Here is the lecture I gave May 2nd at Castle College on the Bible and the Media... RELIGION AND THE MEDIA IN THE POST-MODERN WORLD PROLEGOMENA I have spent a great deal of my time as a professor of Biblical Studies working with the media--- ABC, NBC, CBS, the BBC, the Discovery and History Channels and so on. There are really two different sorts of dealings with the media that people who teach religion or theology are likely to have in this day and age--- questions from the press … [Read more...]

The article by Andreas Dettwiler (translated by Eric Gilchrest and Nicholas Zola, the former of which is one of my own former students) has much the same orientation as the article by Sterling, reviewed in the previous post in this particular series. That is, it involves a comparison of the supposedly deutero-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians to the portrait of Paul in Acts. Like so many who take this view of the pseudonymous character of those Pauline letters, the author talks about a Pauline … [Read more...]

It is a long standing tendency of certain streams of NT scholarship to claim or blame Paul for the way the Jesus movement turned out-- namely a largely Gentile religion based not on the teachings of Jesus but on what was later viewed as his soteriological significance and work. This in turn led to a 'back to Jesus' and 'away with Paul' thrust which we still hear the echoes of today from various members of the Jesus seminar, and most recently from the book by James Tabor Paul and Jesus: How the … [Read more...]

Perhaps for the first time in this whole volume, Jens Schroter in his article on "Paul the Founder of the Church" provides a rationale for the title of the volume in saying "The Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles belong to a trajectory of early Christianity committed to the heritage of Paul's mission and theology." (p. 195). As I have already said, there is a reason to connect those two sets of documents, the middle term being Luke, but if the Pastorals are ultimately from Paul they … [Read more...]

The next essay in Paul and the Heritage of Israel is one by Michael Wolter, based on sociology of knowledge paradigms as a key to interpreting Paul and as a way of distinguishing Paul from what Wolter calls the later pseudepigraphic Paul (in his view this includes 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastorals). Basically, Wolter wants to make a hard and fast distinction between a religion of conversion (see 2 Cor. 5.17) and a religion of tradition (see the later Paulines). The … [Read more...]

Here is the second part of my dialogue with my friend and colleague Beth Sheppard. 4) One of the things I hear regularly from folks like Bart Ehrman is that a true modern critical historian must bracket out the whole notion of the miraculous, which of course leaves large chunks of the NT in the lurch since the miraculous is on almost every page of the Gospels and Acts, and is found elsewhere in the NT as well. Do you think it is necessary to ignore or dismiss the miraculous in order to be a … [Read more...]

According to William Johnson (pp. 87-91), the standard bookroll tended to have 20 sheets, though production of rolls with up to 50-70 sheets are known, but they are surely special orders. If a scribe ran out of space, he would simply glue a new blank roll on to the end of the used up one. This process continued until the copying was complete, and then the excess or blank remnant would simply be cut away. “A reinforced sheet, with fibres at right angles to the roll itself could (but need … [Read more...]

Here is a sane response to the recent kerfuffle (which is much ado about not very much) about the existence of Jesus. The “Did Jesus Exist” Controversy and Its Precedents by larryhurtado Well, the internet is buzzing nowadays with positive and negative responses to Bart Ehrman's recent book: Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, written in response to the recent mini-wave of people denying that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure. I haven't … [Read more...]

Here, thanks to Eric Sawyer, is my dialogue with Bart Ehrman as an audio file. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA2BCFB708740268F&feature=view_all … [Read more...]

Perhaps you've seen this bumper sticker before, or a variant thereof. I saw one in Lexington recently that said 'Born Once: Doing O.K.' What we are talking about here is just another manifestation of the rising tide of ire, frustration with, and outright rejection of Evangelical Christianity in America. And while a rising tide may not float all boats, it is certainly true that you have a variety of people riding the wave of growing opposition to Evangelicalism in our increasingly … [Read more...]