In my Wisdom Literature class, I’m taking the approach of tradition history.  We are trying to look at this corpus through each stage of development.  We started with textual criticism.

At any rate, I can’t find the exact video I used, but this one will do.  To illustrate the importance of textual criticism, I told them that they did not want to be the preacher preaching on a text that might not have been original to a book.  To help communicate the point, I showed them this video:

It’s a sweet little video isn’t it.  Problem is that it’s based on Proverbs 4:7, which a text that is in the Masoretic text, but not in the Septuagint.

I wasn’t trying to make any points about whether or not the text was original.  I only wanted to realize that in preaching these sorts of things ought to be taken into consideration.  You may not want to focus in a sermon, or theological dialogue, or a song on a text that could be questionable from a text critical perspective.

One place I’ve been finding that biblical scholarship is seriously behind is in using video. I’m know I’m not the first to notice this, but even though someone probably has, it deserves mention again.

Let’s take the issue of Noah’s Ark for example since this latest debacle has brought it up.  If someone searches “Noah’s ark” on Youtube here are the primary things that they might learn depending on which videos they choose to watch:

1. Noah’s ark has been found
2. Noah’s ark has really been found somewhere else
3. The story of Noah is ridiculous and shows that God is a vindictive punk
4. The story of Noah is sweet like other cartoons for children (the polar opposite of 3)

One thing that you’d notice if you ran that search is that there isn’t one video in the top results posted by anyone who might be even remotely considered a biblical scholar or real archaeologist.

Now, that’s all fine and well until you realize how many hits these videos have.  For instance, there is a video entitled “Discovery of the real Noah’s Ark Part 1.”  This video has over 450,ooo views.  There’s another video with a similar title with over 650,ooo.  These videos are getting more views than I can imagine most print articles on the topic are getting.

Personally, I feel like I’m pretty terrible at doing video.  It’s uncomfortable for me, but I’ve been trying to get over it.  I think it is going to continue to become more and more necessary.

As a positive, one thing I’ve noticed is that you don’t have to be very good at doing video to get viewed on Youtube.  There’s no way for them to crawl a video the same way that content is crawled on the web.  So, your video can be a lame screen capture with a decent title and still get noticed.

At the very least, I think biblical scholars need to start focusing in on some of the issues that tend to be more problematic (e.g. noah’s ark, the ark of the covenant, etc…) and recording videos about them to post as video responses to some of the nonsense that one finds on sites like Youtube.  Of course, the option to post a video response is not always available, but it is sometimes possible.

Hosea 14:10 has some interesting imagery.  It was a part of the lectionary reading for today.  And, I used this as an opportunity to experiment with putting more video on the site.  Sorry for the blur, YouTube said it might improve

Translation Posts

Okay so a friend asked myself and other youth folks in my area to make (semi-funny) videos for an upcoming conference of what we like to do in our spare time (other than blogging I guess).  Here’s mine (you have to be watching with annotations on to get the full effect):

Okay maybe that’s not funny to you, but it is to me.

Decent, brief Old and New Testament introductions are sometimes difficult to come by in video format.  But, these two seem to be pretty good videos for lay people that make use of professors at Lutheran universities and schools of theology.  They are done by the ELCA, but they do treat different traditions, such as by discussing the concept of canon.  Anyway, if you have some lay folks who might want a general overview, you might encourage them to check them out here or on Google video:

Old Testament Introduction

New Testament Introduction

Don’t know how I allowed myself to get scooped on this because I was very interested in this conference when I first heard about it and wished I could have attended.  At any rate, here is a link to a conference held at Notre Dame University entitled “My Ways are Not Your Ways.”  The conference dealt with some of the difficult aspects of the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible and has a fantastic litany of speakers.  Be sure to check out the videos.