Love this quote: “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.” ~ Winston Churchill HT: Frank Viola Read more

Christopher W. Skinner What Are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas? New York: Paulist, 2012. Available at Amazon.com There has been a salvo of Gospel of Thomas (GTh) studies recently with volumes by Simon Gathercole, Mark Goodacre, and now a helpful overview of scholarship by Chris Skinner. Skinner usefully looks at several areas and gives a state-of-play as it is in scholarly circles: 1. GTh in historical perspective 2. The date of GTh 3. GTh and the canonical Gospels... Read more

Kent Schaffer gives the top 200 Church Blog rankings. Found some interesting blogs that I haven’t seen before! Euangelion is # 60. Read more

Over at ABC Religion & Ethics, John Dickson has a good write-up on the whole Coptic Gospel of Jesus’ Wife thing. It would be cliched and unfair to accuse the media of a “beat up.” I prefer to think of it as an example of journalistic ignorance about Christian origins. I suspect many commentators simply did some quick media maths: pretty old document in some funny language + Dan-Brown-like claims + Harvard professor = a newsworthy story about the wife of... Read more

I confess to being both warmly encouraged and coldly concerned by G.K. Beale’s addendum on globalism and postmodernism in his book The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 261-65. Beale begins by opining the ridiculous mantra that systematic theology is just a western thing, he wisely responds to the postmodern perspective that what is true in one part of the world is not necessarily true for another, and rightly contends... Read more

It is not often that you hear me lauding the excellence of New Zealanders. But Carey Baptist College in New Zealand has put up a brilliant discussion on same sex marriage with a panel including a sociologist, biblical scholar, and a lecturer in pastoral counseling. Same Sex Marriage is being debated in many western democracies. My American readers will benefit immensely from this discussion as it shows how the same issue is being responded to in another western country by... Read more

A new book on Hellenism and Archaeology of the Holy Land by Eric Meyers and Mark Chancey. This comprehensive and richly illustrated book explores the archaeological record of the land of the Bible from its conquest by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E. until the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century C.E. Unique in its focus on the region’s archaeology during the crucial Greco-Roman era, the book offers an excellent overview of a tumultuous... Read more

Mark Goodacre links to Francis Watson’s short piece that suggest that the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a fake. My gut feeling was that the fragment sounded like a hodge podge of Gospel of Thomas and maybe Gospel of Philip, but I’m no Coptologist. Yet Watson gives a line by line discussion of the fragment and its comparison with Gospel of Thomas. I won’t say that it is a slam dunk, but I think Watson has put forward a very good case... Read more

Anthony Le Donne gave me a heads up about the conference Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, to be held Oct 4-5, in Dayton, Ohio. Read more

The blogosphere is a buzz with reports of a Coptic fragment that allegedly depicts Jesus referring to “my wife.” The most helpful stuff I’ve read on the topic is: Karen King’s original paper describing the fragment: “Jesus Said to Them: ‘My Wife …’: A New Coptic Gospel Papyrus” Simon Gathercole, Did Jesus Have a Wife? Craig A. Evans, The “wife” of Jesus Larry Hurtado, “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife … Maybe … Maybe Not April DeConick, Did Jesus Have a Wife?... Read more