Inusitado acontecimento: três israelenses atacam Basílica da Anunciação em Nazaré

Folha Online: 03/03/2006

Extremistas israelenses atacam Basílica da Anunciação – da Efe, em Jerusalém

Três extremistas israelenses vestidos de peregrinos cristãos atacaram com explosivos nesta sexta-feira a Basílica da Anunciação, na cidade de Nazaré, informou a rádio pública israelense.

O ataque, perpetrado por um homem e duas mulheres, aconteceu durante uma reza no templo e gerou pânico entre os fiéis. Alguns deles tiveram que receber atendimento médico porque sofreram ataque de nervos.

Os autores do ataque utilizaram explosivos e botijões de gás, os quais foram carregados dentro de um carro de bebê, segundo testemunhas.

O inusitado ataque causou grande confusão dentro da basílica e houve reações indignadas entre as pessoas que se encontravam fora do templo.

Aparentemente, um dos agressores ficou ferido, informou a rádio israelense. Um grupo de policiais que chegou ao templo para deter os agressores teve que se trancar com eles em um quarto da basílica, já que foram cercados por uma multidão que tentava linchá-los (cont.)

Estudos sobre as origens e o desenvolvimento da agricultura no Egito

Prehistoric and Predynastic Egypt: site de Andie Byrnes, Londres, Reino Unido, sobre o Egito pré-histórico e pré-dinástico. Além deste site, Andie, que está escrevendo sua tese na UCL, Londres, tem outros relacionados com o Egito, de modo geral, e/ou sobre o tema das origens e desenvolvimento da agricultura no Egito. Além de um blog, Egyptology News ativo de 2004 a 2013.

This site has been built with the intention of pulling together information about Prehistoric and Predynastic Egypt, presenting it in a way which is easy to absorb and navigate. The subject is the origins and development of agriculture in Egypt. By Andie Byrnes, studying for a PhD at UCL (London, UK). Other sites by Andie: Ancient Egypt Portal, Egyptology News (blog), Predynastic Faiyum, S. Cairo and Western Delta, The Origins & Spread of Agriculture.

 

Sobre o novo templo descoberto em Heliópolis

Confira no blog Egyptology News de Andie Byrnes, London, o post Heliopolis Update, sobre a descoberta do Templo em Heliópolis, no Egito, do qual falamos ontem aqui.

Ela diz:

Nevine El-Aref, providing a good summary of the new temple at Heliopolis, with some additional information: “This site is believed to be an important part of the ancient city of Iunu (ancient Heliopolis), which was one of ancient Egypt’s three main cities. In addition to being the city of sun worship, Iunu was an astronomical centre and a literary hub, where intellectuals, including Greek philosophers, studied.

Among the unearthed artifacts were a pink granite colossus, weighing five tonnes, whose features resemble those of Ramses II, and a 1.5 metre sandstone headless statue of a Pharaonic figure, whose back is engraved in hieroglyphic text. While brushing the sand off, three cartouches of Ramses II were also uncovered, scattered on the temple ground, along with an unidentified pink granite royal head wearing a nemes (head dress).

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Al-Ahram Weekly that further excavations revealed a number of talatat (small painted stones) bearing the name of Queen Nefertiti. ‘This suggests that the monotheistic King Akhenaten once built a temple or a shrine in this area,’ he said, adding that archaeological evidence of massive constructions of sun temples had been carried out much earlier that the 19th Dynasty.”

UE vai colocar na Internet todo o seu patrimônio científico e cultural

Folha Online: 02/03/2006 – 17h14

Biblioteca Digital Européia terá 6 mi de obras em 2010

da Efe, em Bruxelas

A União Européia (UE) contará em 2010 com uma biblioteca digital de mais de 6 milhões de livros, filmes, fotografias e outros documentos, um projeto que começa a ser executado neste ano com o objetivo de reunir todo o patrimônio cultural e científico do continente. A iniciativa é similar à da empresa Google, que prevê disponibilizar na internet 15 milhões de obras procedentes de bibliotecas americanas e da universidade britânica de Oxford. A Biblioteca Digital Européia permitirá ao usuário, através de um único portal em vários idiomas, ter acesso ao saber cultural e científico de bibliotecas, arquivos e museus de toda a UE (cont.)

Descoberto Templo em Heliópolis com estátuas de Ramsés II

Leia no blog Egyptology News o post More re new temple at Heliopolis.

Two-page article on the National Geographic website re the recent discovery of a temple under a market in Heliopolis, on the outskirts of Cairo: “An Egyptian team has been cooperating with a team from the German Archaeological Institute on the excavations in the Ain Shams and Matariya neighborhoods of Cairo . . . . The temple was built of limestone, and the archaeologists have uncovered the remains of one pillar bearing inscriptions of Ramses II. The researchers are currently excavating the entrance area and the west side of the temple site. They have found chambers for the storage of wheat, a kiln for making amulets, part of a large statue—the head of which weighs 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) and would have stood almost 20 feet (6 meters) tall—and another head of granite, weighing 2 tons (1.8 metric tons). ‘Perhaps the most exciting [find] is an unusual seated statue that shows Ramses II in the leopard skin of a priest, showing that he built this temple as the high priest of Re’, Hawass said.”

Pesquisa acadêmica da Bíblia e fé

Há uma discussão em andamento sobre pesquisa acadêmica da Bíblia e fé, provocada pelo artigo de Michael Fox no Fórum SBL, sob o título Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View.

 

Que de certa maneira se resume na seguinte posição:

In my view, faith-based study has no place in academic scholarship, whether the object of study is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or Homer. Faith-based study is a different realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it. I distinguish faith-based Bible study from the scholarship of persons who hold a personal faith. In our field, there are many religious individuals whose scholarship is secular and who introduce their faith only in distinctly religious forums.

Na minha opinião, o estudo baseado na fé não tem lugar na pesquisa acadêmica, seja o objeto de estudo a Bíblia, o Livro de Mórmon ou Homero. O estudo baseado na fé é um tipo diferente de atividade intelectual que pode mergulhar na pesquisa bíblica com seus objetivos específicos, mas não pode contribuir para a pesquisa acadêmica. Eu distingo o estudo bíblico baseado na fé da pesquisa de pessoas que possuem uma fé pessoal. Em nosso campo, há muitas pessoas religiosas cujos estudos são laicos e que introduzem sua fé apenas em fóruns claramente religiosos.

 

O texto completo do artigo de Michael Fox diz:

Recently, claims have been made for the legitimacy of faith-based scholarship in the forum of academic scholarship (on a related issue, see the recent FORUM article by Mary Bader and the responses to it). In my view, faith-based study has no place in academic scholarship, whether the object of study is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or Homer. Faith-based study is a different realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it. I distinguish faith-based Bible study from the scholarship of persons who hold a personal faith. In our field, there are many religious individuals whose scholarship is secular and who introduce their faith only in distinctly religious forums.

Faith-based study of the Bible certainly has its place—in synagogues, churches, and religious schools, where the Bible (and whatever other religious material one gives allegiance to) serves as a normative basis of moral inspiration or spiritual guidance. This kind of study is certainly important, but it is not scholarship—by which I mean Wissenschaft, a term lacking in English that can apply to the humanities as well as the hard sciences, even if the modes and possibilities of verification in each are very different. (It would be strange, I think, to speak of a “faith-based Wissenschaft.”)

Any discipline that deliberately imports extraneous, inviolable axioms into its work belongs to the realm of homiletics or spiritual enlightenment or moral guidance or whatnot, but not scholarship, whatever academic degrees its practitioners may hold. Scholarship rests on evidence. Faith, by definition, is belief when evidence is absent. “There can … be no faith concerning matters which are objects of rational knowledge, for knowledge excludes faith” (thus Aquinas, as paraphrased by the Enc. of Philosophy 3.165). And evidence must be accessible and meaningful apart from the unexaminable axioms, and it must not be merely generated by its own premises. (It is not evidence in favor of the Quran’s divine origin that millions of people believe it deeply, nor is it evidence of its inerrancy that the it proclaims itself to be “the Scripture whereof there is no doubt.”) To be sure, everyone has presuppositions and premises, but these are not inviolable. Indeed, it is the role of education to teach students how to recognize and test their premises and, when necessary, to reject them.

Faith-based Bible study is not part of scholarship even if some of its postulates turn out to be true. If scholarship, such as epigraphy and archaeology, should one day prove the existence of a Davidic empire, faith-based study will have had no part in the discovery (even if some epigraphers incidentally hold faith of one sort or another) because it starts with the conclusions it wishes to reach.

There is an atmosphere abroad in academia (loosely associated with postmodernisms) that tolerates and even encourages ideological scholarship and advocacy instruction. Some conservative religionists have picked this up. I have heard students, and read authors, who justify their biases by the rhetoric of postmodern self-indulgence. Since no one is viewpoint neutral and every one has presuppositions, why exclude Christian presuppositions? Why allow the premise of errancy but not of inerrancy? Such sophistry can be picked apart, but the climate does favor it.

The claim of faith-based Bible study to a place at the academic table takes a toll on the entire field of Bible scholarship. The reader or student of Bible scholarship is likely to suspect (or hope) that the author or teacher is moving toward a predetermined conclusion. Those who choose a faith-based approach should realize that they cannot expect the attention of those who don’t share their postulates. The reverse is not true. Scholars who are personally religious constantly draw on work by scholars who do not share their postulates. One of the great achievements of modern Bible scholarship is that it communicates across religious borders so easily that we usually do not know the beliefs of its practitioners.

Trained scholars quickly learn to recognize which authors and publications are governed by faith and tend to set them aside, not out of prejudice but out of an awareness that they are irrelevant to the scholarly enterprise. Sometimes it is worthwhile to go through a faith-motivated publication and pick out the wheat from the chaff, but time is limited.

The best thing for Bible appreciation is secular, academic, religiously-neutral hermeneutic. (I share Jacques Berlinerblau’s affirmation of the secular hermeneutic [The Secular Bible, Cambridge, 2005], review here, but not his ideas about what it constitutes or where it leads). Secular scholarship allows the Bible to be seen as a rich and vital mixture of texts from an ancient people in search of God and moral culture. Its humanness—and primitiveness—can allow us both to recognize and make allowances for some of its uglier moments (Lev 18:22, for example or Deut 20:10-20, or much of Joshua). These things would (in my view) be abhorrent coming from the Godhead, but tolerable when viewed (and dismissed) as products of human imperfection and imagination in an ancient historical context.

We are in a time when pseudo-scientific claims are demanding a place in the science curriculum, and biologists and zoologists cannot afford to ignore them. Similar voices wish to insert themselves into academic Bible scholarship, and serious adherents of Bibelwissenschaft should likewise offer opposition.

Michael V. Fox, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

 

Faith Based Scholarship Interviews from Café Apocalypsis

Craig Blomberg (Monday, March 13, 2006)

Scot McKnight (Monday, March 13, 2006)

James Crossley (Friday, March 17, 2006)

Craig Evans (Monday, March 20, 2006)

Darrell Bock (Monday, March 20, 2006)

Mark Goodacre (Monday, March 20, 2006)

Peter Williams (Tuesday, March 21, 2006)

Peter Bolt (Tuesday, March 21, 2006)

Andreas Köstenberger (Thursday, March 23, 2006)

Michael Bird (Monday, March 27, 2006)

Philip Davies (Tuesday, March 28, 2006)

Thomas L. Thompson (Tuesday, April 04, 2006)

George Guthrie (Wednesday, April 12, 2006)

Jim Davila leu e comenta O Código Da Vinci

Não perca a resenha de Jim Davila em seu blog PaleoJudaica.com: DA VINCI CODE REVIEW.

Chamo a atenção para uma frase:

The bad thing about the book is that many people will read it and think the ridiculous claims in it are true — and Brown himself is partly to blame for this and he could have mitigated the problem instead of making it worse.