The quest into the Odes of Solomon has now taken me to another text recommended from the notes I received via the editor of Vigiliae Christianae from one of the readers. When I had done the original research for my article, I had been looking for one section particularly closely at all the songs recorded in the New Testament book of Revelation. I ( Read more... )

Thursday night featured a bit of extra entertainment with a dinner invitation from my Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen, who live nearby. They treated me to a dinner at La Merenda, a sort of Italian/Tapas place, although it's really much more diverse than Italian. Call "Italian" something more like the restaurant's starting place or inspiration, that ( Read more... )

In a bit of a brain daze today with regard to the dissertation, so I'm going to finish up a couple of older papers as articles and send them off to journals. "The Odes of Solomon: From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism" is pretty straightforward and needing little editing, comparatively, before sending it off. Mercifully, the journal I'm ( Read more... )

A meditation on Judas' betrayal on Good Friday. My friend Kevin was thinking out loud about some of this stuff, and ran a question by me. After I typed it up, I thought I might as well throw it on the Journal so that it looks like I did something today.

Why is Judas' betrayal worse then Peter's denial? I mean, in Dante's Inferno Judas is in ( Read more... )

Dissertating. My life is about dissertating. I'm still having fun with it, with about 100 raw pages written now, but it's such a huge thing, and I'm writing the easiest, quickest part of it right now. I got a huge, annoying curve ball thrown at me last week, though. I received an email last week from the Department which had been just been told ( Read more... )

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AT LAST!!! After painful amounts of emails where I delicately tried not to irritate people through constant badgering, I have finally succeeded in setting up the date for my Doctoral Qualifying Exam oral-exam session. Trying to co-ordinated six schedules is absolutely no fun. But I'll be going before my committee on Thursday November 10th from 3 ( Read more... )

I'm having a week where my days last about 45 minutes and then it's over. My financial aid and pay have been activated, so that was good, but otherwise the day was a wash, again. Had to bow out of going to the "Opera in the Park" down by the lake tonight to get in extra reading for the exams and still not enough happened. I'm trying to keep up ( Read more... )

Some reviews that I just found online of the key essay I've been studying on the influence of Jewish Mysticism on the Prologue to the Gospel of John:
The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology, The
Catholic Biblical Quarterly, The, Apr 1998 by Hurtado, L W

JARL E. FOSSUM, The Image of the ( Read more... )

The cool thing about having moved to the Ardmore is having Mike Harris as my building's live-in manager. Mike is one of my frequent classmates, being a Patristics scholar, so we've been in all of Michel Barnes' stuff together, and we're part of Barnes' movie posse. One cool aspect of Mike living in the building is when he's doing the evening ( Read more... )