Hagia Sophia (Aya Sophia)

Perhaps the highlight of our trip, the magnificent Hagia Sophia was the focus of our last day in Istanbul. We approached the building through snow. Scaffolding which had been up for 17 years had been recently removed which enabled more of the interior to be seen. So the timing of our visit was fortunate. Above is the interior dome with the arches. To the right you see a revealed face of one of the seraphim just under the dome only uncovered this past year. Our guide observed that he was looking at the face of an angel for the first time.

Hagia Sophia began as a Byzantine Church and rebuilt for the third time by the Emperor Justinian in 537. Procopios, a contemporary historian, in De Aedificiis, PG 87 assesses the completed building:

A spherical-shaped dome standing upon this circle makes it exceedingly beautiful; from the lightness of the building, it does not appear to rest upon a solid foundation, but to cover the place beneath as though it were suspended from heaven by the fabled golden chain. All these parts surprisingly joined to one another in the air, suspended one from another, and resting only on that which is next to them, form the work into one admirably harmonious whole, which spectators do not dwell upon for long in the mass, as each individual part attracts the eye to itself. No one ever became weary of this spectacle, but those who are in the church delight in what they see, and, when they leave, magnify it in their talk. Moreover it is impossible accurately to describe the gold, and silver, and gems, presented by the Emperor Justinian, but by the description of one part, I leave the rest to be inferred. That part of the church which is especially sacred, and where the priests alone are allowed to enter, which is called the Sanctuary, contains forty thousand pounds' weight of silver.

After the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Hagia Sophia continued as a mosque. The mosaics were painted over in accordance with Islamic prohibition on realistic representation. In 1935 it became a museum which had aided the restoration of certain features particularly the mosaics.

Here we see the Deesis (entreaty) in which the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist petition Christ on behalf of humanity. A helpful website about the Hagia Sophia Deesis is here. It contains details of the creation of the mosaic and its restoration. The bearded head of Christ is thought to be the inspiration of Christ in Russian art while the Deesis itself has influenced western representations of the Last Judgment.

Augsburg Fortress has an announcement of Studying the New Testament: A Fortress Introduction due to be published in the US on July 1, 2010.

Religious Songs of Trebizond (Sunday Feature Radio 3)

As I download photos and videos of our trip to Turkey, here are some relevant programmes. Last week's Sunday Feature is a programme on religious songs of Trebizond. It uncovers the complicated religious history of one Turkish city in which the personal and collective religious beliefs reflect the changing religious history of the region.

The shepherds in the high mountains behind the city of Trebizond, who for more than a thousand years had driven their flocks up onto the high plateau in summer and back to the narrow coastal plain in winter, sometimes adopting a Christian persona, sometimes a Muslim one, disappeared and the economy has never really recovered. Worse than this for some, the architectural jewel that was Trabzon (as it is now called) has become an almost Soviet-like conglomeration of tower blocks. The final insult came five years ago with the much opposed construction of a coastal motorway, which has chopped this once great maritime city off from the Black Sea. The isolation that kept ancient cultures protected has finally gone - along with the cultures. Tom de Waal traces some of what has been lost to the Soumela Monastery where every August 15th people of Pontic descent from across the globe come to remember the feast of the Virgin. Here there is a collision of Russian, Turkish and Greek interests, which provides a lesson in modern regional politics. But connecting all of these disparate people is music - the Greek Lyre and the Turkish Kemence, a small violin played like a 'cello. They play the same, they dance the same. Culturally connected and politically divided this is a story of people who are really cousins, or even brothers, but cannot quite bring themselves to admit it.

U of Chicago copy of Mark's gospel is a forgery

A friend and colleague forwarded a recent article from the journal The Art Newspaper for February 2010 describing the research that went into a discovery that a manuscript previously thought to be a 14th Century text of the Gospel of Mark is in fact a fake.

The ongoing debate as to the codex’s authenticity re-ignited in 2006 with its digitisation, giving international experts an opportunity to examine the work closely for the first time. Beginning in 2007, Margaret Mitchell, Alice Schreyer and Judith Dartt from the university collaborated with research microscopist Joseph Barabe from the Illinois-based lab McCrone Associates, and manuscript conservator Abigail Quandt from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, to perform a cross-discipline, in-depth analysis of the codex.

Barabe conducted a material and elemental analysis on Archaic Mark which involved the use of a wide variety of techniques including x-ray diffraction, raman spectroscopy, polarised light, x-ray spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. He was particularly interested in determining whether the codex had undergone an earlier restoration which would account for the presence of various “modern” shades of blue including synthetic ultramarine blue—a material not available until the 1820s. He found no evidence of a prior restoration and most importantly determined that the white colour used contained the pigment lithopone which was not available until 1874, thereby setting an 1874 terminus post quem date for the codex. Carbon dating was used to determine that the canvas dates from the mid 16th century.

Izmır to Mıletus to Ephesus

I am on a trıp to Turkey for the fırst tıme. We flew ınto Izmır and today we went to Mıletus ın the mornıng where there ıs a small amphıtheatre and extensıve town buıldıngs. We read the farewell speech of Paul ın Acts as our entry poınt to the town. Nothıng lıke the end of Paul at the begınnıng of the trip!

In the afternoon we went to the house of John ın Ephesus 4 -- the fourth ıncarnatıon of the town of Ephesus. It was quıte movıng to be at a signifıcant place of Chrıstıan tradıtıon. From the ecclesıastıcal structures, one can see the older temple of Artemıs not far away. If John is the beloved dıscıples who takes Mary to hıs house at the command of the dyıng Jesus on the cross, why ıs ıt to Ephesus that John takes Mary? Is ıt so as to brıng Mary there? Was ıt Irenaeus who locates John ın Ephesus? We know the Acts of John locate John in and around Ephesus ın the second century CE.

National Holocaust Memorial Day

Thought for the Day, 27 January 2010

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks

Today is National Holocaust Memorial Day, and this year the focus will be on one small group of people in the Warsaw ghetto and the astonishing task they took on themselves for the sake of future generations.

The Warsaw ghetto into which hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded was not some remote spot far from public gaze. It was near the centre of one of Europe's capital cities. There 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. 270,000 were taken in cattle trucks to Treblinka and other camps to be gassed, burned and turned to ash. Eventually in April 1943 the Nazis gave the order that everyone left should be killed and it was there that the ghetto inhabitants mounted an extraordinary act of resistance, keeping the German army at bay for five weeks until they were overcome.

But by then a quite different act of resistance had taken place, and it's this we're going to remember this year. It was the brainchild of a Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, who realised that the Nazis were unlike any previous group bent on conquest. All others had preserved a record of their victories for posterity. But the Germans were intent on obliterating or falsifying every trace of their mass exterminations, of Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, and the Jews. Ringelblum understood that they were preparing a systematic denial of the Holocaust at the very time it was taking place.

So, in the ghetto, he brought together a group of academics, teachers, journalists, religious leaders, artists and the young to gather testimonies from people in the ghetto, so that the world would one day know what happened. Unbelievably they gathered 35,000 documents, stories, letters, poems and records. They hid them in tin boxes and milk churns where they lay for years until the handful of survivors led the way to their location.

What an astonishing act of faith: that evil would ultimately be defeated, that the documents would be found and not destroyed, and that truth would win out in the end. Faith in God after the Holocaust may be hard; but faith in humanity is harder still, knowing the evil people to do one another, and the hate that lies dormant but never dead in the human heart.

Ringelblum and his friends had faith in humanity, and they left us a legacy of hope preserved intact in the very heart of darkness. In our still tense and troubled age, may we be worthy of that faith, that hope.

Workshop on Feb 21st: AUDIO DIVINA-- Jewish & Christian Interpretations and Experience of Scripture

AUDIO DIVINA: Jewish and Christian interpretations and experience of Scripture

In this workshop, biblical scholars and musicians from Jewish and Christian traditions will join together for a multi-sensory experience of Scripture. We will study texts together, considering the history of the ideas in their ancient and modern Jewish contexts. Together with the intellectual examination of words and texts, we will consider ways that Jews and Christians experience these texts within musical liturgical contexts.

When: February 21^st 2010

Instructors: Professors Marcie Lenk (above) & Deirdre Good

Musicians: Rabbi Julia Andelman and Ana Hernandez

Workshop Length: 1-5pm

Workshop Location: The Tutu Center, General Theological Seminary, New York, NY

Cost: $10.00 for the public; free for students

Preliminary Workshop schedule:

1. Introduction: Listening to music and texts (15 minutes)

2. Performances of Psalm 23 by Jewish and Christian Musicians (30 minutes) by Rabbi Julia Andelman and Ana Hernandez

3. Written and oral responses to the music from participants using particular questions to address how singing and hearing music affects understanding of the Psalm (45 minutes).

4. Break for tea (West 3: Deirdre Good's apartment) (30 minutes)

5. Performances of Hannah's Prayer and Song and the Magnificat (30 minutes).

6. Interpretation of Hannah's Prayer and the Magnificat (Marcie Lenk and Deirdre Good) (1 hour).

6. Concluding music (30 minutes).

Marcie Lenk is a Visiting Professor at Boston University and a doctoral candidate in the study of Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism at Harvard University. Having lived in Jerusalem from 1988-2000, she has also taught in a number of Jewish and Christian seminaries.

Deirdre Good is a professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary in New York City. She has recently published a book with Bruce Chilton called Starting New Testament Study: Learning and Doing (SPCK, 2009).

The workshop is made possible by a generous grant from the Evangelical Education Society of the Episcopal Church. Register for the event here.

Paul with Helen Bond, John Haldane and John Barclay (In Our Time)

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time (Radio 4) held a discussion on St Paul and his significance with Helen Bond, John Haldane and John Barclay (May 2009). Included in the discussion are assessments of the reliability of the New Testament epistles and Acts; the role of Paul in the new Jesus movement; Paul's Pharisaic background and education in Tarsus. It's anachronistic to speak of Paul's persecution of early Christians, of course, since all were Jewish, and the growth of churches rather than communities or assemblies. There's a tiny assessment of Paul from a Jewish perspective with an emphasis on the grace of God's spirit falling freely on the most unlikely people. This is not quite enough given recent scholarship.

The real Narnia of C. S. Lewis--the Mourne Mountains of Northern Ireland (with more snow on the way).
The Mourne Mountains are said to have inspired Belfast-born CS Lewis to create the magical land of Narnia — and yesterday’s scene near Rathfriland recaptured in fairytale fashion the icy Narnian winter from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

How memory works

This week's New Yorker has a fascinating article about the popularity of memoirs by Daniel Mendelsohn. The article focuses on Ben Yagoda's Memoirs: A History. Towards the end of the article, there are some insights into how memory works.

The psychologist F. C. Bartlett, whom Yagoda quotes without discussing his work, once conducted an experiment in which people were told fables into which illogical or non-sequitur elements had been introduced; when asked to repeat the tales, they omitted or smoothed over the anomalous bits. More recently, graduate students who were asked to recall what their anxiety level had been before an important examination consistently exaggerated that anxiety. As Yagoda puts it, “That little tale—‘I was really worried, but I passed’—would be memoir-worthy. The ‘truth’—‘I wasn’t that worried, and I passed’—would not.” In other words, we always manage to turn our memories into good stories—even if those stories aren’t quite true.

It's not difficult to see how this works with Mark's Gospel which (especially in Greek) is full of anomalies, infelicities and loose ends, the most obvious of which is the prepositional ending at 16:8. Most are eliminated by Matthew and Luke in their gospel retellings using (versions of) Mark. Thus making Mark's infelicities all the more valuable.

Book promotion party? From this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review comes the DIY book tour.

The people who showed up for these events had usually never heard of me. They came because it was a party at their friend’s house and the friend promised to make those cupcakes they like or was calling in a favor. Nobody wants to give a bad party, and touring this way ensured there would be at least one person other than myself who would be embarrassed if no one showed up.

Sounds like a good idea. Will mention it to my new publisher in time for this year's promotional push. (In certain circles, we could offer wine and cheese with acceptable alternative beverage.)