Bill Hamblin and I published this column in the Deseret News on 27 April 2018:   One of the most significant biblical sites in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is known as “al-Maghtas,” which, in Arabic, means “baptism,” or “immersion.” It sits on the eastern shore of the River Jordan, directly opposite an Israeli equivalent — only a few feet distant across the stream — that is known as “Qasr al-Yahud” (“the castle of the Jews”). Traditionally, this... Read more

    John 12:9-11   Clearly, according to the gospel of John, the raising of Lazarus was the immediate catalyst for the arrest and execution of Jesus.  The miracle was simply too obvious and far too spectacular to ignore.  The Jewish leadership may not have believed it to have been a genuine miracle — they most likely didn’t — but they knew that a very great number of their fellow Jews did.  It was creating a very volatile situation.  ... Read more

    I published this column in the Deseret News on 15 June 2017   Critics of religious faith often like to compare it, unfavorably, to science. Science, they say, has cured polio and malaria, sent humans to the moon, created powerful computers and plumbed the secrets of distant stars and galaxies. Religion has done none of these things. However, this is a profoundly misguided argument. For one thing, it suggests that only such accomplishments as these have value. Most... Read more

    I often joke with people on the tours that we accompany in Israel, Egypt, and/or Jordan, or considering joining one of these tours, that they’ll need a vacation when we’re done with them.  I don’t mean that as negatively as it may perhaps come across.  What I do mean is that the time is filled, that we don’t waste precious moments, that people have paid a fair amount to come on these trips to places where there’s an... Read more

    Since leaving the United States on this current trip, I’ve devoted some of my fleeting moments of spare time — essentially nonexistent for the past few days, and perhaps fated to be nonexistent for the next two weeks — to reading in the excellent book made up, with just one exception, of chapters contributed by members of the faculty at Brigham Young Universityedited by Kent P. Jackson and , A Bible Reader’s History of the Ancient World (Provo:... Read more

    Here’s a video of Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf of the Quorum of the Twelve inviting the general public to attend the impending open house of the newly renovated Frankfurt Germany Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and encouraging members of the Church to attend the temple as often as possible after its rededication:   https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/frankfurt-germany-temple/videos/   I must say that Elder Uchtdorf’s German is really quite good.  One might even call it “native.”  ... Read more

    Bill Hamblin and I published the following column in the Deseret News on 28 April 2017:   When Jesus was born, the largest and most important city on the Sea of Galilee was Magdala — perhaps the same town as the New Testament’s “Dalmanutha” and “Magadan” — on the western shore. Josephus’ “Jewish War” says that the Roman general Cassius (later one of the assassins of Julius Caesar) took 30,000 captives from Taricheae, as Magdala was known to... Read more

    Roughly fifteen years into his remarkable, unsleeping, virtually daily, nearly fifteen-year-old anonymous campaign of defamation and character assassination against me, my Malevolent Stalker has declared that the only genuine way in which I can demonstrate that I don’t accompany these tours for the money that I earn from them — naïvely, I had imagined that the fact that I earn no money from them might suffice on that score — would be to prove that I accompany them... Read more

    Bill Hamblin and I published this column in the Deseret News back on 15 April 2016:   Driving along the western shore of Lake Kinneret, called “the Sea of Galilee” in the New Testament, it’s virtually impossible to miss a steep cliff called Arbel and a valley below it called either the Wadi Arbel or the Wadi Hammam (“Valley of the Doves”). This area is saturated — literally as well as figuratively — with ancient history. The Arbel... Read more

    A new article appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 32 (2019): 77-186:   Bruce E. Dale and Brian Dale, “Joseph Smith: The World’s Greatest Guesser (A Bayesian Statistical Analysis of Positive and Negative Correspondences between the Book of Mormon and The Maya)”   If their argument holds up . . .  Well, let’s simply say that their conclusion is pretty spectacular:   Abstract: Dr. Michael Coe is a prominent Mesoamerican scholar and author of a synthesis and review of ancient Mesoamerican Indian... Read more