James Bowley, Millsaps College

By some stroke of genius, luck, or poor planning, you have reached the home page of

Mainly I teach courses in BIBLE and biblically related RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS, Judaism and Christianity, and Islam. I’m a scholar of TEXTS and all the stuff in and around and behind and before and after them. See below for a list of courses.

But what I really am is a STUDENT—a student who gets paid! My real job is to ask questions about texts and religions and history and then to devise meaningful and enjoyable ways of exploring in the directions that those questions point.

Is the Pope Catholic? Is Mississippi hot? Is popcorn in theatres ridiculously expensive? Is baseball the best game ever invented? Is the entire “Left Behind” series a colossal waste of ink and trees and reading lights? Yes! I love my job! What’s not to like about spending the day with great colleagues and students thinking and conversing and researching about religious traditions, reading beautiful or even shocking texts, and investigating intriguing religious practices?

You’ve got to be crazy! Religion is one of the most fascinating and powerful social forces on the planet—and has been as far back as we can see—and it is a fascinating conglomeration of culture and psychology, sociology and history and divine claims and literature and morals and immorals (!) and just about anything else you can think of.

And as for Bible, you think that is boring? Crazy again! Many people expect only pious, sacred (whatever that is) things in “holy scripture.” But what is really there are things like a God having casual conversation with humans, people getting swallowed by fish, donkeys talking, bathroom humor, boys calling an old prophet “baldy” only to have the prophet get mad and sic bears on them, a woman taking off her sandal in court and spitting in a man’s face, a vaunted patriarch lying to save his own skin at the expense of his wife’s, strange regulations about priests wearing underwear, rules about women’s menstrual cycles and about mildew on walls. And don’t forget all that stuff about sex—stories and poetry wild enough to catch even Dr. Ruth’s attention. This (and a lot of religion too) is the real “stuff” of biblical literature and it often makes for delightful reading for those with even a modicum of curiosity. In a lot of places of our culture where “the Bible” is used, these messy and interesting details get ignored and forgotten—but not in my classes!

Indeed! I am the Religious Studies Department's member of MIIAR (pronounced "Mir," yes, as in the Russian space program) And, just in case you don't know what that means, it stands for Millsaps Institute for Interdisciplinary Archaeological Research. I sponsor, encourage, and sometimes accompany our students on archaeological excavations. I have traveled extensively in the Middle East and am delighted that we are currently associated with a very active and significant site in Israel, Tel Zeitah, under the direction of archaeologist Ron Tappy. For more on this exciting excavation, go to http://www.zeitah.net/. For more on MIIAR check out http://www.millsaps.edu/miiar/

For other cool classes about Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, comparative religion, historical and modern theologies, and philosophy of religion you should take courses of Steve, Darby or Loye. But, you could take mine:

	BECAUSE YOU WONDER what Judaism is all about, or how people make claims of speaking for God, or what have classic authors said about GOD and EVIL, or how ancient Israelites related to surrounding cultures, or what Early Christians believed about Jesus, or what is that book called “Revelation” all about, anyway?
The famous Rosetta Stone-key to reading Ancient Egyptian. 196 BCE.

BECAUSE YOU ARE CURIOUS about ancient cultures and how they lived and thought, or about the Dead Sea Scrolls, or about meanings of the book of Job or some other biblical book.
	A commentary on Habbakuk (1^st cen. BCE)

BECAUSE YOU HEARD (CORRECTLY) that all are welcome in our department’s classes, regardless of your background in Bible or religion. In my classes, even if you don’t know much at all about Bible or Judaism or Christianity, you will find that the material is meant to enrich and enlighten students of many different traditions. Curiosity, courtesy, and diligence are all you need. (If you want indoctrination or confirmation of some particular orthodoxy, it would be best to go somewhere else.)

I’m fairly new here--just a senior--but here is the list of courses that I have or will teach in the next few years. The descriptions are more specific than those in the catalog.

Discerning the divine will has always been a prime human concern. This course will involve a comparative study of how human beings have determined what God(s) say in ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Israelite cultures, following this theme into the world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

It's classical, it's biblical, it's fun!! This in an introductory course for the study of Hebrew and if you take all three semesters, it will qualify as your foreign language requirement. Cool!

"Religion." What is it? As the word "religion" is multivalent, so also phenomena usually labeled "religious" are complex and innumerable. Religion can be deeply personal and/or political, impersonal, or businesslike. Using a variety of effective methods (discussion, site visits, film, guests, interviews) this course is meant to bring us to engage with a multiplicity of religions, with multiple of ways of studying religion, and with the multifaceted nature of religious systems.

RLST 2010 Why Can’t God be Good? Why Should We?: Ethics, Religion, and Literature (a.k.a. Religion and Ethics)

This course is an exploration in ideas of evil and God in literature in a hellish and beautiful world. A 9 year-old is brutally raped; a mudslide wipes out a town of 10,000; a business executive cheats a 65 year-old widow out of her entire retirement savings; a child is born with severe Hurler syndrome and dies at age 3; a guard crams naked children into a gas chamber “shower”; 3,000,000 starve from famine in one year on one continent. . . . What can we say? A novelist picks up her pen and weeps. This class will explore THROUGH CLASSIC LITERATURE (Job, Ecclesiastes, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Camus, Dillard) the always-intertwined subjects of religion (especially monotheistic) and ethics. Check out my syllabus.

The impact of “the Bible” on “Western” culture could hardly be overstated; but just what is this book? This course, designed particularly for breadth, is an academic introduction to, and a general survey of, the library of Hebrew Scriptures (a.k.a. Old Testament). We will explore the historical and cultural settings and the literary expressions and content of each book, through readings, projects, lectures, writing, and discussions. In addition, we will engage questions about contemporary interpretations of these ancient writings in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. In the end, what will we make of the saying of Voltaire, “the Bible is more celebrated than known”?

What was the cultural and religious background of the New Testament writers? What sources and traditions were they working with? What aims and interests are evident in their work? What different ways of thinking about God, Israel, the Messiah, Jesus, sin, salvation, and life in this world are represented in the New Testament, and how do they fit together? How do the New Testament writings reflect institutional developments in the early Christian church?

This course involves careful reading and discussion of New Testament texts as well as exposure to many of the chief findings of scholarly work on the New Testament. There is no prerequisite, although Religious Studies 2210, Hebrew Scriptures, makes an excellent preparation. Check out my syllabus.

Scholarship is a big chat-room across the continents and centuries. I try to listen well, and I have added a couple words to the conversation and hope for a couple more before I (re)turn to dust. Here is a list of my most current publications. Please buy them so my editors will be happy and my children can eat.

NEW! HOT OFF THE PRESS!! Guided Tour of Israel’s Sacred Library: An Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.2007

The Dead Sea Scroll Concordance, James Bowley and Edward M. Cook associate editors and Martin Abegg, Jr., general editor. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.

	Living Traditions of the Bible: Scripture in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Practice. Editor. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999. James Bowley, “A Library of Tradition: The Beginnings of the Bible,” in Living Traditions of the Bible: Scripture in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Practice; pp. 7-34.
Living Traditions at Amazon.com

“Moses in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Living in the Shadow of God’s Anointed,” in The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, and Interpretation, ed. Peter Flint and Martin Abegg, Jr. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000, pp. 159-181.

Bible at Qumran

	*“Heroes,” “Pax Romana,” “Purification Texts (Dead Sea Scrolls),” in Dictionary of New Testament Background.* Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2000.**
Dictionary of NT Background at Amazon.com

“Rethinking the Concept of ‘Bible’: Some Theses and Proposals,” Henoch: Historical and Philological Studies on Judaism, James Bowley and John C. Reeves. XXV (2003), pp.3-18. (http://www.uncc.edu/jcreeves/).

“Prophets and Prophecy at Qumran” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years, ed. James VanderKam and Peter Flint. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998, vol. 2:354-378.

A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts of Cave Four, Fascicle 4,James Bowley, Martin Abegg, Jr. and Ben Zion Wacholder. New York: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1996.

“Ur of the Chaldees in Pseudo-Eupolemus.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 14 (1996): 55-63.

(Never heard of Pseudo-Eupolemus? What have you been doing? Reading “Left Behind”?)

“The Compositions of Abraham,” in Tracing the Threads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha. Ed. John Reeves. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994, pp. 215-238.

“Josephus’ Use of Pagan Sources” in Pursuing the Text: Studies in Honor of Ben Zion Wacholder. Ed. John Kampen and John Reeves. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994, pp. 202-215.

Judith. Septuagint Commentary Series, ed. Stanley E. Porter et al. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Prayer of Manasseh. Septuagint Commentary Series, ed. Stanley E. Porter et al. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

“Rethinking the Concept of ‘Bible’: Some Theses and Proposals,” with my friend and excellent scholar John C. Reeves (http://www.uncc.edu/jcreeves/).

“Euphoric La Palma”

WHAT ELSE DO I DO, AND LIKE, AND FIND MEANINGFUL?(OR, how can I convince you I’m pretty much [not too much] a regular human being that might not be too bad to have as a teacher?)

I hope I’m a scholar BUT first I hope I’m a true human being beyond my job. I like to read (poetry, history, fiction, essay), a lot; I like to watch baseball—little league especially—and watch and play it with my kids; fall is my favorite season and I like to visit cemeteries (checking out my future accommodations) and to take walks in the neighborhood or in forests and mountains or art galleries. I love to travel—would go almost anywhere and eat almost anything. I enjoy music: Bob Dylan, U2, Sheryl Crow, Beatles, Neil Young, Counting Crows, Beethoven, Satie, Emmylou Harris, Debussy, Vigilantes of Love, Brahms’s Requiem,

write me (Millsaps College, 1701 North State Street, Jackson MS 39210; fax: 601 974 1324),

Official Stuff: Ph.D. Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (1992)

BECAUSE YOU WANT TO KNOW what’s REALLY in a Bible and you want to read it and think about it for yourself—not just believe what someone else tells you.
	Leningrad Codex, oldest complete Hebrew biblical manuscript, 1009 CE.