Just got back from my first-ever trip to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. It’s absolutely spectacular. I can’t believe I waited 59 years to see it. Here are some of my photos from the late 19th century agricultural buildings of the Mormon homesteaders in “Mormon Row.” Read more
The Mormon Theology Seminar on 1 Nephi will occur this June in London. It is co-sponsored by the “new” Maxwell Institute. Some of it will apparenlty be podcast. Full Disclosure: I submitted an application to the seminar, but was not chosen as one of the participants. Read more
On “Mormon Stories.” Interesting for their reflections on the “new” Maxwell Institute. Dan Peterson extracted a passage of the discussion: “Interestingly,” says Dehlin, “it was published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute — an organization, of course, near and dear to my heart. [Guffaw from Adam Miller.] And I actually am not being facetious. You know, I’ve got friends there, and, right now, I really like what the Maxwell Institute’s doing.” If Dehlin likes the new direction, then … Read more
Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News on religious art. Read more
The ever insightful Larry Hurtado reviews Bart Ehrman’s new book How Jesus Became God (2104). Read more
One of the latest book-length defenses of the Documentary Hypothesis, Joel Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch (2012). It is noteworthy for the fact that he is only willing to defend a much circumscribed version of the Documentary Hypothesis. For Baden—and I agree with him here—the Documentary Hypothesis is a purely literary theory, with strict epistemological limits on what it can demonstrate. Here is a summary of his conclusions (246-249). • “The literary question is primary and is in fact... Read more
Documentarians generally claim that they can: 1- identify the four different sources within the Pentateuch; 2- reconstruct form those diverse sources the original documents J, E, D and P from which the received Pentateuch was composed; 3- determine the original rival “theologies” and world views of the authors or composers of the four original documents; and 4- discover the date and the location of the composition of the original four documents. Narrowly speaking, only one of these four steps—identifying sources... Read more
As far as I can tell, there is no example of any other ancient Jewish book being composed the way the Documentarians claim the the Pentateuch was composed. The closest example is probably the Temple Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls. (See J. Charlesworth, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Volume 7: The Temple Scroll (2011); D. Swanson, The Temple Scroll and the Bible, (1995).) The Temple Scroll is composed in part from passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, with many additions from... Read more
Spring City, Utah (population 1000), is an old Mormon pioneer agrarian settlement from the 1850s. It probably has the highest per capita survival of nineteenth century homes of any city in the US, most of which are still private residences. There is also a thriving arts and crafts community. For more of my photos, see here. This is the old stone chapel. Read more
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Commentary on Luke
Kent Brown, professor emeritus at BYU and a leading scholar on the New Testament and Coptic Egypt, has just finished his magnum opus, a commentary on Luke. Catholic New Testament scholar Stephen Webb, formerly Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Wabash College, Indiana describes the book as follows: “Prof. Brown’s Commentary is, to put it bluntly, an astonishing achievement, indeed, one that I cannot do justice to. . . . It is a book that, if it finds the audience it deserves,... Read more