Nothing like a big stack of papers to grade to get you in the Christmas spirit! The silence of this blog is due to the heap of marking I have to get done in the next week.
If you are in the same predicament, you may enjoy this cartoon:
Cinema Blend is reporting a rumour that Paul Verhoeven, director and Jesus-Seminar member, is planning on making a Jesus film. I have heard this rumour before, but it seems that this rumour may have some basis in reality:
The rumor comes from the frequently unreliable guys at WENN, so don’t believe it until someone else confirms it, but it is true that there has long been talk of Paul working on such a film. The working title once rumored for it was Christ, the Man, and apparently there’s now some movement on the whole thing again. The current incarnation is supposed tell Jesus’s story as if he’s not a god made man flesh but instead just a dude. Verhoeven plans to completely ignore all the superstitious mumbo jumbo surrounding him and focus on Big J as a guy navigating the complex political and social landscape of his time.
It seems that the boobs, guns, and gore director has an insatiable interest in the Christ figure. He’s a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who use historical methods to determine who Jesus was. One problem though. He’s afraid it’ll get him lynched.
He reportedly tells Empire Magazine, “My scriptwriter told me not to do the movie in the United States because they (Christians) might shoot me. It’s not a joke at all. I took that very seriously. So I took his advice and decided to write a book about it first.”
I can’t find any corroboration for this rumour, but I don’t think Verhoeven really has to fear for his life.
Reuters has an article by Dan Williams (no relation) on maverick scholar Ghil’ad Zuckermann, entitled, “Hebrew or Israeli? Linguist stirs Zionist debate.” Zuckermann argues that modern Hebrew should be renamed “Israeli” and give up any claim to pure descent from the Hebrew of the Bible.
Here are some excerpts:
Israelis are brainwashed to believe they speak the same language as (the prophet) Isaiah, a purely Semitic language, but this is false,” Zuckermann told Reuters during a lecture tour to promote his soon-to-be-published polemic “Hebrew as Myth”.
“It’s time we acknowledge that Israeli is very different from the Hebrew of the past,” said Zuckermann, who points to the abiding influence of modern European dialects — especially Yiddish, Russian and Polish — imported by Israel’s founders.
…
Some critics throw Zuckermann in with revisionist academics who made their names questioning the justice of the 1948 war of Israel’s founding in what had been British Mandate Palestine.
Early Zionists were quick to assume Hebrew as part of an ancient birthright to land also claimed by Palestinian Arabs.
“His attitude toward modern Hebrew is less that of a professional linguist than of someone driven by the agenda of post- (if not anti-) Zionism,” wrote an Israeli contributor to the American newspaper Jewish Daily Forward.
Professor Moshe Bar-Asher, president of Israel’s Hebrew Language Academy, likened Zuckermann to Noam Chomsky, a renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist who in recent decades became a freewheeling critic of U.S. foreign policy.
“I think Zuckermann is a very good scholar, but he risks wasting his efforts by mixing up linguistics with politics,” Bar-Asher said. “He stirs up a lot of antagonism.”
There is continuity and discontinuity between Modern and Classical/Biblical Hebrew, so while I think differentiating between the two as scholars do is necessary, I’m not sure that calling “Modern Hebrew” “Israeli” is the best solution. Perhaps, akin to “Canadian English” or “American English”, “Israeli Hebrew” is a potential option.
Do my Jewish/Israeli readers have any opinions?
The TV Land cable network has put together a list of the 100 greatest catchphrases in television. There will be a countdown special, “The 100 Greatest TV Quotes & Catch Phrases,” over five days starting December 11.
You can see the whole list here. Here are some of my favourites:
One phrase that really ought to be on the list is, IMHO, “Eat my shorts” (Bart Simpson).
(HT Bits & Pieces)
The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel offers a couple responses to the question, “How Historically Accurate is the Bible?” The first response is by an orthodox rabbi who believes “completely in the historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible” on the basis of the uniqueness of its message:
The Bible internally proves its own accuracy. No people who were simply inventing their history would invent such things as apparent character flaws and mistakes in their heroes and founders. The sheer honesty of the Bible helps prove its accuracy. And the lack of precedent for and the sudden appearance out of nowhere of so many ideas in the Hebrew Bible that are fundamental to Western civilization also prove its historical accuracy.
Another answer is offered by a pastor of a Disciples of Christ church, who approaches the Bible “with prayer and scholarship” and affirms “the Bible is ‘true’ – and some of it even happened!” (italics added). Here’s an excerpt:
But reading the Bible as history misses its gift and grace, which lies not in its historical or scientific accuracy, but in the profoundly creative way it guides the search for meaning and hope. The search is so deeply rooted in the human spirit that the Bible stories predate an age of literacy. Traveling orally, the sacred words were passed from one generation to another attempting to make sense of the root of the human experience: love, suffering, joy, evil, hope.
Maximalism and minimalism in the popular press. So, what do you think?