Rated M For Meme

I’d like to thank Ian for awarding me (or should that be “infecting me with”?) the “Rated E for Excellent” award – which is also a meme, since you then pass it on to ten other blogs, and so on until the word “excellent” in reference to blogs eventually loses all meaning, or the meme runs out of steam. The latter seems more likely in view of the number of blogs that exist and their growth rate.

I’d like to make the first award to Jim West, who is on his third blog (that I’m aware of), the previous one having recently been maliciously hacked. Although his latest blog is ‘new’, surely a sequel will always be as good as its predecessor, right? 🙂 Plus, I know how much Jim loves memes…

I’m making the remaining awards mainly to Biblical scholars with blogs that make a contribution to the quality of discussion in the blogosphere of the Bible and other ancient literature from the same time period:

Mark Goodacre – who is certainly a pioneer in the realm of web resources for Biblical studies and biblioblogging – for his NT Gateway.

April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels

Christopher Heard’s Higgaion

John Hobbins’ Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Jim Davila’s Paleojudaica

Duane Smith’s Abnormal Interests

Jim Crossley’s Earliest Christian History

Stephen Cook’s Biblische Ausbildung

Doug Chapin’s Metacatholic

It was hard to limit myself to these ten. Even among those blogs that deal with topics related to Biblical scholarship, there are others that deserve mention, like Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed, Sansblogue, Targuman and Evangelical Textual Criticism. If I nominated you and you value those blogs, perhaps you’ll award them!