The Blog of Dr. James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis
Feb 23rd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
Two major resources that I want to share:
The Cairo Genizah Collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford (HT Dan McClellan and AWOL)
The Israel Antiquities Authorities National Treasures (HT Jim West)
Tags: antiquities, archaeology, Bible, Bodleian, Cairo, digital, Genizah, history, IAA, Judaism, library, museum, online, Oxford
Feb 22nd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
A while back I posted on why I don’t think anyone today really believes that God, exactly as depicted in the Bible, exists. In the Bible, God doesn’t hesitate to show off, demonstrating power by sending fire from heaven, parting seas, bringing darkness at midday, and so on. Today, religious believers who claim to believe in the same God and take the Bible literally expect to get a parking spot to open up, not that a new one miraculously be painted for them by angels.
I thought of this when I saw this cartoon by Wulff Morgenthaler, which Arni Zachariassen linked to:
The problem is perhaps neither that God is not serious, but that God (or whatever term one may prefer to use to refer to transcendent, ultimate reality) is not as depicted in the Bible. I suspect that deep down, most people, most religious believers, know that to be the case, but feel as though it is appropriate to pay lip service to the Biblical depiction of God, or suppress and deny what they think or suspect or fear might be the case.
But human thinking about God has always been changing, and we see a small measure of it even within the pages of the Bible, which provide evidence of development from an idea of God defeating a sea monster to create, to creating by forming matter, to creating simply by speaking with nothing offering opposition.
It is thus, in one sense, perfectly Biblical for our ideas of God to change. Ironic as it might seem, it might be perfectly Biblical to not think of God in Biblical terms.
Tags: 9/11, Bible, cartoon, creation, divine, God, intervention, literalism, miracles, theology
Feb 22nd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
Feb 22nd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
A geologist from the NCSE explains why young-earth creationism’s Flood geology doesn’t fit the evidence:
In other related news, it sounds like we haven’t heard the last of creationism bills in Indiana.
Tags: Bible, bill, Dennis Kruse, education, evolution, flood, geology, Grand Canyon, Indiana, National Center for Science Education, NCSE, science, young-earth creationism
Feb 22nd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
Feb 22nd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
Via George Takei on Facebook
Tags: exam, Facebook, funny, George Takei, hard water, humor, ice, minerals
Feb 22nd, 2012 by James F. McGrath
The episode “Timelash
It is interesting to note the progression from Attack of the Cybermen (focusing on the Sixth Doctor’s connections to the first), to the Two Doctors (bringing him into direct contact with the Second Doctor), to Timelash (bringing him to a place he visited as the Third Doctor). It is as though the writers felt the need to emphasize the continuity of the Sixth Doctor with the show’s past, perhaps since he was comical in a somewhat different way than Tom Baker had been, and rather more severe at times than either of the previous two had been.
It is interesting to note that the First Doctor, arguably the most severe of all, was toned down by the time he made it to the aired pilot!
Religion features more than once in the episode. The first time as a revelation about the Doctor’s companion, Peri. When an android takes her necklace, she explicitly says that it is her St. Christopher, placing Peri in the Catholic tradition, something that had not been mentioned previously. As many readers will know, St. Christopher is particularly thought of as looking out for travelers. If I were Catholic and were traveling with the Doctor, I too would wear such a medallion.
The second time religion appears is when a character named Herbert (later not unexpectedly revealed to be Herbert George Wells) who has interest in the occult entertainingly tries to drive the Doctor (whom he believes to be an evil spirit) away with a crucifix and Bible.
The Doctor’s own status as a godlike entity is also in focus at one point when someone believes he has outwitted the Doctor, and refers to the stories about him on the planet, which characterized him as “all-knowing and all-powerful.”
Also worth mentioning is the relative callousness of this Doctor, much more willing to kill (as he does yet again in this episode), compared to say Peter Davison’s Doctor hesitating with a gun pointed at Davros.
In addition to a connection to H. G. Wells (and making nothing specific of the people who were sent through a time corridor to 12th century Scotland), the episode also hints that the Borad, traveling through the time corridor, becomes the Loch Ness Monster. Why the Doctor is so confident that he will not cause any trouble there is hard to explain, although perhaps it is simply his confidence that he had broken the Borad’s spirit with his insults and his highlighting of how loathsome and grotesque his appearance had become.
I’d say that on the whole, puzzles and inconsistencies set to one side as they always must be, the episode works, being both comical and dramatic in classic Doctor Who fashion. What do others think?
Tags: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, H. G. Wells, Jo Grant, Jon Pertwee, Karfel, Peri, Roman Catholic, St. Christopher, time machine, time travel
Feb 21st, 2012 by James F. McGrath
The sci-fi website IO9 had an article on Doctor Who’s scandalous and troubled beginnings. It seems that the show was not expected to do very well. As the article says early on,
The show had a tiny studio and huge cameras, and a shoestring budget. But the people who were making the show were outsiders, who were anathema to the entrenched BBC culture.
At the Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, we were thrilled to hear from Waris Hussein, who directed the very first Doctor Who episode, about how an East Indian teamed up with a Canadian and a young woman to revolutionize television science fiction.
While those looking back on the longest-running sci-fi show in history may find it incredible that the BBC had so little faith in the concept, and even later on didn’t mind about wiping recordings. What we see with hindsight was not yet visible with foresight. There were also interesting challenges related to prejudice against women and people who were not English, as well as the more familiar budgetary constraints.
I found myself thinking of the beginnings of Christianity, and indeed of most major world religions. Notice by their contemporaries and near contemporaries are relatively few for some of the greatest names, from Siddhartha Gautama to Socrates to John the Baptist to Jesus to Muhammad and many others besides. Of course, each of the above is different, and so the extent to which they made noticeable ripples in their own time differs. But given my interest in the history of religion in general and the history of early Christianity in particular, I couldn’t help but notice a similarity. Many people find it incomprehensible that people could look back to Jesus as the central point of history in later times, and yet his contemporaries could for the most part have been unimpressed. Yet that is not only the story as historians in later times have come to know it – even in some early Christian writings, such as the Acts of the Apostles, the rabbi Gamaliel is depicted as anticipating that the whole Christian thing might blow over, like so many other movements that seemed similar (Acts 5).
It is typical for the significance of something or someone to only be visible with hindsight. I suspect that is one reason for the penchant of the ancients for creating stories of miraculous births and childhoods for their important people. By the time someone’s significance began to be recognized, who remembered any longer anything much about their childhood? In much the same way, entire religions, works of literature, and television programs have not been recognized in the time of their origin as likely to have lasting significance.
Tags: BBC, Christianity, Doctor Who, Jesus, origins, religion, Waris Hussein, William Hartnell
Feb 21st, 2012 by James F. McGrath
Various news outlets are reporting that the Southern Baptist Convention stopped short of voting for a name change, and has instead added an additional name to their denomination: “Great Commission Baptists.”
The article in the Washington Post says
Convention President Bryant Wright and other church leaders are concerned that the Southern Baptist name is too regional and impedes the evangelistic faith’s efforts to spread the Gospel worldwide…The Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845 when it split with northern Baptists over the question of whether slave owners could be missionaries. Draper said that history has left some people to have negative associations with the name…Of the 2,000 Americans surveyed, 40 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view of the denomination and 44 percent of respondents said that knowing a church was Southern Baptist would negatively impact their decision to visit or join the church.
It seems to me that the organization is concerned with the negative connotations that its name has, but not with the approach to religion and understanding of Christian teaching that leads to those negative views of them. Is this not an example of trying to dupe customers by re-releasing an unpopular product under a new label?
I think Southern Baptists should ask if they actually think that there is something fundamentally wrong with their past emphases and practices. If so, then they should stop interpreting the Bible in the same way in relation to women in ministry and other issues as they interpreted it in relation to slavery. Then they can adopt not only a new name, but a new stance to go with it.
If, on the other hand, they are not ashamed of what they have stood for in the past, then they should keep the same label, to communicate honestly to people that nothing has changed, and they are proud of it.
But trying to add a new name to distract from their stagnation and shameful past (apparently it is only legal hassles that has led them to keep the old name) strikes me as akin to false advertising.
Tags: advertising, Bible, change, Christianity, exegesis, Gospel, Great Commission Baptists, hermeneutics, legalism, name, slavery, Southern Baptist Convention
Feb 21st, 2012 by James F. McGrath
Today’s Dilbert is subtle. It serves as a nice illustration of the confusion created when physicists talk about the “God particle” – they are not using God in the sense of a personal deity liable to add hassles to one’s life by issuing awkward commandments…
Tags: ark, cartoon, comic, Dilbert, funny, God, God particle, Higgs Boson, humor, Noah, physics
Feb 21st, 2012 by James F. McGrath
In “The Two Doctors
The episode has some wonderful bits of dialogue. One of my favorites occurs very early on:
DASTARI: Well, Doctor, what did you make of our chatelaine?
DOCTOR 2: Was she an Androgum?
DASTARI: She was. Now she’s an Androgum TA. Technologically augmented.
DOCTOR 2: Oh, one of your biological experiments.
DASTARI: I’ve carried out nine augmentations on Chessene. She’s at mega-genius level now. I’m very proud of her.
DOCTOR 2: Proud of her, or your own skill?
DASTARI: Perhaps a little of both, but all that Androgum energy is now functioning on a higher plane. She spends days in the databanks simply sucking in knowledge.
DOCTOR 2: She’s still an Androgum. You can’t change nature.
DASTARI: In Chessene’s case, I believe I have.
DOCTOR 2: That’s dangerous ground, Dastari. You give a monkey control of its environment, it’ll fill the world with bananas.
DASTARI: Oh really, Doctor. I expected something more progressive from you. Don’t you understand the tremendous implications of my work?
DOCTOR 2: Yes, that’s why I say it’s so dangerous!
DASTARI: Doctor, our races have become tired and effete. Our seed is thin. We must hand the baton of progress to others. If I can raise the Androgums to a higher plane of consciousness, there’s no limit to what that boiling energy might achieve.
DOCTOR 2: Dastari, I have no doubt you could augment an earwig to the point where it understood nuclear physics, but it’d still be a very stupid thing to do!
There are several tropes which are familiar from sci-fi in general and Doctor Who in particular, including the idea of augmenting organisms to exceed their natural capacities. But there is also a rather disturbing hint of a familiar colonialist trope as well – the idea of the savage whom one may educate, but who can never truly be civilized. That the language of “savages” and “civilized” occurs later in the episode reinforces the presence of this motif (see the quote below), which is disappointing. That the base, savage Androgums seem patterned on the Scots is all the more troubling, and surprising, given the presence of Jamie as a hero.
The motif also runs in reverse (as often in colonialist material, which often feared the possibility of enticement or corruption of the “civilized” by attractive elements in the “primitive” culture). The Doctor receives genetic treatment seeking to turn him into an Androgum.
The story also recalls My Fair Lady/Pygmalion, with sci-fi twists and reversals, once the possibility of the Doctor being turned into Chessene’s consort is envisaged. She had been made less Androgum in the process of augmentation, in her appearance as well as in her thinking, and was often ambivalent about her status and her relationship to her kin. Again, many of these are familiar motifs (seen recently in Avatar as well).
Religion features explicitly in a few places. The most visible (and hardest to interpret) is the piety of the old, blind Spanish woman, Doña Arana, who kneels and prays before a statue of the Virgin Mary, makes the sign of the cross, and soon after getting up is killed, Chessene, the Sontarans and the rest of them occupying her home. It is unclear what the significance of this is, other than to contrast the woman’s vain reliance on the Madonna or God, who fails to protect her from the augmented alien “goddess” who pays her a visit. The Doctor is at his least godlike in this episode, even though present twice over – he is fallible, susceptible to being genetically altered, and at one point Colin Baker’s Doctor once again doesn’t refrain from killing someone in self defense.
There is also a reference on Dastari’s part, and later on Chessene’s, to her being elevated to among the gods. Here is one example:
DASTARI: I shall put her among the gods. There need be no limit to her achievements.
DOCTOR 2: There’ll be no limit to her capacity for evil. She’s an Androgum, Dastari, whatever you may say! She’ll snap off the hand that feeds her whenever she feels hungry.
DASTARI: You don’t know Chessene. I confess I was sad that the Time Lords chose to send you as their emissary, because I’ve always had a certain regard for you, Doctor, personally, and the operation will, by necessity, be very painful. But
DOCTOR 2: It’ll hurt you more than it hurts me.
DASTARI: What gives you that idea? No, I was going to say but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you have been part of a great undertaking.
(Dastari leaves.)
DOCTOR 2: You are an irresponsible old fool! The Androgums are barbarians! Release them into time and every civilised people in the galaxy will curse your name!
Another important bit of dialogue, which gives insight into the culture of the Androgums, involves a conversation between Chessene and the other main Androgum character in the episode:
CHESSENE: You think of nothing but your stomach, do you, Shockeye.
SHOCKEYE: The gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action. Is that not our law?
CHESSENE: I still accept it, but there are pleasures other than the purely sensual.
SHOCKEYE: For you, perhaps. Fortunately, I have not been augmented.
CHESSENE: Take care. Your purity could easily become insufferable.
SHOCKEYE: These days, you no longer use your karam name, do you, Chessene o’ the Franzine Grig?
CHESSENE: Do you think for one moment that I forget that I bear the sacred blood of the Franzine Grig? But that noble history lies behind me, while ahead? Oh, ahead lies a vision.
While it might lead to criticism of the plausibility of this imaginary race, the episode can serve as a useful starting point for discussion – in particular, of whether any group has ever or could ever achieve dominance and power while focusing on satisfying only our baser instincts.
Shockeye actually mentions the old woman’s religion previously referred to – but only to say that he doesn’t care about the religion of “primitives” – only what they taste like.
The Androgum characters thus also introduce the issue of perspective: from what perspective, if any, can different cultures in fact be judged “primitive” or “superior”? To a culture that regards hedonistic satisfaction of pleasure as the highest and most worthy end, a culture that failed to pursue or attain that end might seem “primitive.” And so, we are forced to remember, might we, when viewed from the perspective of another culture – alien or terrestrial.
This episode of Doctor Who serves as a reminder that, even as it is sometimes dramatic and even scary, Doctor Who has consistently and persistently ventured into comedy as well. Some elements are not intelligible except in the way that things are on comedies – just realistic enough to work, but clearly contrived to make us laugh. When Doctor Who enters this territory, it usually does so effectively. But even the comical elements often serve to make or bolster a provocative point. So too in this episode, for instance when Shockeye is “tenderizing” Jamie while he is still alive, and he reassures Dastari that he needn’t worry that it hurts, since “Primitive creatures don’t feel pain in the way that we would.” Here too, the fact that primitiveness is a matter of perspective, and thus we should think twice before inflicting pain that we would not wish inflicted on us by those who view us as we view animals. This is not the first time the Doctor has encountered aliens who said that humans are like animals in some sense (it comes up in “The Faceless Ones” which I recently blogged about).
I honestly cannot remember whether I had seen this episode before when I was younger – there are definitely some from several of the Doctors’ tenures that I missed. But either way, I certainly enjoyed it now. Have you seen this episode? If so, what did you think of it?
Tags: Androgum, civilization, civilized, Colin Baker, colonialism, Patrick Troughton, savage, Sontarans
The characteristic introduction in the sections of the Mandaean Book of John focused on John the Baptist (pictured above from Lidzbarski’s edition) reads “Yahia teaches in the nights, Yuhana in the evenings of the nights…”
In the translation above, I’ve merely transliterated the names used. But what we have in the text is synonymous parallelism, Yahia being the name for John in Arabic, transliterated into the Mandaic alphabet in the text, and Yuhana being the name John in Mandaic.
The challenge is to figure out the best way of rendering these two versions of the same name into English. Since neither is familiar to most English speakers, rendering them as Yahia and Yuhana might obscure that the reference is to any John at all, much less the one familiar to them as John the Baptist. Yet rendering both as “John,” on the other hand, obscures the fact that what is in the Mandaic text is different versions of that same person’s name.
Presumably one reason for using the two names is an effort by the Mandaeans to persuade Muslims that the Yuhana of whom they traditionally spoke is the Yahia recognized as a prophet in Islam.
…They stand questioning and they say, “Who is your prophet ?
Tell us, who is your prophet?
And tell us, Which is your Scripture?
Tell us, which is your Scripture?
And tell us whom you worship.”
They do not know and they do not understand.
(They are) accursed and disgraceful.
They do not know and they do not understand.
Our Lord, the King of Light on high,
He is ONE.
Returning to the translation issue with which this post began, at the moment I am toying with the idea of rendering Yuhana as “John” (rendering the Aramaic/Mandaic name into a native language English one) and Yahia as “Yahia” to indicate that it is a borrowed Arabic form of the name, transliterated.
But even this is not straightforward, since Yahia occurs very frequently on its own, and in those instances a cursory reading might leave readers of an English translation confused about the individual’s identity. And eventually, Yahia became every bit as much a Mandaean name as the earlier form of Aramaic origin.
What do others think? How would you approach this issue as a translator? If you were reading the Mandaean Book of John in English translation, what translation would you find most conducive to your reading and understanding the text?
Feel free to read some of the drafts of sections of the Book of John in English translation that are currently available on the project blog dedicated to that purpose, as you reflect on this question of how to translate the names used to denote John: Yahia and Yuhana.
Tags: Book of John, John the Baptist, Lidzbarski, Mandaean, translation, Yahia, Yuhana
Feb 20th, 2012 by James F. McGrath
This chapter at long last brings into the foreground something that is central to Doherty’s book: the question of where Jesus was believed to have been crucified (on earth vs. in a celestial realm). Also central to Doherty’s argument is a work known as The Ascension of Isaiah, which some have regarded as originally having been a Jewish text which Christian redactors made additions and changes to in order to adapt it to a Christian viewpoint, while others would say that the work is better viewed as resulting from the combination of Jewish and Christian works originally composed separately. There are several places online where one can read the text in English translation in whole or in part. The manuscript tradition is varied, and trying to solve the textual and literary issues is fraught with complexities. But if the oldest Jewish core is found in chs.1-5, there is no basis therein for Doherty’s claims about the pre-history of Christianity. The Christian version is dated by scholars to the second half of the second century at the earliest, and Doherty does not even address that conclusion or show awareness of it, much less present anything that might justify disagreeing with it. All he does is selectively quote from versions of the Ascension as it suits him, and implausibly posit that in some form the work is earlier than the New Testament writings.
This brings us to the crux of Doherty’s views. Doherty’s entire argument for mythicism can be viewed as an attempt to regard some parts of the Ascension of Isaiah as both the key to understanding the New Testament, and the fountainhead of what eventually became Christianity. At no point is the case he makes persuasive. Let me illustrate this point by point.
First, the Ascension of Isaiah in its Christian form has the descending Savior be transformed into the likeness of the various spheres into which he descends, including taking on the form of a baby in the womb of Mary. Doherty actually claims that the nativity account in the Ascension of Isaiah might be more primitive than that found in the New Testament Gospels, which no one who actually compares them will find remotely plausible. On the one hand, the Ascension largely follows and assumes the account in Matthew’s Gospel, while on the other, it adds to it secondary details of a docetic nature: the child simply emerges miraculously from the womb without labor, the child sucks at his mother’s breast merely so as to not be detected as a heavenly visitor, and the minds of others in the village are confused so that they do not perceive what is going on.
The work (particularly in the Ethiopic version containing such details) is plainly on the trajectory towards docetism, and perhaps itself appropriately viewed as docetic. And so is best situated in the period in which docetism arose, which fits with mainstream scholarship on the date of this form of the work.
Mythicism could be viewed as an attempt to claim that docetism was the original form of Christianity, but on the one hand its case for that is not at all compelling, and on the other hand, even works such as this one have the descending Redeemer take on the appearance of the spheres entered, and so in the forms in which we have it that include Christian components at all, the Savior appears in the human realm in human form. The Ascension of Isaiah therefore does not support Doherty’s claim for a crucifixion that takes place in a celestial realm. (And the same obviously applies to docetism in general, which posits an entity appearing in human history who seemed human to observers but really wasn’t, not the purely celestial entity that is part of Doherty’s mythical account of Christian origins.)
We see this in the relevant manuscripts of Ascension of Isaiah, where it says, “And after this the adversary envied Him and roused the children of Israel against Him, not knowing who He was, and they delivered Him to the king, and crucified Him, and He descended to the angel (of Sheol).”
And so, even if Doherty’s case for the primacy of the Ascension of Isaiah were to be found persuasive by someone, the text simply does not support his claims about the work’s view of the descending savior or about the character of early Christian belief. Like all other evidence, Doherty only cites the text selectively, and as usual he shows no sign of having familiarized himself with scholarship on this work, much less of having interacted with that scholarship in the necessary detail so as to draw persuasive conclusions and answer possible objections.
Towards the end of the chapter, Doherty once again uses the term “midrash” incorrectly, and while he and some of his defenders have tried to distract attention from this, it is crucially important. Doherty uses midrash not as the Jewish tradition does but as John Shelby Spong does, which seems in turn to be based on the manner that Barbara Thiering used the more specific term pesher. They all claim that people not only interpreted already-existing sacred texts in a manner that resembles their allegorical decoding, but composed texts of their own that were supposed to be interpreted in the same way. Doherty makes claims similar to the bogus ones made by Thiering, albeit ironically to make the opposite point to the one she does. But the effect is the same in one important respect: both claim that early Christians wrote things about Jesus or the early church that were not supposed to be taken literally, but later mistakenly were. And so far from being a mere problem of misused terminology, Doherty’s misuse of the term midrash is a sign of a crucial and fundamental flaw in his case. He is treating the Gospels as examples of a genre that did not exist, and turning them into allegories for the same reason that Christian preachers have so often done so: to make them say something that they do not.
;
APPENDIX: Online resources related to the Ascension of Isaiah:
R. H. Charles introduction, translation and commentary (also on Google Books)
Magnar Kartveit, The Origin of the Samaritans
István Czachesz, ”
The Coptic and Old Slavonic versions of the Ascension of Isaiah: Some text-critical observations”
Tags: Ascension of Isaiah, ascent, Barbara Thiering, Christian, Christology, descent, docetism, Earl Doherty, Jewish, John Shelby Spong, Midrash, mythicism, pesher, pseudepigrapha, Redeemer
Feb 20th, 2012 by James F. McGrath
“The Mark of the Rani
Much like the First Doctor, with whom the Sixth’s character shares so much in common, the Doctor expresses delight when he realizes that he and Peri will have the opportunity to meet a genius, a great man of science, invention, and engineering, namely George Stephenson. When Peri looks at the Doctor and says sarcastically that she thought she had already met a genius, the Doctor agrees, but adds that whereas he himself was expressly prohibited from changing history, George Stephenson was a genius who would do precisely that.
Against this background, the Doctor discovers that the Rani, an exiled timelord, is extracting a chemical from the human brain, for use on the planet where she has been exiled and rules. In robbing the people of the chemical, they are left unable to sleep and with an increasing penchant for violence.
The Doctor comments about the Rani’s lack of conscience, saying that she, like many scientists, sees us merely as a collection of chemicals. He adds explicitly that there is no place for the soul in her thinking.The religious-spiritual reference is striking, given the Doctor’s seeming self-understanding as a “man of science” opposed to superstition. It is also worth noting that many accused those (like George Stephenson) who brought mechanization which risked replacing humans with machines of much the same thing. And so the episode at once raises questions about scientific limits and conscience, and illustrates that the line can be blurry unless viewed with hindsight.
The stereotype of the reductionist scientist may be a caricature, but it resembles what some scientists have actually said and written well enough to make its point. On the other hand, if one speaks of the human “soul” (even if not in its classic sense), one is implicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of perspectives other than purely scientific ones, and affirming that people and things can have value beyond that which science itself can attribute to them.
The episode has some clever dialogue, including the Doctor saying that he has given up guns because they can seriously damage one’s health. Also, when asked what he and Peri do in that strange blue box of theirs, he replies, “Argue, mostly.”
One last religious reference: the Master also plays a major part in the episode (some have felt that he does little more than distract from the more intriguing character of the Rani), and the Doctor at one point refers to him as “the prince of darkness.”
Tags: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Luddite, machines, Master, Rani, science, scientist, soul, technology
Feb 19th, 2012 by James F. McGrath
A Facebook friend asked me about this image earlier today, and when I asked about its source, I received no reply. Someone else, however, mentioned that the infamous D. M. Murdock as having already been discussing it online, making me even more suspicious. But a couple of bibliobloggers have posted the picture, and so I thought I’d do so as well.
What, if anything, does this have to do with the supposedly first-century manuscript fragment of the Gospel of Mark that Dan Wallace has been talking about?
I have no idea, as yet, because when something appears on Facebook, like an ossuary appearing on the antiquities market, lots of questions are left as yet unanswered.
Tags: Acharya S., D. M. Murdock, Dan Wallace, first century, Gospel of Mark, mythicist, textual criticism
Interesting Posts Elsewhere
