Divinity United

The Spring 2014 Scripture and Theology Coloquium at Wycliffe College , University of Toronto will be held May 9, 9am to 4pm. Refreshments and lunch provided. The topic of this colloquium is Ecclesiastes. There is a great line-up, including Tremper Longman (Westmont College), Daniel Treier (Wheaton), Daniel Driver (my OT colleage at Tyndale), Ray Van Leeuwen (Eastern), and Chris Seitz (Wycliffe). The colloquia are always an excellent integration of biblical and systematic theology.

Recently the Guardian Data Blog brought together a number of data images of the Bible in a post entitled "Holy Infographics: the Bible Visualised." The above image is the first of those images. I think that the image itself is actually quite beautiful in the rainbow like arcing of color, especially when the high resolution image is viewed (find that here ). The image is attributed to Christoph Römhild and Chris Harrison. And the following description of the image is given:   "This is about how the bible speaks to itself - or the textual cross-references within it. The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate between white and light gray and the length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect." This ap...

The McMaster Bingham Colloquium will be held on June 8, 2013, and the title of this year's Bingham Colloquium is "Rejection: God's Refugees". The schedule can be found here . The description of the one day colloquium that will revolve around the topic of Diaspora is as follows: "God’s people have always lived as exiles and refugees–from the ancient Israelites to Christians throughout history. This conference explores what it means for God’s people of any age to live as those rejected by their surrounding cultures, and living in the world as refugees. For some, this takes the character of spiritual isolation, living a life of faith within a hostile alien culture. For others, this means living outside their land of origin among strangers and even those hostile to them and their beliefs. This conference explores what it means to be God’s refugees in four broad sweeps–from the Old Testament and its tales of exile, to the Second Temple period and Jewish...

James L. Kugel has an essay entitled "The Beginning of Biblical Interpretation" in Matthias Henze (ed.), A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 3-23. The essay is an excellent introduction to interpretation of the Hebrew Bible during the Second Temple period (i.e., "early Judaism"). He notes that such interpretation may be found in later Old Testament books such as Chronicles, the Greek translation(s) of the OT, apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts (Ben Sira, Jubilees, Wisdom of Solomon, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs), the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and Pseudo-Philo. The central piece of the essay are the four assumptions that he argues form "a common attitude and approach to the biblical text" even with the differences of time, location, and content in the texts and authors mentioned above (p. 13, emphasis original). These assumptions are 1) The Bible is a fundamentally cryptic document, which means...

It is less than a month until the Wycliffe Centre for Scripture and Theology fall meeting 2011 . The program looks to be interesting and engaging. One of the presenters is Tyndale's own Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Dr. Stanley Walters (PhD, Yale). The meeting will take place at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto on Friday, October 21. The program is as follows: Discussion will focus on Isaiah 9 in reception history, and on connections here with Legaspi's recent book,  The Death of Scripture & the Rise of Biblical Studies (OUP, 2010). Time Participants Friday, 21 October 2011 9:30 am Ephraim Radner Greeting & Introduction 10:00 am Gary Anderson Isaiah 9 with a focus TBD 11:00 am Michael Legaspi Isaiah 9 and the work of Robert Lowth 12:00 pm Stanley Walters Review of Legaspi’s The Death of Scripture… 1:00 pm everybody Lunch provided for attendees & presenters 2:00 pm Joseph Mangina Response to morning presentations...