Let’s start with Faithful Progressive’s post explaining that the personal God rejected by the “new atheists” isn’t the God he believes in. On a related topic, Martin LeBar has a post about Alister McGrath’s response to Richard Dawkins. Roland Boer thinks that John Loftus is still a theologian.
John Loftus shared a thought experiment about the Gospels on his blog. I responded there that the scenario depicted was problematic. It is unfortunate that debates over the religious claims of conservative Christians have made it so hard to talk about the Gospels in a balanced historical fashion. Atheists point to errors, while believers point to verifiable facts. To the historian and most Christians, this just confirms what we would have expected anyway in ancient texts of this sort: that there are things that are verifiably historical, things that may be but cannot be verified, things that are verifiably unhistorical, and a range of other nuanced points on the spectrum.
That the Gospels preserve accurate information about who the high priest and prefect were when Jesus was crucified (in an age when such details couldn’t just be looked up on Wikipedia) suggests that some information was indeed continuously transmitted (not necessarily without alteration, but with at least some continuity) between the time of Jesus and the time when Gospels were written.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Nick Norelli discusses interpretation that took place before we ever got a Bible in our hands. Richard Beck continues looking at snake-handlers. Jim Linville continued his series on slinky Bible babes, as well as uncovering what happened to Jim West. Missives from Marx doesn’t like requests for generous interpretations of texts when they come from those who don’t read other texts and others’ texts with comparable generosity. Bob Cornwall notes that the puzzle is not why many people don’t go to church, but why so many still do.
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