Friday, June 11, 2010

Larry Hurtado in Amsterdam

In a previous post, Arie Zwiep announced the one-day symposium with Larry Hurtado at our university. I could do some live blogging, for Larry is speaking as I am typing this.
More importantly, however, we had a nice session of our Amsterdam New Testament Colloquium yesterday, where we were able to discuss with Larry his Lord Jesus Christ in a cordial and relaxed manner.
The discussion focussed (partly) on the category of ‘religious experience’, as Larry uses a taxonomy of it and more notably the special category of ‘revelatory religious experience’ as part of his historical explanation of early devotion to Christ. What kind of explanation is it? How does it square with current research on ‘religious experience’? Can such an explanation be verified or falsified? It turned out, at least, that further research and discussion is still possible.
The photograph below shows the group after the discussion, or, to be entirely correct, between the official part of it and its less official continuation at another, even more spirited location.


From left to right: Bas van Os, Cees van der Ziel, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, Jan Krans, Arie Zwiep, Larry Hurtado, Martin de Boer. The painting between Larry and Martin shows Tjitze Baarda, as former dean of our faculty.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Symposium with Larry Hurtado

Dear all,

You are all cordially invited to a research symposium with Larry Hurtado (University of Edinburgh) on 11 June 2010 at VU University Amsterdam.

See for details: http://www.cert-amsterdam.nl/en-events.htm

Arie Zwiep

Syriac Alphabet

As (1) I found no easy cheat sheet on the Internet for Syriac, and (2) I am still struggling with the Serto alphabet, I decided to make a hopefully nice table myself. You can download a PDF version as well.
It is version 1.2; if you spot any errors or want to suggest an improvement, please do so in the comments. The fonts used are Meltho OpenType.

Update 3 June 2010: some errors corrected; the PDF link now brings you to version 1.1.
Update 2 January 2013: some further updates, to version 1.2; links to a different location.