[The Spinozist Mormon] Chapel Hill, NC: Young Rock and Religious Studies
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Christian Y. Cardall
Jan 16, 2006, 11:29:25 AM1/16/06
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An unfortunate and unprecedented pair of back-to-back trips: on the heels of last week’s travel, this week I spend a few days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of the University of North Carolina.
It’s perhaps not surprising that there aren’t many movies relating to Chapel Hill. In fact the only thing I could find to continue my recent tradition of movie images commemorating my travel destinations was Chapel Hill: Young Rock, a documentary of this university town’s music scene during it’s peak of the early 90’s.
UNC also boasts Professor Charlesworth, famous expert on the Pseudepigrapha with occasional connections to FARMS. I seem to recall an account of John Welch showing him the chiasmus in Alma 36. Was he persuaded it constituted evidence of antiquity? As I recall his response was something along the lines of, ‘Mormons are fortunate. Their book is very beautiful.’
Another thought on religious studies at UNC: A few weeks ago I heard part of an interview with Bart Ehrman, the chair of the UNC religious studies department on the NPR show Fresh Air, who is, oxymoronically, agnostic. Is this common in religious studies departments? I may not be remembering this exactly right, but it seems he had gone from something like Episcopalian to fundamentalist Evangelical to agnostic, based on the fact that the words and message of the New Testament could not be recovered with sufficient accuracy to be relied upon.
On the radio show he spoke of how the four gospels had different theological agendas and that harmonization of them ought not be imposed. As I recall he said Mark depicted a suffering, bewildered Jesus, while Luke portrayed a more transcendent, powerful Christ (for example, compare the Mark’s plaintive ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ to Luke’s Christ confident of arriving in paradise declaring, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit.’) He argued that Jesus’ suffering in Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood, is not in the earliest manuscripts of Luke, and that it was likely added by a later scribe in an attempt at harmonization with, say, Mark’s theology of the suffering Christ. This would seem to be an interesting question for Latter-day Saints, since King Benjamin speaks of the drops of blood. Any insight out there from all you LDS Bible scholars out there? In any case, Ehrman’s many works on the New Testament look interesting.
Perhaps what I need to know more urgently, however, is whether the music scene in Chapel Hill remains sufficiently vibrant that I might be able to catch a decent act on a Tuesday or Wednesday night (tonight is out, as I’d like to watch the continuing season opening of 24!).
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Posted by Christian Y. Cardall to The Spinozist Mormon at 1/16/2006 10:37:00 AM
It’s perhaps not surprising that there aren’t many movies relating to Chapel Hill. In fact the only thing I could find to continue my recent tradition of movie images commemorating my travel destinations was Chapel Hill: Young Rock, a documentary of this university town’s music scene during it’s peak of the early 90’s. UNC also boasts Professor Charlesworth, famous expert on the Pseudepigrapha with occasional connections to FARMS. I seem to recall an account of John Welch showing him the chiasmus in Alma 36. Was he persuaded it constituted evidence of antiquity? As I recall his response was something along the lines of, ‘Mormons are fortunate. Their book is very beautiful.’
Another thought on religious studies at UNC: A few weeks ago I heard part of an interview with Bart Ehrman, the chair of the UNC religious studies department on the NPR show Fresh Air, who is, oxymoronically, agnostic. Is this common in religious studies departments? I may not be remembering this exactly right, but it seems he had gone from something like Episcopalian to fundamentalist Evangelical to agnostic, based on the fact that the words and message of the New Testament could not be recovered with sufficient accuracy to be relied upon.
On the radio show he spoke of how the four gospels had different theological agendas and that harmonization of them ought not be imposed. As I recall he said Mark depicted a suffering, bewildered Jesus, while Luke portrayed a more transcendent, powerful Christ (for example, compare the Mark’s plaintive ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ to Luke’s Christ confident of arriving in paradise declaring, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit.’) He argued that Jesus’ suffering in Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood, is not in the earliest manuscripts of Luke, and that it was likely added by a later scribe in an attempt at harmonization with, say, Mark’s theology of the suffering Christ. This would seem to be an interesting question for Latter-day Saints, since King Benjamin speaks of the drops of blood. Any insight out there from all you LDS Bible scholars out there? In any case, Ehrman’s many works on the New Testament look interesting.
Perhaps what I need to know more urgently, however, is whether the music scene in Chapel Hill remains sufficiently vibrant that I might be able to catch a decent act on a Tuesday or Wednesday night (tonight is out, as I’d like to watch the continuing season opening of 24!).
--
Posted by Christian Y. Cardall to The Spinozist Mormon at 1/16/2006 10:37:00 AM
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