The Emperor Tiberius died in Italy in A.D. 37, leaving mad Caligula in charge of a massive Empire. Though Caligula never visited Jerusalem (contra the portrayal in the last couple of episodes of A.D.) he did nevertheless want his visage displayed in the temple in Jerusalem– a sort of in your face use of his face. Caligula only ruled from A.D. 37-41, and it was in A.D. 40 that he cooked up the idea of having a statue placed in… Read more

Here is a second excellent post by Philip jenkins about the nature of real scholarship vs. pseudo-scholarship, reposted by his permission. See what you think. BW3 Outliers and Iconoclasts May 8, 2015 by Philip Jenkins 2 Comments I have been writing about mainstream and fringe scholarship, and defending the sometimes unpopular idea of mainstream orthodoxy, or the scholarly consensus. Blogging on any religious topic invites wacky comments and responses. As one example of many, I had a commenter not long… Read more

Yes, this is a real T shirt, given to Conrad….. and bless his heart, he wore it at a Jesus festival where he was asked to speak. Kudos to Philip Richardson for discovering this and passing along the news. Read more

[Picture courtesy of You Tube] Today, May 30th, exactly 80 years ago in 1935, Babe Ruth hung up his spikes. Here is a picture of him in his final uniform, and ironically he standing with his old Yankee teammate (I’ll let you guess who that is). Ruth was indeed a figure larger than life, and sometime if you can manage it, you should see ‘The Babe Ruth Story’ and older film about his life, which I saw at the YMCA… Read more

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[This is a repost by kind permission of Professor McGrath of an article he wrote that appeared in a Keble College website…..BW3] An Unknown Photograph of C. S. Lewis By Professor Alister McGrath C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) is one of the best-known Oxford dons of all time. He gained a “Triple First” while an undergraduate at University College, gaining First Class Honours in Classical Moderations in 1920, First Class Honours in Greats in 1922, and First Class Honours in English… Read more

[The Next Few Blog posts come courtesy my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins. See what you think. BW3] I Want to Believe May 4, 2015 by Philip Jenkins Last year, Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson published an impressively dreadful book called The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’s Marriage to Mary the Magdalene. The Lost Gospel made much of an ancient novel called Joseph and Aseneth, claiming (on no vaguely convincing grounds) that the characters in it… Read more

Having seen the previous Mad Max movies, I decided, reluctantly, to go see the most recent installment of that franchise, coming many years after ‘Beyond Thunderdome’. I was reluctant because I don’t like extremely violent movies anyway, or movies that glorify violence, and the previews I had seen didn’t encourage me to think this movie could rise above that sort of primal threshold of acceptability. I was wrong. This movie is not just another excuse to show things being blown… Read more

Ben: When I took second and third century church history with Bruce Metzger at Princeton, several things stood out to me as reflecting a change from first century Christians and their writings: 1) the beginning of a rising tide of anti-Judaism, including in sects like Gnostics, but also in the mainstream church (perhaps because the church was largely Gentile at this point); 2) the decline in general of eschatological fervor in the church and related to this; 3) the beginnings… Read more

Ben: Let’s talk ecclesiology for a moment. Irenaeus was by no means just a writer, he was a bishop in ‘Gaul’. What was his vision of the church and church structure, including his vision of church leadership. Is he an example of ‘early Catholicism’ or does he have some other vision of church structure? What about his vision of the women teachers and prophetesses in the second century? How does he view them? Jackson: If by ‘early Catholicism’ you mean… Read more