Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 47

MM i FLYING COLORS Derefc had a tough choice: A job assignment or his girlfriend's birthday. Some test. See Page 8 INSIDE SECTION 5 Horoscope 4 Comics 6-7 Dear Abby 7 Bridge 7 Crossword 7 Book review 7 Tales from the front 8 Tuesday, April 7, 1998 Looking for el Controversial biblical scholar Robert Funk leads an unorthodox tour of the Holy Land By Dennis Polkow Special to the Tribune AP file photo Angela Davis: understanding the blues might start to break down the rigid notions that feminism belongs to white women." IPPORI, Israel "Jesus was the first word out of my mouth," admits Rev. David Owens, "before Dada and Mama. So I get very excited and emotional when I come here.

The first time I saw all of the if' iddfrZ' f( ff Up, -i- vr Radical blues Ex-Black Power activist Angela Davis reinterprets the ladies who sang them holy sites, I cried." Owens, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Wilmette, has organized 10 previous tours to the Holy Land, but none quite like this. The leader of the tour is Robert Funk, author, historian, biblical scholar, retired New Testament professor and founder of the Westar Institute's Jesus Seminar, a controversial conclave of more than 100 biblical scholars who have been meeting twice a year since 1985 to vote on whether Jesus actually said and did the things attributed to him by the Bible or whether some of that was hype, interpretation or flat-out invention used by authors of the Gospels to attract new recruits to the embryonic Christian movement. The tour, which covers three countries Jordan, Israel and Egypt is being called "The Jesus Seminar around the World The Middle East." Today the tour group is looking over the ancient ruins of Sepphofis, less than three miles from Nazareth on the ancient trade route which connected Akko on the Mediterranean coast with the Sea of Galilee. Once a bustling, cosmopolitan Greco-Roman See Jesus, Page 5 This is the first in a series of reports examining an ongoing quest to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. By Teresa Wiltz Tribune Staff Writer The image, circa 1970, persists: The Afro-styled radical, the "dangerous Communist," the marquee figure from the FBI's Most Wanted List, posing with fist raised high in Black Power defiance.

Today, Angela Davis is a bit of a fashion plate, decked out in brown velvet, nails painted a vampy shade of blood red, her hair a fuzzy tangle of rusty curls. The voice is mellifluous; her smile a gap-toothed grin. At 54, the author and professor is still fighting the powers-that-be. (Her causes these days are challenging the prison system and advocating gay and lesbian rights.) But she's got a lighter side as well. She's particularly fond of early morning runs, gobbles up mystery novels at a breathtaking pace, loves a good bottle of California wine and hanging with her two Huskies.

She also digs the blues, so much so that she invested a scholar's passion into analyzing the words behind the music and the women who sang them. Davis spent years transcribing the lyrics of the blues divas Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday hard-living, tell-it-like-it-is sistas who sang of love and lust and, like Smith, weren't afraid to tell a no-good man, "You'll miss the way I baked your jelly rollThen daddy, daddy, you won't have no mama at all." Entranced with the audacity, of their music, Davis, a professor of history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz, put needle to vinyl again and again, mining what she calls the "rich terrain for examining a historical feminist consciousness that reflected the lives of working-class black communities." The result is her latest book, "Blues Legacies and Black See Davis, Page 2 Institute Suove Benedettine di Priscilla, Rome Courtesy of "Frontline" "Head of Christ," a depiction of Jesus from the Catacomb of Ponzianus. Retracing the historical path of Jesus of Nazareth 1 -i -i ipiiMim r- -r -Ti rrr -3 Mi- -mi Funk points to a tablet in Cae-sarea that contains the only arch-eological reference to Pilate. "The Mona Lisa of the Galilee," a detail from "Dionysius' Feast," a floor mosaic in Sepphoris. Robert W.

Funk (at left in dark glasses) and tour group members at the ruins of Herod's palace. Composing contest draws international attention and a few sour notes ggafyl Russian museums find unlikely patrons By Elizabeth Williamson Special to the Tribune T. PETERSBURG, Russia Street-smart, savvy and feasting on post-communist spoils, bankers are the fattest cats in Russia. They sport Italian suits, travel with legions of 'Someone has to make these Russian businessmen civilized. If not us, then Vladimir Gusev, director of the Russian Museum a By Ray Moseley Tribune Foreign Correspondent LONDON For the past two months, six contemporary composers from as many nations including one American have enjoyed perhaps the greatest exposure of new classical works in music history.

Thirty-eight radio stations around the world, including National Public Radio in the United States, in mid-February began playing a new CD consisting of short works by each composer. At the same time, the 200,000 subscribers to the BBC Music Magazine, of whom there are 90,000 in the United States, received the CD free with their subscription. These developments represent the penultimate stage of a new competition, Masterprize, that was designed to change the face of modern music. The winner will be announced Tuesday at a gala concert in London's Barbican Hall at which all six works will be performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding. Cherie Blair, wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, will present the top prize.

John McLaren, a part-time banker, novelist and former British diplomat who is the organizer and chairman of Masterprize, estimates the exposure resulting from radio broadcasts since February has resulted in a worldwide audience of 100 to 150 million. "This must be by a huge margin the biggest ever for new classical music," he said. But whether audiences like what they have been 'offered is still to be determined. Some critics, See Music, Page 5 bodyguards, spend their holidays on the beach in Cannes or the slopes in Cha-monix. They don't know much about art.

Now they're Russia's first home-grown cultural patrons. In what promises to become a two of Russia's largest museums, the State Hermitage Museum and the Russian Museum, have received pledges of money and expertise from two of Moscow's biggest banks. For the bankers, who possess everything but respectability, the agreements are an image booster; for the cash-starved museums, they're a lifeline. "Do they have the right, to be patrons of art? Did the Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies, the robber barons, did they have a right to be patrons?" asks the Hermitage's director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. "Culture is bigger than all of us.

Nobody understands the reality of the Hermitage more than Russian business interests." That reality is grim. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a cash-strapped Moscow failed to fulfill its mandate to support Russian cultural institutions, including the museums, which are more than 90 percent state-funded. By 1996, funds were so scarce that St. Petersburg's museums, theaters and uy versities staged a citywide protest, threatening to close unless Moscow ponied up. But after an initial bailout, the situation has changed little.

The Hermitage, for example, received only 40 percent of last year's operating budget, enough to pay salaries and utilities but nothing else. Enter Vladimir Potanin, one of the country's seven most powerful bankers, who gave a symbolic $50,000 to fund Hermitage's scholarly publications. More important, Uneximbank now is on line to fund a feasibility study for development of the decaying, nearly vacant General Staff building, a huge, czarist-era soldiers' quarters adjacent to the Hermitage. Then, it is hoped, the bank will help pay for the $150 million project, which would add exhibit space and restoration laboratories, a wax museum, restaurants and a cinema. Asked about his artistic preferences tit" a press conference announcing the agreement, Potanin expressed a partiality for landscapes.

"I like pictures with no people in them," he said. "When I see faces I feel Photo for the Tribune by Paul Miller With bankers taking an interest and pledging aid, better times may be ahead tor the State Hermitage Museum in Moscow. See Russia, Page 5, Bob Greene is on vaccwn..