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... Read more

Here’s a link to the video of my lecture at Edinburgh April 30th. http://christianorigins.co.uk/ Read more

There is a hilarious article in today’s Daily Telegraph about how English organists have taken revenge on their ministers and others they found difficult to work with. In a survey taken by Christian Research, almost half the respondents mentioned that they had noticed organists slipping snippets of heavy metal classics, advertising jingles, and nursery rhymes into hymns and anthems. For example, there was an organist in Scotland who had fallen out with the elders in his church, but he got... Read more

There was a good reason why Jesus insisted that the commandment to love God and to love neighbor was essentially one commandment, and none was greater than it. Jesus knew all too well about the possibility, even the human propensity to separate love of God from love of neighbor, the vertical from the horizontal. The quest for the beatific vision, quite separate from loving one’s neighbor, was all too common, and fundamentally flawed. It is the sort of quest we... Read more

There are now some twenty reviews on Amazon o ‘A Week in the Life of Corinth’ and there is a new good one in the Trinity Journal N.S. 34 (Spring 2013), pp. 211-13, by Benjamin Marx. Check it out online. Read more

It may seem odd, but despite the prominence of commandments to love in the NT, which can also be found in the OT, there have actually not been that many scholarly monographs written on the subject. We could point to the seminal work of C. Spicq, a French scholar, whose mammoth study was finally translated into English, or the classic little book by V.P. Furnish entitled The Love Commandment in the New Testament but scholars have been surprisingly reticent to... Read more

My wife and I are big fans of the Impressionists. In my view, art went mostly downhill in the 20th century after that period. What I had forgotten about the Scottish National Gallery is that it has a nice Impressionist wing with Cezanne, Gaugin, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh… you get the picture. Well…. you will in a minute. This is a lesser known Van Gogh painting of cherry trees in the Spring… On the much more famous side, we have... Read more

Scotland is a land of wild beauty, and even wilder food. Here is a fine painting of the Highlands by a Scottish artist… It’s a brave man that takes a pub up on the offer of the following culinary item…. It’s one thing to eat sheep’s innards. It’s another to be charge $16 for the privilege! And just when you thought you were going to focus on Scottish artists in the Scottish part of the museum, the stairwells are full... Read more

When one thinks of Scotland, one quite readily may think of this…. or perhaps this… But perhaps you would not associate Edinburgh with fine art… though it has one of the best small museum collections of religious paintings in Europe. For example, did you know you could find a famous el Greco here…. Or a very colorful painting of the stoning of Stephen? This painter must have thought Stephen was stoned by the fashion police for wearing flash clothes! But... Read more

The Scottish Museum of Art in Edinburgh is absolutely full of remarkable religious art. In the next few posts we will be sharing some of it. Above is a remarkable painting that is an allegory about the OT and NT. Here below is the description of the painting… I have always loved the art of Hans Holbein (see above), who is perhaps most famous for a painting of Henry the VIII which looks so real it could be a photo.... Read more