The Blog of Dr. James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis
There have been a couple of amusing posts over at Vridar. In one of them, Neil Godfrey discusses Daniel Boyarin’s claim (in his book The Jewish Gospels) that there may have been an expectation about a suffering Messiah prior to Christianity. Whatever your thoughts on this (the view is not unique to Boyarin, but neither [...]
A key point I emphasize in my classes is that, just because a range of views about a topic may be held by experts, that does not mean that all views are compatible with the evidence. Nor is it the case that, just because we are uncertain about the answers to some questions, everything is uncertain. [...]
It was recently suggested to me that it might be useful to put together an index of mythicist claims, and the answers and responses to those claims from the perspective of mainstream historical study. Although it can be said that every claim by mythicists has probably been addressed at least implicitly in scholarly monographs and [...]
Jerry Coyne recently shared this Bizarro comic: I think the cartoon illustrates nicely some of the problems involved in thinking about God in such anthropomorphic terms. Coyne adds the comment: The whole nature of God for these people (and for many, many Americans) is that of a personal God, something with the characteristics of a [...]
I learned via Jerry Coyne’s blog that Susannah Cornwall (a theoblogger and biblioblogger) had made an argument for gender equality in ministry by pointing out that we do not know whether Jesus was biologically male. This led to the Telegraph picking up the story, as well as some negative responses which largely missed the point. Do we [...]
HT Jerry Coyne. While this is worth sharing just as religion and cat humor, it also connects with my interest in religion and science fiction. Thinking about what other species, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial, might think about God or morality is an interesting thought experiment. And on that last topic, see this amusing bit of [...]
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