̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Theology

Reinterpreting Newton and religion

zs332 — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:15:44 +0000

Rediscovered notebook adds new depth to our understanding of Isaac Newton's relationship with theology.

Bridging the divide: philosophy meets science

sjr81 — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 15:03:08 +0000

̽��ֱ��Templeton World Charity Foundation Project, spearheaded by Professor Sarah Coakley, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, saw three postdoctoral researchers placed into science labs around the ̽��ֱ�� with the aim of addressing the ever-widening gap between those working in the fields of science and those working in fields of philosophy and theology.

For three years, Daniel De Haan, Natalja Deng and Peter Woodford worked side-by-side with colleagues from the Department of Experimental Psychology, the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and the Department of Zoology respectively – taking part in cutting-edge research, and being mentored by world-leading thinkers in their subject fields.

It is hoped that the huge success of this project – which saw unusually deep philosophical engagement with working scientists – will be a catalyst for similar experiments both in Cambridge and beyond.

Professor Coakley said: “Top level, path-breaking science can often go on in universities without any connections to the history and philosophy of science which is coming at the same material from a different direction. ̽��ֱ��philosophical questions are enormously pressing so we were delighted that some truly leading scientists at Cambridge were open to the possibility of having our three young researchers embedded with them.”

Dr Peter Woodford, who worked both in Cambridge’s Zoology labs and in the field in Africa to look at cooperation among meerkats, what makes them behaves the way they do, and how we as humans understand the value of selflessness, altruism and the care of others.

He said: “It was obviously a unique experience for any philosopher to have, seeing what animals are doing in their natural environment and asking why animals do what they do – that’s a central question of philosophy as well as science. ̽��ֱ��value of pursuing these big questions is to understand what we believe and why we believe it in a better way.”

Dr Natalja Deng, who worked on the cosmology strand of the project, alongside colleagues in DAMPT, said: “What does it mean to ask if God exists? And what does it mean to say that the universe had a beginning? If you ask yourself questions like this, you are doing philosophy.

“In order to do that, you need to talk to both theologians and physicists. They may not be used to talking to one another, but that’s all the more reason to bring them together in conversation. We were an experiment for this.”

Dr De Haan looked at the connections between cognitive neuroscience, psychology and philosophy for his strand of the project. As with his other Templeton colleagues, Daniel received formal training in his chosen subject areas to ensure they were up to date with the latest research and scientific developments in that particular field.

He said: “It was enormously helpful to spend time seeing what the day-to-day routines are, working in a lab and attending lectures. ̽��ֱ��people in my lab were open to the idea of having someone around from a different background and a different perspective.

“Academics in the humanities as well as the sciences are beginning to appreciate some of the difficulties arising from the extreme degrees of specialisation – where we are losing the ability to talk to each other.”

Added Coakley: “I’m more happy than I could have hoped. This was a unique experiment in how to create a new generation of scholars to learn this agility early in their careers and we have shown that if it’s possible in one of the top universities in the world for scientific and mathematical endeavour, it should be possible in other places, too.”

A unique three-year project to bridge the divide between science and philosophy – which embedded early-career philosophers into some of Cambridge’s ground-breaking scientific research clusters – is the subject of a new film released today.

Academics in the humanities as well as the sciences are beginning to appreciate some of the difficulties arising from the extreme degrees of specialisation – where we are losing the ability to talk to each other.

Daniel De Haan

Bridging the divide: Philosophy meets science

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Solomon Schechter (1847-1915): a Jewish polymath with a gift for friendship

amb206 — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 09:49:12 +0000

Solomon Schechter was instantly recognisable in 1890s Cambridge. He was tall and untidily dressed, and he had an unruly red beard that matched his fiery personality. According to his friends, he seldom wore socks that matched in colour. People and conversations, Jewish history and books, were what mattered most to him.

In 1890 Schechter, a Romanian-born rabbi, became Lecturer in Talmudics at Cambridge. Together with his wife Mathilde he entertained a wide circle of people of different faiths. His Cambridge friends included the Presbyterian twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, co-founders of Westminster College, William Robertson Smith of Christ’s, J Rendel Harris of Clare, and Charles Taylor of St John’s.

His closest friend was the reclusive James Frazer of Trinity, author of ̽��ֱ��Golden Bough, a monumental comparative study of folklore, magic and religion, who proof-read Schechter’s essays and with whom Schechter liked to take long walks.

To mark the centenary of Schechter’s death, scholars are looking afresh at his remarkable life and afterlife - in particular at the contribution to scholarship made by a man with an omnivorous hunger for learning that drove him from the traditional Jewish Eastern-European world into which he was born to Vienna, Berlin, London, Cambridge and finally New York.

When he collapsed (and later died) after giving a lecture on Jewish philanthropy, his wife recounted that he asked for a book to read, protesting that “I can’t just lie down here doing nothing”.

A conference in Cambridge on Sunday, November 22, will bring together scholars from the USA, the UK, Europe and Israel to examine many aspects of Schechter’s life – from his work on ancient, medieval and modern Jewish history to his close relationships with his Cambridge contemporaries.

“Solomon Schechter was only the second Jew to be appointed to a teaching position at Cambridge. He was the quintessential absent-minded but brilliant scholar,” says Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün of CRASSH and St John’s College, who is convening the conference.

“He possessed a phenomenal intellect and was passionately interested not just in Jewish theology and history generally, but in all manner of literary, social, and cultural issues, including the role of women in Judaism, in ways that were way ahead of his time. A dazzling intermediary between rabbinic and academic worlds, he wrote beautiful, pioneering essays for an appreciative Victorian readership.”

It was a meeting with two of his Cambridge friends that won Schechter a place in history. In May 1896, Schechter was walking along King’s Parade when he met Agnes Lewis who, with her sister Margaret Gibson, had recently returned from Cairo where they had purchased a bundle of interesting documents. Lewis and Gibson, whose remarkable lives are vividly documented in Janet Soskice’s Sisters of Sinai, were self-taught scholars who had learnt Syriac in order to be able to read the earliest known versions of the Christian gospels.

Among the documents that Lewis and Gibson had acquired from a dealer in Cairo was a grubby scrap of paper which looked, in Gibson’s words “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy”. Schechter identified this fragment as part of a medieval copy of a hitherto unknown Hebrew original of the apocryphal book known as Ecclesiasticus to Christians and the Wisdom of Ben Sira to Jews. ̽��ֱ��incredible discovery suggested to him the possibility that there might well be more where it came from.

In accordance with Jewish law, no document containing the Holy Name may be destroyed. Jewish communities collect old texts beyond use in a so-called Geniza, a tomb for texts. ̽��ֱ��precious fragment of text that had, according to Gibson, made Schechter’s eyes glitter with excitement came from such a Geniza, a vast repository of documents stored, in haphazard fashion, in the oldest of Cairo’s synagogues, the Ben Ezra.

̽��ֱ��discovery and importance for medieval history of this unique collection is told in riveting detail by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s book Sacred Trash and in Stefan Reif’s A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo.

Sponsored by his friend Professor Charles Taylor, Master of St John’s College, Schechter travelled from Cambridge to Cairo, where, after winning the trust of the chief rabbi, he entered a windowless room that contained several hundreds of thousands of documents and manuscripts accrued, layer by dusty layer over a period of nearly a thousand years.

“A battlefield of books” is how Schechter described the chaos of handwritten manuscripts mingled with later printed text. Extraordinary as it may now seem, the chief rabbi authorised Schechter to take as much as he liked to deposit in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library. Schechter famously commented that he liked it all.

After spending a month trying to separate out the early material which mattered to him most, Schechter packed a “whole mass of rugged, jumbled, dirty stuff into huge sacks” which were dispatched to Cambridge. A black-and-white photograph reproduced in Sisters of Sinai shows Schechter sitting in a room in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library surrounded by boxes brimming over with documents that range from love letters and children’s doodles to hymns and religious texts.

Today these 193,000 manuscript fragments make up the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library – a treasure trove that an ambitious digitisation project has recently made accessible to scholars worldwide.

Schechter is not surprisingly best remembered for his contribution to the preservation of an archive that offers a unique window onto daily life of the medieval Jewish past in the Islamic world. But his pioneering study of the Geniza was just one strand in a career that took him from the Hassidic milieu of the small Romanian town where he was born to the rarefied world of late-Victorian Cambridge, and eventually to America.

In 1902, Schechter left Cambridge to take up the chancellorship of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, where he helped shape a generation of scholars and communal leaders and became the unintentional founder of the movement now known as Conservative Judaism.

Dunkelgrün says: “Schechter’s name will always, and justly, be associated with the Geniza, but he was much more than a Geniza scholar – he was a polymath who cared passionately for the entirety of the Jewish tradition, mystical and rational, from antiquity to his own time and beyond, towards the future. He paired this panoramic vision both with the traditional rabbinical education he received at home, in Lemberg and in Vienna, and with the philological skills he acquired in Berlin to produce critical editions of several major Rabbinic texts.”

A postdoctoral research fellow at CRASSH, Dunkelgrün is contributing to a European Research Council-funded project on ̽��ֱ��Bible and Antiquity in 19^th-century culture. He insists that Schechter’s work in Cambridge over a period of 20 years was made possible in large part because of the fascination of Victorian England, and Cambridge in particular, for biblical antiquity.

“Schechter cut an exotic figure, but one that was strangely at home in academic circles already convinced about the importance of rabbinic studies for the early history of Christianity. Schechter was the second in a line of six teachers of Rabbinics at Cambridge, the last of whom was Professor Nicholas de Lange, now formally retired from his post. We hope very much that this conference will draw attention not only to Schechter but also to this unique and precious tradition of Cambridge scholarship, and the importance of keeping it alive.”

Attendance at Sunday’s conference, Solomon Schechter’s Life and Legacy, is free of charge. Particulars and a link to registration may be found here: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26067/

Inset images: Solomon Schechter, before his death in 1915 (Wikimedia Commons); Solomon Schechter at work in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library).

̽��ֱ��Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter is best remembered for his work on the Cairo Geniza. A conference this Sunday will explore the wider impact of a man with an unquenchable thirst for learning.

A dazzling intermediary between rabbinic and academic worlds, he wrote beautiful, pioneering essays for an appreciative Victorian readership

Theodor Dunkelgrün

Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Solomon Schechter at work in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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A conflict of Biblical proportions: How the Bible was used to turn the First World War into a Holy War

tdk25 — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 06:00:44 +0000

Amid the mud and mechanised slaughter, it is difficult to see how the teachings of the Good Book could have been much more than an afterthought for those who lived and fought through the horrors of the First World War.

Yet as a new research project aims to reveal, the Bible may have done far more to shape popular perception of the war than has previously been appreciated. Starting this week, researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will embark on a centenary study examining how the Bible played an influential role in the deadliest armed struggle that the world had, at that stage, ever seen.

Over the next two years, an international network of academics in various disciplines including history, literature and theology will attempt to piece together an aspect of the conflict that remains broadly overlooked, showing how the supposed word of God was widely employed both to support and oppose war efforts on both sides.

Among other themes, the research will explore the Bible’s role as inspiration for soldiers, a device for swaying public opinion, a foundation for conscientious objection, and as a text so important that German theologians debated whether the Bible was sufficiently bloodthirsty to be given out to the troops.

Entitled “ ̽��ֱ��Book And ̽��ֱ��Sword: ̽��ֱ��Bible in the Experience and Legacy of the Great War”, the project will consist of three workshops being held in Cambridge and Ludwig Maximilian ̽��ֱ�� of Munich as well as events engaging the public and church leaders with various partner organizations including St Paul’s Cathedral and Westcott House, an Anglican Theological College affiliated to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��project is being carried out in the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Divinity by Andrew Mein, a senior researcher at Westcott House and Nathan MacDonald, an Old Testament lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� and a Fellow of St John's College.

Researchers argue that the Bible represents something of a “blind spot” in academic and popular understanding of the Great War, its legacy, and in particular of the terms in which the war would have been seen at the time. Religious instruction was still a core part of the education of many of those who fought, and soldiers and civilians alike were still widely familiar with scripture. In Britain, Bible Society printing presses went into overdrive in 1914 as efforts were made to satisfy the demand for personal copies among troops departing for the front.

Dr Nathan MacDonald, the project’s co-lead, said: “It is difficult to remember just how suffused the culture of the Edwardian Era was in the language of the Bible. ̽��ֱ��Bible was hidden in plain sight. If you left school at 12 or 14 you probably knew the Bible better than many theology students now. Many people could quote it with ease.

“Politicians and church leaders could appeal to that cultural world and use it to influence popular sentiment. It led to a sense on both sides that the conflict was in some sense a Holy War.”

̽��ֱ��religious resonance with which aspects of the war were fought is perhaps most obvious in the Sinai and Palestine campaign, in which the British ultimately defeated a German-supported Ottoman army. ̽��ֱ��researchers argue that for the Christian nations involved, this was seen as a battle for their own people’s hearts and minds, with both sides keen to present success in the Holy Land as symbolic of a righteous cause.

Germany, for example, sent a battalion to the Middle East charged with protecting monuments and claiming inheritance to the world described in the Bible, including in its number the theologian Albrecht Alt. When, in December 1917 General Edmund Allenby became the first Christian to capture Jerusalem for centuries, he deliberately entered the Old City on foot, taking his cue from the description of Jesus’ humility in the Bible. ̽��ֱ��Prime Minister, David Lloyd George described the victory as “a Christmas present for the British people”.

More broadly, the Bible was an essential tool of the propaganda war. British publications depicted the Germans as “Philistines” and as a modern-day Assyria sweeping down on Israel. ̽��ֱ��Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, whose jingoism periodically offended leaders on even his own side, proclaimed a “great crusade to defend the weak against the strong”. Motivational sermons by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dean of Westminster, and other religious leaders, were printed in national newspapers.

̽��ֱ��use of the Bible is particularly evident in the German context, however, where a debate erupted over whether soldiers should be allowed access to it at all. Some academics feared that, with its peace-loving message, the text would weaken soldiers’ will, but their opinions were successfully countered by a school of thought which argued that the Bible persuasively encouraged violence for a cause.

As this implies, one of the project’s main contentions is that the Bible was used on both sides as a “mirror” in which any claim (or counter-claim) could be seen reflected. Many conscientious objectors, for example, refused to fight on religious grounds, and often found themselves before tribunals at which they were grilled on their Biblical knowledge by Church officials.

̽��ֱ��project will also examine how the First World War changed the way in which people treated the Bible. For some, the conflict destroyed any belief in God; but for others it represented the apocalypse as foretold. During the war interest in the Book of Revelation and its apocalyptic prophecies soared.

Opinion also evolved within the Church. ̽��ֱ��German-based scholar, Alfred Bertholet, argued that war had enabled Biblical concepts such as divine vengeance to be appreciated with deeper resonance by those who had survived. Meanwhile, Karl Barth, deploring the way his teachers in Berlin had used the Bible to support the war effort released a revised commentary on the Book of Romans, which laid the foundations for what became known as “neo-orthodoxy”, and for much 20th Century Christian thought.

“ ̽��ֱ��Bible is an inescapable part of the cultural and religious landscape of World War I,” Dr Andrew Mein, the project’s leader, said. “It was perhaps the single most widely-read book during the war, offering inspiration, challenge and consolation to soldiers and civilians alike.”

MacDonald added: “In some ways we treat the idea that scripture can be used as the basis of a holy war as primitive and medieval. We like to think that it applies more to fanatical organisations in the Middle East than our own modern history. Actually, it is part of our recent history. ̽��ֱ��Bible was being used for self-justification by opposing sides in Europe just a century ago.”

“ ̽��ֱ��Book And ̽��ֱ��Sword” is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Additional image: Army Chaplain tending British graves, from a Daily Mail Official War Photograph, reproduced via Wikimedia Commons.

̽��ֱ��significance of the Bible in the war, and anti-war efforts, of both Allied and Central powers in the First World War are to be examined in a new research project, which will document ways in which scripture was used to create notions of a Holy War, and how views of the Bible changed as a result of the conflict.

In some ways we treat the idea that scripture can be used as the basis of a holy war as primitive and medieval. Actually, the Bible was being used for self-justification by opposing sides in Europe just a century ago

Nathan MacDonald

A Photographic History of the World War, via Wikimedia Commons

General Sir Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem in December 1917. ̽��ֱ��widely-circulated image of him entering the Old City on foot conjured up images of Christ-like humility in the Bible in a calculated attempt to win over hearts and minds.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Charting the Rise and Decline of the Gothic Cathedral

bjb42 — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 09:00:02 +0000

̽��ֱ��lectures, which run from 23 January through to 12 March, begin with Dark Gothic, the origins of the cathedral in the twelfth century and examine the myth of the cathedral in the history of late 19^th and early 20^th century ideas. ̽��ֱ��series continues with an investigation into the origins of Gothic art and architecture in northern France in the twelfth century that features a close-up analysis of Abbot Suger’s new choir at St-Denis which is widely considered the first appearance of Gothic Architecture.

̽��ֱ��series examines the cathedral as a work of engineering and advanced technology; the speakers will discuss the rhetorical notions of ductus and memoria in relation to liturgy and religious experience at Chartres; and plot the changes of meaning and experience in sculptural ensembles in northern France, England and the German Empire.

Stained glass also features prominently as a didactic medium that offers a delicate balance of story-telling and moral meaning.

̽��ֱ��last two lectures weigh up the relations between cathedrals and their cities, and the incursions of royalty and the coronation in the functions and imagery of the Cathedral. ̽��ֱ��series concludes with a short postscript which speculates on why the cathedral idea failed in the later Middle Ages.

̽��ֱ��8 part lecture series is hosted by Professor Paul Crossley, Emeritus Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Foreign Fellow of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Paul Crossley was educated at Downside School and Trinity College Cambridge. It was at Trinity College and the Jagiellonian ̽��ֱ�� in Krakow where he completed his doctorate on the history of Polish Medieval architecture. From 1971 to 1990 he was a lecturer in the History of Art at Manchester ̽��ֱ��. 1990 he joined the teaching staff of ̽��ֱ��Courtauld Institute, first as a Senior Lecturer and then as a Professor in 2002.

̽��ֱ��lectures will take place weekly at 5:00 pm on Mondays during the Full Term in Lecture Room A of the Arts’ School, Bene’t Street, Cambridge, starting on 23 January 2012.

23 January: Dark Gothic

30 January: Architecture as Spolia: Suger and St-Denis

6 February: An Architecture of Reason?

13 February: Ductus and Memoria at Chartres Cathedral

20 February: From Judgement to Atonement: Sculpture at Strasbourg, Lincoln and Naumburg

27 February: Stained Glass: From narrative to moral meaning

5 March: Royalty and the Cathedral

12 March: Cathedrals and their Cities

A comprehensive exploration into Gothic cathedrals and their place in medieval society will be the focus of a series of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Slade Lectures in Fine Art entitled ̽��ֱ��Gothic Cathedral: A New Heaven and a New Earth.

Allie Caulfield from Flickr

Normandie 0344 Rouen Kathedrale

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̽��ֱ��Penultimate Supper?

bjb42 — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 04:00:10 +0000

̽��ֱ��Last Supper, which millions of Christians will mark on Maundy Thursday as Easter begins this week, actually took place on a Wednesday, a groundbreaking study is to reveal.

̽��ֱ��dramatic claim is the principal conclusion of a new book in which Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, a scientist at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, argues that he has solved what the eminent Biblical scholar, F. F. Bruce, once described as “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”.

Researchers have puzzled for centuries over the precise nature and timing of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples. At the heart of the problem is an apparently fundamental contradiction in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke all assert that the Last Supper was a meal marking the start of the Jewish festival of Passover. John, by contrast, says that it took place before the Passover began.

Writing in ̽��ֱ��Mystery Of ̽��ֱ��Last Supper, Professor Humphreys proposes a new solution, based on a combination of Biblical, historical and astronomical research. ̽��ֱ��core of his argument is that Jesus used a different calendar to that conventionally accepted by Jews at the time. According to this different system, the Last Supper would have fallen on the Wednesday, and not the Thursday, of what is now called Holy Week.

“Whatever you think about the Bible, the fact is that Jewish people would never mistake the Passover meal for another meal, so for the Gospels to contradict themselves in this regard is really hard to understand,” Professor Humphreys said.

“Many Biblical scholars say that, for this reason, you can’t trust the Gospels at all. But if we use science and the Gospels hand in hand, we can actually prove that there was no contradiction. In addition, this research seems to present a case for finally introducing a fixed date for Easter.”

̽��ֱ��new study is based on earlier research which Professor Humphreys carried out with the Oxford astrophysicist, Graeme Waddington, in 1983. This identified the date of Jesus’ crucifixion as the morning of Friday, April 3^rd, AD 33 – which has since been widely accepted by other scholars as well.

For Professor Humphreys, who only studies the Bible when not pursuing his day-job as a materials scientist, this presented an opportunity to deal with the equally difficult issue of when (and how) Jesus’ Last Supper really took place.

Aside from the basic contradiction posed by three Gospels’ reference to a Passover meal, all four present a logistical problem. If, according to the Holy Week model, the Last Supper was on a Thursday, then for Jesus to have been executed on a Friday morning, a large number of events had to take place overnight: These included his arrest, interrogation, and separate trials before the Jewish court (the Sanhedrin), Pontius Pilate and Herod.

Even for the alleged son of God, squeezing all of this in would have been an ask. In addition, it was against Jewish law for the Sanhedrin to meet at night. Suspiciously, all of the Gospels also omit to mention what happened on the Wednesday of Holy Week.

If Jesus died on April 3^rd, the standard Jewish calendar of AD33 would have placed his crucifixion on the 14^th day of the Jewish month of Nisan. ̽��ֱ��Passover meal, however, falls on the 15^th – which supports John’s account, but not those of the other Gospels.

Humphreys is not the first researcher to suggest that Jesus might, therefore, have been using a different calendar altogether. Most recently, the Pope suggested in 2007 that Jesus used the solar calendar of the Qumran community, which was probably employed by a Jewish sect called the Essenes and is described in the Dead Sea Scrolls. As Humphreys shows, however, when the date of Passover is calculated using this calendar, it would have fallen a week later, after both Jesus’ death and resurrection.

For the first time, Humphreys investigates the possibility that a third calendar was in use. ̽��ֱ��official Jewish calendar at the time of Jesus’ death was that still used by Jews today; a lunar system in which days run from sunset to sunset. This was developed during the Jewish exile in Babylon in the 6^th century BC.

Beforehand, however, the Jews had a different system. This is referred to in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, when God instructs Moses and Aaron to start their year at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. Humphreys argues that this system would have been an adaptation of the Egyptian lunar calendar (confusingly one of two systems used by the Egyptians), in which the start of the year was redated to occur in the spring.

There is, he adds, extensive evidence to suggest that this survived as more than a remnant into Jesus’ time. Not all Jews were exiled in Babylon. Those who remained retained the old system of marking the days, and by the 1^st century AD, groups such as the Samaritans, Zealots, some Galileans and some Essenes (who may well have provided Jesus with the accommodation used for the Last Supper), were still abiding by the old system.

Under this, pre-exilic, calendar, Passover always fell earlier and the days were marked from sunrise to sunrise, not sunset to sunset. In AD33, the Passover meal would have occurred on the Wednesday of Holy Week, which presuming Jesus, Matthew, Mark and Luke all used pre-exilic dating, and John does not, resolves both the contradictions in the Gospels and means that the events they describe could have taken place on Thursday, at a more leisurely pace and in accordance with Jewish law.

Jesus also had the motivation to use the earlier dating system developed by Moses. ̽��ֱ��Gospels are littered with examples of him presenting himself as the new Moses. According to Luke, he even said during the Last Supper that he was making a “new covenant” with his disciples – a direct reference to the covenant made between God and the Jewish people through Moses in Exodus.

In many ways, therefore, Humphreys suggests that the Last Supper was a positioning exercise on Jesus’ part, which gave him ample reason to use the pre-exilic calendar. “Jesus was identifying himself explicitly with Moses,” he said. “He was setting himself up as a deliberate parallel. He then died on Nisan 14^th, just as the Passover lambs were being slain according to the official Jewish calendar as well. These are deep, powerful symbolisms – and they can be based on objective, historical evidence.”

̽��ֱ��Mystery of the Last Supper, by Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

̽��ֱ��Last Supper of Jesus Christ was on the Wednesday, and not the Thursday, before his death, according to a new study which claims to have solved “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”.

If we use science and the Gospels hand in hand, we can prove there was no contradiction about the nature of the Last Supper.

Professor Colin Humphreys.

Wikimedia commons

Leonardo Da Vinci's depiction of the Last Supper

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All in the script

bjb42 — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:34:36 +0000

Professor David Ford, who is also Director of the ̽��ֱ��’s Inter-Faith Programme, will give the Pope John Paul II Honorary Lecture today (Tuesday, 5 April). ̽��ֱ��highly prestigious annual lecture, which takes place at the Pontifical ̽��ֱ�� of St Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), examines interreligious understanding.

Scriptural reasoning brings together members of different religious traditions in small groups to read and discuss extracts from their sacred texts. Professor Ford will argue that the process can function as a bridge between Abrahamic faiths which, without necessarily leading to consensus, can result in mutual understanding and respect.

His lecture will begin by describing the 21^st century as a “kairos” – a particularly propitious moment – for engagement between faiths. Professor Ford himself was brought up as an Anglican in the Church of Ireland in Dublin (placing him in a 3% religious minority) and spent parts of his early academic career working in an inner city Anglican parish in Birmingham, which was both multi-ethnic and multi-faith.

“Scriptural Reasoning has transformed my understanding of both Judaism and Christianity,” he said.

“This is not about becoming clearer regarding any of the faiths – I was much clearer about Judaism and Islam before getting to know so many Jews and Muslims. To plunge into a sea of Talmud and Hadith while trying to interpret a scriptural text is often more bewildering than clarifying. To hear Jews or Muslims arguing among themselves subverts many textbook generalisations.”

̽��ֱ��presentation will advocate Scriptural Reasoning as one way in which it is possible to achieve “wise faith”; an understanding of faith as something which doesn’t necessarily always involve clear assertions or imperatives, but is instead about asking questions and exploring and seeking a relationship with God. This, Professor Ford suggests, has the potential to lead not just a deeper understanding of one’s own faith, but to a broader commitment between Christians, Muslims and Jews to the wider, common good.

“ ̽��ֱ��global inter-faith challenge we face requires institutional creativity, conversation, collaboration and thorough theological work and education – locally, nationally and internationally,” he concludes. “ ̽��ֱ��thinking required for this has, I think, hardly got going. As a catalyst for this I have not found anything as helpful as Scriptural Reasoning.”

̽��ֱ��lecture is a central event of the John Paul II Centre for Interreligious Dialogue, created through a partnership between the Russell Berrie Foundation and the Pontifical ̽��ֱ�� of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum). ̽��ֱ��Centre aims to build bridges between Catholic, Jewish and other religious traditions by providing the next generation of religious leaders with a comprehensive understanding of and dedication to inter-faith issues.

Details of the event can be found at https://jp2center.org/, where a full copy of Professor Ford’s lecture will also be published.

̽��ֱ��power of “scriptural reasoning” to transform the way in which different faiths understand one another is to be the subject of a major lecture in Rome, by Cambridge’s Regius Professor of Divinity.

Scriptural Reasoning has transformed my understanding of both Judaism and Christianity.

Professor David Ford

Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme

Scriptural reasoning.

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