Jesus Seminar in East Lansing, Michigan

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East Lansing, Michigan
Friday & Saturday
April 9-10, 2010

Competing Early Christian Voices
The Contest for Authority

Milton C. Moreland & Rubén Dupertuis

The last 150 years have witnessed a wide range of exciting new discoveries of early Christian literature outside of the New Testament. Documents such as the Gospel of Thomas, of Mary (Magdalene), Peter, Judas, the Acts of Thecla, and many others have reshaped how we picture the beginnings of Christianity. Scholars have also come to terms with the conflicting perspectives within the New Testament. It is clear that the wide variety of competing, early Christian documents cannot be best assessed using the categories of orthodoxy and heresy, biblical or non-biblical.
This seminar will concentrate on describing some of the many important new documents from the first two centuries of early Christianity. We will look carefully at how these documents help make sense of the many differences in early Christian literature, both inside and outside the New Testament.

Lecture

Rubén Dupertuis & Milton Moreland
A New Picture of How Christianity Began
The first 200 years of Christianity saw major debates about what Jesus said and did, as well as how believers should respond to this new movement. These disputes come alive in the texts of Q, Mark, Matthew, and in Paul’s letters. Texts like the Gospels of Mary, Judas, and the Acts of Thecla tell of huge disagreements about everything from sex, marriage, and the role of women, to questions about how to be saved and what the kingdom of God is. We begin the search for Christian beginnings by exploding old categories of orthodoxy and heresy.

Friday, 7:30-9 P.M.

Workshops

Milton Moreland & Rubén Dupertuis
Body or Soul: From Plato to Peter and Thomas
Why are Jesus’ death and resurrection at the heart of some early Christian texts and completely absent in others? Why did a focus on the soul and its salvation become so important for many forms of early Christianity? We will examine the Gospels of Peter and Thomas for glimpses of radically different ways early Christians understood what brought about salvation. In the process we will also ask why some early Christian texts have so much in common with ideas that were made famous by the Greek philosopher Plato.

Saturday, 9:30-Noon

Rubén Dupertuis & Milton Moreland
Gender, Sex, and Salvation
Who was Mary Magdalene and why is there a gospel named for her? Why were stories about women like Thecla so popular among early Christian communities? Texts like the Gospel of Mary and the Acts of Thecla contain intriguing ideas about the roles that women played in the origins of Christianity. They expose animated debates about women’s leadership roles alongside fascinating ideas about how to be saved. We will discuss these important texts and answer your questions about how Christianity began.

Saturday, 1:30-4:00 P.M.

Faculty

Rubén René Dupertuis (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the Co-Chair of the Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative Group and a member of the steering committee for the Bible and American Popular Culture Group, both of the Society of Biblical Literature. He was the recipient, in 1998, of an Award for Excellence in Biblical Studies from the Claremont School of Theology.

Milton C. Moreland (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Program in Archaeology at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the Archaeology Senior Staff & Area Supervisor for the ongoing excavation at Sepphoris in Galilee. His publications include articles on Roman period Galilee and Jerusalem and two edited books on the sayings of Jesus.