Paul Mirecki

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Paul Mirecki is Bible scholar and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas and the faculty advisor for the Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics student organization. He was chairman of the department until he stepped aside on December 7, 2005.

Mirecki earned his Th. D. in Theology from Harvard University, worked with John Strugnell to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he was one of the most recent persons to discover and translate an unknown gospel.

1 Early life
2 Scholarly work
3 Intelligent Design controversy
4 Response from the Friends of the Department of Religious Studies
5 External links

[edit] Early life

Raised Roman Catholic in a Polish community in Chicago, Mirecki's parents wanted him to be a priest. Instead, he took to music. In the late 1960s, he attended Roosevelt University in Chicago and majored in musical composition and played classical guitar and piano. He dropped out early to work, but returned to college in 1973, pursuing religious studies at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Upon graduation, he headed for the East Coast. Unlike other students at Massachusetts's Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Mirecki wasn't intent on becoming a minister. And following his work there, he enrolled in a doctoral program at Harvard in 1980. Mirecki focused more intensely on language study, partly out of necessity. In one class, he was required to read a long article in Italian. When he told the professor he didn't speak the language, the response, he recalled, was: "That's your problem. Not mine."

Today, Mirecki can read French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Middle Egyptian, Coptic,and Latin.

After teaching stints at the University of Michigan and Albion College, Mirecki joined the University of Kansas faculty in 1989.

At the top of the "academic resume" section of his website, Mirecki has an image of Mr. Van Driessen, the liberal hippie teacher of Beavis and Butt-head, with the caption, "(Actual photo of Paul Mirecki)".

[edit] Scholarly work

In 1991, amid the vast holdings of Berlin's Egyptian Museums, Mirecki uncovered fragments of an ancient Egyptian manuscript containing a lost gospel. The museum had purchased the manuscript years before, and the scraps languished in storage for decades before Mirecki discovered it. Mirecki edited the manuscript with Charles Hedrick, professor of religious studies at Missouri State University who also had been studying it. Identifying the manuscript's significance was not easy. Mirecki compared it to taking 20 pages from a modern book, running them through a shredder, throwing half away and then trying to decipher the text from the remaining scraps.

The lost gospel, called the Gospel of the Savior, contains conversations between Jesus and his disciples. It’s estimated to have been written sometime in the second half of the second century. The document provides more information about the origins of Christianity.

Mirecki also identified an ancient Egyptian scroll that was housed in the private collection of a student's father in Johnson County, Kansas. The student told Mirecki his father had the scroll but wasn't sure it was authentic. "I was shocked at what he had", Mirecki recalls, "I immediately recognized it as something authentic."

The scroll was donated to the university and is now housed in a museum. It is a sort of guide to the afterlife that would have been placed in a tomb with a mummified person. It dates back to the origins of the belief in resurrection.

[edit] Intelligent Design controversy

Mirecki achieved notoriety in late November, 2005 for making derogatory comments about adherents of intelligent design. Mirecki was to teach a class in spring 2006 on the topic, "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design and Creationism". (The original title was to be "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies", but the phrase "Other Religious Mythologies" was removed on November 28 [1].) The class was a response to a November 8 ruling by the Kansas State Board of Education designed to allow Kansas public school students to hear more criticism of evolution in class. He had previously led a group of KU faculty in creating a parody creationist organization called "Families for Learning Accurate Theories" (F.L.A.T.) in 1999 in response to and ridicule of creationists on the Kansas Board of Education who decided to de-emphasize the teaching of evolution.

In emails to the Society for Open Minded Atheists and Agnostics, Mirecki commented on the course's perspective on intelligent design, saying, "The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category 'mythology'." Mirecki signed the note, "Doing my part to piss off the religious right, Evil Dr. P." He later apologized for these words and urged that the class be cancelled.

The course was withdrawn on December 1, 2005 with the support of University of Kansas Provost David Shulenberger. Some conservative political activists are not satisfied with the university's response and have called for sanctions against Mirecki or for his dismissal.

On December 5, 2005 Mirecki reported that he was accosted and beaten by two unidentified men. He was treated and released from Lawrence Memorial Hospital. Mirecki has stated that the men made reference to the recent controversy over the class during the beating. On December 7, Mirecki stepped down from his post as department chair. Mirecki denounced the university as being unsupportive of him and his First Amendment rights, and said he had faced an increase in harassment since the chancellor publicly called his email commentary "repugnant and vile". He also criticized the police as treating him more like a criminal than a victim, saying they had confiscated his car and his computer and had interrogated him for up to five hours straight[2]. Despite a newspaper photo showing two black eyes and a bruise[3], Michelle Malkin and criminology professor Mike Adams suggested in separate columns at Townhall.com, a conservative website, that Mirecki had reported his assault as a fabrication, [4] [5].

The University of Kansas issued a press release on December 10 affirming that they stood behind Mirecki unequivocally, that they deplored the violence against him, that he remained a tenured professor, that he had resigned as department chair voluntarily on the recommendation of the department faculty, that he had canceled his course on intelligent design as mythology voluntarily, but that the university "continues to believe the course has merit and should be taught in the future."

[edit] Response from the Friends of the Department of Religious Studies

In December 2005, the fundraising and support arm of the Department of Religious Studies sent out a postcard that denounces Mirecki's comments. The text of the postcard includes a claim that the repudiation is supported by the administration of the university.