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Program |
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The third annual Westar Summer Institute
Asilomar on Monterey Bay
June 8 –13, 2008
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We are very sorry to report that Karen King has had to withdraw from Westar’s Summer Institute. She asked that we express her profound regrets at not being able to be there. Charles W. Hedrick has very kindly agreed to teach her program.
There are some 34 gospels known to have been written from the late first through the end of the second century. This diversity illustrates the following datum: in the first century there existed neither one way of understanding Jesus nor one way of being his follower. In the earliest extant sources (Paul, around 50C.E.) diversity is the rule rather than the exception. Even the canonical gospels do not agree on the details of Jesus' public career or the nature of his person. This course begins with that diversity and situates two of the most famous of the “unorthodox” gospels within the formative period of early Christianity. The Gospels of Mary and Judas, attributed to two of Jesus’ most famous (and infamous) disciples, paint portraits of Jesus that seem shockingly at odds with the canonical gospels. Yet the issues they raise are strikingly contemporary: What was the real purpose of Jesus’ death? How could a God of love desire the suffering and death of his son? How should Jesus be viewed? What role should women play in the church? These two gospels lead us right into the center of the debates about the nature of Christianity. Charles W. Hedrick, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University, was a member of the UNESCO team that reconstructed and conserved the Nag Hammadi Codices. More |
The writer Margaret Drabble says that the gloomy poet Philip Larkin cheers us up because he reconciles us to our ills by the scrupulous way in which he notices them. The same could be said of religion, and one way to use it is to observe how it notices and responds creatively to the tensions in the human condition. Hugh Walpole said that the world was a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel: any scrupulous noticing of the ills of the world must hold both ends of that polarity. One of the consolations of literature is the way it transmutes the tragic-comedy of life into art, by noticing it. The same can be said of existential religion. Richard Holloway will examine the human predicament, looking honestly at the fact that we are the most dangerous animal on the planet, yet the only one equipped with the spiritual resources both to understand and respond to the crisis we ourselves have created. Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church till 2000. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he is the author of twenty-seven books, including How to Read the Bible (2006) and Doubts and Loves (2001).
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Bob Funk claimed that the Bible is like a fester in the American tradition because it has not been allowed to speak for itself. Rather, fundamentalists interpret the Bible in light of a Baconian, rationalist worldview, and liberals read it in light of post-Darwinian, scientific empiricism. Both fundamentalists and liberals exploit it to support extra-biblical theological assumptions and cultural values. Lane McGaughy is the Atkinson Professor Emeritus of Religious & Ethical Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He currently serves as chair of the Boards of Directors of Westar Institute and Polebridge Press. |
Mary and Judas
Between the Monster and the Saint
The American Bible
Charles W. Hedrick, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University, was a member of the UNESCO team that reconstructed and conserved the Nag Hammadi Codices. He served as both translator and volume editor for the Nag Hammadi Library in English and later excavated at the site of the discovery. In the 1990s, he and colleague, Paul Mirecki, discovered, reconstructed, translated, and published the Gospel of the Savior, a previously unknown ancient gospel in Coptic.
Hedrick is no stranger to the intrigues of the world of antiquities. In 1990, he and Greek colleague, Nikolaos Olympiou, Professor of Old Testament at the University of Athens, began a ten-year journey of discovery that led to the publication of new, color photographs of a letter by Clement of Alexandria (end of the second century c.e.) that contained fragments of a gospel known simply as Secret Mark. The existence of that gospel had been the subject of hot debate since its publication in 1973 by Columbia University Professor Morton Smith. The new photos which appeared in the September/October 2000 issue of Westar’s magazine, The Fourth R, laid the question to rest for most scholars, though certainly not all. (See the story and photographs online at http://www.westarinstitute.org/Periodicals/4R_Articles/secretmk.html.) In 2000, an antiquities dealer sent him some fragments of yet another unknown gospel which subsequently became known as the Gospel of Judas. Hedrick’s provisional transcription and translation of those fragments were posted on the internet without his permission by a Dutch blogger who had asked to see them as background for a story he was writing.
Charles Hedrick is a retired U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain (Colonel) and Juvenile Probation Officer, Los Angeles County Probation Department. He is the author of several books including Many Things in Parables (2004) and The Gospel of the Savior: A New Ancient Gospel (with Paul Mirecki, 1999), and is a regular presenter on the Jesus Seminar on the Road circuit as well as for the Biblical Archaeology Society and the Charis Institute.