Word: prothero
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...much messengers as auteurs. And since the faith awakened or sustained by their work was its most important attribute, they probably would have hoped for maximum exposure - which can be at odds with free market economics, portracted lawsuits, or the bitter taste that accompanies literary bickering. "Well gosh," says Prothero of the Sallman portrait, "that image could be preaching the gospel more effectively if it were available to everyone...
...Stephen Prothero, the head of the religion department at Boston University, says that the controversies would not have made the front page (or the front papyrus) in the past. One reason for this is that the concept of ownership of intellectual property is only a few hundred years old. The other is that the real author of pious art - whether literary or artistic - used to be considered to be God, who may require fear, awe or compassion, but not royalties...
...Prothero brings up what is perhaps the foremost example of this kind of tolerance. Most modern critics regard the Gospels of the new Testament as being mutually dependent. "Did Luke rip off Mark?" he asks. "Probably." That is to say, Luke probably incorporated Mark's gospel into his own. Did it matter? Certainly not to the early Christians, who put four different and arguably contradictory accounts in their Bible. "Piety," notes Prothero, "trumped authorship." Besides, the real author reigned in heaven...
...work in question falls into the hands of a company, forget it. In his book American Jesus, Prothero wrote extensively about the massively reproduced 1940 portrait of Christ called "Son of Man" by the artist Warner Sallman. He wanted to use it as an illustration in the book. Sallman died in 1968, and Prothero says that the the portrait is currently owned by a religious press (a non-profit) whose price for its use was so high that he opted...
...Prothero may be overly sanguine about the workings of the U.S. court system. But even if he's wrong, this shouldn't stop schools from making some effort to teach the Bible. The study doesn't have to be mandatory. In a national school system overscheduled with basic skills, other topics such as history and literature deserve core status more than Scripture--provided that these classes address it themselves, where appropriate. But if an elective is offered, it should be twinned mandatorily with a world religions course, even if that would mean just a semester of each. Within that period...