted to the writings of Martin Hengel.)
The essay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' closes with words that seem apposite for this season of Advent and Christmas, and I will conclude with them: 'The Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, became the Messiah of Israel in order to fulfil the promises made to the fathers, and he became for us, who have come afterwards from all the nations of the earth, "the author of our salvation", because we experience in him what the love of God is, that we might, for the sake of such grace, praise as our Father, the God of Israel and Father of Jesus Christ' (72).
In memoriam aeternam!
Martin Hengel died on 2 July, 2010, at the age of 82. I visited him during my brief sabbatical in Tuebingen in January/ February 2006, and sat in one of his studies, a room perhaps 30' long and 10' high, lined with books. Peter Stuhlmacher, a colleague of his at Tuebingen, said that he had 'perhaps the finest private library in Europe.'
In 1974 (!), his Judaism and Hellenism (two volumes: one of text, one of notes) instantly blew apart the long-held distinction between the two supposedly quite distinct categories of thought which had so long dominated NT research. Instead, he noted that the Palestine of Jesus had been under Hellenistic rule for over 350 years, and in consequence that 'Jewish Galilee was not more but less Hellenized than Jerusalem (Between Jesus and Paul, 1983, 7), that 'Syria... had the strongest Jewish Diaspora,' and that 'virtually all the Gentile-Christian missionaries of the first twenty-five years were Jewish Christians' (Between Jesus ahnd Paul, 45).
His monographs The Son of God (1976), Crucifixion (1977) and The Atonement (1981) are all brief stunning scholarly works. 'Paul's conception of the Son of God...was certainly not his own creation but goes back to earlier community tradition' (Son of God, 15). 'In the Son, God himself came to men and was involved with their deepest distress, therein to reveal his love to all creatures. Only as the broken figure on the cross was Jesus - paradoxically - the exalted one...' (76)
Crucifixion is a detailed historical study of a barbaric form of execution -the 'supreme Roman penalty' (and reportedly being used currently against Christians in Sudan). 'The heart of the Christian message...ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people' (Crucifixion, 5). 'The one thing which made Paul's preaching the offensive 'word of the cross' was the fact that in it the apostle interpreted the death of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. of a specific man, on the cross, as the death of the incarnate Son of God and Kyrios, proclaiming the event as the eschatological event of salvation for all men' (20). On p. 50 he quotes Quintilian to the effect that crosses ought to be set up on the busiest roads as a blunt, obscene deterrent to everyone. 'That this crucified Jew, Jesus Christ, could truly be a divine being sent on earth, God's Son, the Lord of all and the coming judge of the world, must inevitably have been thought by any educated man to be utter "madness" and presumptuousness' (83).
The Atonement considers ancient forms of self-sacrifice, both Greek and Jewish. Hengel then investigates the origins of the doctrine in the NT, particularly with reference to Isaiah 53, and writes: 'That the man Jesus died meant little, for many men were crucified in Jewish Palestine at that time; incomparably more astonishing was the confession that this man Jesus, executed as a criminal, was raised by God' (40).
Taking up elements of his major early study of The Zealots (ET 1989; original German 1961, revd. ed. 1976!) in his The Pre-Christian Paul (1991), Hengel rejected another false split (that between politics and religion) by showing that Pharisaism was easily combined with zealotry, indeed that Pharisaism (in aspects of its origins), as a movement for the purifying of the land ('the ritual sanctification of everyday life in Eretz Israel', 30), was precisely the foundation and motivation of Paul's own persecution of the early believers in Jesus. The 'typically Palestinian phenomenon' of 'zeal for the law' 'between the time of the Maccabees and 70CE' 'is...attested in our sources only for Jewish Palestine' (41). The zealots - like the Taliban - intentionally combined theology and politics. This required Paul's theology and politics alike to be radically overthrown by the appearance of the risen Jesus to him.
In his essays in Between Jesus and Paul (1983), Hengel continued to press back the origins of early Christology. In one of his most significant sentences he writes (39-40): 'the christological development from Jesus as far as Paul took place within about eighteen years, a short space of time for such an intellectual process. In essentials more happened in christology within these few years than in the whole subequent seven hundred years of church history.' 'The multiplicity of christological titles does not mean a multiplicity of exclusive "christologies" but an accumulative glorification of Jesus' (41). And so: 'It is astonishing how quickly the post-Easter christology of the Greek-speaking community...interpreted this "sending" of Jesus in terms of an eschatological sending of "the Son of God" (Gal. 4:4f., Rom. 8:3f). This is a pre-Pauline formula...which probably already developed in the first ten years of earliest Christian history (178, n. 76).
His Studies in Early Christology (1995) includes a long esay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' (1-72) in which he overturns the assumptions of a century and more concerning the 'non-Messianic' nature of Jesus' ministry and 'self-consciousness'. For him, Paul's understanding of God and Christ did not originate with Paul, but is 'ultimately rooted in Jesus' own self-understanding' (ix). Before Jesus, there was no firmly-established conception of what the Messiah would do or be (33) - only a whole range of ideas based on different passages from the Old Testament. Additionally, 'Jewish eschatology knows no genuine "transcendence", one might also say, no clear distinction betwen "immanence" and "transcendence". The earthly and heavenly world formed one continuum, were bound together and continually influenced one another.' (35-6)
(A recent volume by Michael Bird: Are You the One Who Is To Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question (Baker, 2009) is at least partly indebted to the writings of Martin Hengel.)
The essay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' closes with words that seem apposite for this season of Advent and Christmas, and I will conclude with them: 'The Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, became the Messiah of Israel in order to fulfil the promises made to the fathers, and he became for us, who have come afterwards from all the nations of the earth, "the author of our salvation", because we experience in him what the love of God is, that we might, for the sake of such grace, praise as our Father, the God of Israel and Father of Jesus Christ' (72).
In memoriam aeternam!
Saturday, 28 November 2009
"Syrian Islamic revival has woman's touch"
After far too long, with endless ideas coming and going (and going nowhere), a brief note of an article just seen on the BBC news web-site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7710822.stm
As so often, there seem to be concurrent movements in both conservative and flexible directions. The situation in Syria is worth watching: Assad's wooing of the West, combined with the ?destruction of the Baath party in Iraq following the invasion in 2003, and an increasing fascination with the earliest days of Christian faith in the area (from Paul in Damascus onwards), and a consequently greater number of visits to Syria being offered on the market, all make for an interesting resurgence.
As so often, there seem to be concurrent movements in both conservative and flexible directions. The situation in Syria is worth watching: Assad's wooing of the West, combined with the ?destruction of the Baath party in Iraq following the invasion in 2003, and an increasing fascination with the earliest days of Christian faith in the area (from Paul in Damascus onwards), and a consequently greater number of visits to Syria being offered on the market, all make for an interesting resurgence.
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