As we follow the narrow paths through the village of path, covered with oyster shells to keep the paths from having ruts, we walk over to the oldest house in the town, presently called the Palmer house (but it was originally owned by a family with a Huguenot name). This was at one time a guest house, which is one reason it is large and has four bedrooms upstairs…. Note the family graveyard in the foreground. Contrast the size of... Read more

There are many places on or near the coast of North or South Carolina where there is lots of interesting history to be discovered, and one of those places is the little tiny town of Bath North Carolina, the very first town of any size in North Carolina, and certainly the first village of any importance in N.C. And both this town, and the plantation we will be viewing in the next post are connected with my Methodists– in particular... Read more

It is always difficult to maintain the quality of a series of movies that are filmed over a rather long period of time. It is especially hard when you get to the point of filming a fourth or fifth film in the series. So I went to see this two hour long movie with somewhat low expectations, having read various reviews and watched the trailers (see above). It’s always nice to be surprised in a good way, and I can... Read more

It’s now official. I have visited beaches all over the world from the northern to the southern hemisphere, and from east to west in North America. And from Singapore to Sydney, from Hong Kong to Hawaii, and the winner of the best beach in the world is pictured in this post— Cherry Grove Beach in North Myrtle Beach S.C. Why is it the best beach you ask? Well, of course because God made it that way, but to give less... Read more

READ THIS— This is a story even Dan Brown couldn’t make up. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573/ or http://theatln.tc/1Or1orY Read more

Here’s another helpful post by my friend Larry Hurtado…… See what you think— BW3 “The Paul Dialogue”: Barclay & Wright Yesterday was the day-long dialogue on the Apostle Paul between John Barclay (Durham) and N. T. Wright (St. Andrews) held under the auspices of our Centre for the Study of Christian Origins. Both of these scholars have recently published major works on Paul’s thought, and each has reviewed the other’s work in journals: John Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans,... Read more

Here’s an interesting recent post by my friend Larry Hurtado on Christian graffiti on pagan coins… I was contacted a couple of weeks ago now to comment on a Roman-era coin recently acquired that exhibited marks indicative of Christian graffiti. This introduced me to something that I hadn’t known about before. The coin in question is a large (ca. 42 mm) copper-alloy piece minted in the reign of Elagabalus (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 188-217 CE). On the side showing a profile... Read more

There are a few more items to note from the new Urfa museum and then a few to note from the separate new mosaics museum in Urfa. Firstly, here is a nice depiction of a Roman funeral procession heading to the necropolis…. And here is the sort of Roman who would have been in such a cortege…. Here is a statue of Nike, the goddess of victory from the NT era…. This is a bust from Syria, with a Syrian... Read more

The new museum in Urfa is mind-blowing. It is big, it is beautiful and it is full of things from Gobeckli Tepe….. There are helpful re-creations in this museum of the Gobeckli site, for example….. This drawing helps us picture the building of the site….. Perhaps the most remarkable find of recent vintage is the totem pole…… The totem clearly enough has a human figure at the bottom, appearing to be making some sort of clay vessel, then perhaps another... Read more

In some ways, it is as instructive to examine some of the newest dig sites, for example this one where you see a head of a monolithic column standing up, as is true at one of the squares on this site, both on the back side of the hill…. Some of these columns are highly decorated, some less so…. most have creatures on them and a few have humans or deities…. There is rather clear evidence this was a sacrificial... Read more