Pilgrims Way to Canterbury

Walking along in the footsteps of pilgrims is a wonderful experience. This is part of the North Downs Way which allegedly follows the route of pilgrims to Canterbury and to the tomb of St Thomas a Becket. It is not of course the exact path but it's close enough for me to find the experience almost religious.

On another day at another time, I'll do more of the walk than my mother and I did today. But for now, this suffices. And whilst I am an enthusiast of cyber-pilgrimages, there's nothing quite like the real thing. 

Interfaith Presentation on Sacred Texts Deirdre Good, Professor of New Testament, will join a rabbi and a Muslim scholar on Sunday, May 20, at the Congregation of Saint Saviour of The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in teaching a course on The Uses and Abuses of Sacred Texts: The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament and The Qu’ran. What do these sacred texts really say about contemporary issues? When public figures justify their opinions and biases by quoting from one of these holy books, are these proof texts legitimate? Can these quotes, taken out of context, be valid as proofs of “higher values”? Together, Prof. Good, Rabbi Leonard Schoolman and Dr. Hussein Rashid will invite participants to study frequently quoted texts and see what they really mean. The registration fee of $20 includes lunch beginning at 12:45 pm, with the course running from 1:15 pm to 3:15 pm. To learn more, visit the congregation’s website.

Jesus was literate

Chris Keith has a book, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of  Jesus (New Testament Tools, Studies, and Documents 38; Leiden: E.J. Brill,  2009), in which he argues cogently (according to Michael J. Kruger) that the pericope of the woman taken in adultery is designed to show that Jesus was indeed literate and that --since it is an independent pericope--it was perhaps inserted into the text in the third century CE to answer accusations and pagan challenges that Jesus and Jesus' followers were illiterate. Previous scholarship on "the woman taken in adultery" focuses on what Jesus wrote, not that he wrote, and this is a helpful refocus. There is of course much more to say about the book, a revised dissertation.