No, it isn’t a secret symosium about Mark (otherwise I wouldn’t be letting the cat out of the bag) but an announcement about a planned symposium about the Secret Gospel of Mark. Tony Burke announced that there is hope to hold such an event in York in May 2011. Timo Paananen also mentioned it. Tony also mentioned updates to his page with more Christian apocrypha. Read more

At Science and the Sacred (the Biologos Forum), Evangelical Christian and biologist Dennis Vennema offers a critique of the old-earth creationism of Reasons to Believe. It focuses on comparative primate genetics. Since it has “Part 1” in the title, we can expect that there is even more to come! Read more

Today I happened across The Least Creative Home Page in the History of Humanity. No, that’s not an insult, that’s actually the name of the blog: The Least Creative Home Page in the History of Humanity. This may be the only time I can encourage readers to visit a blog because it doesn’t live up to its name. 🙂 It’s the blog of Eric M. Vanden Eykel, a graduate student at Marquette working on New Testament/Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity. I’m... Read more

As promised, today Baker Academic posted this announcement on their Facebook page: Confused or curious about the historical Jesus? It’s time to get some answers from a luminary in the field. Dale Allison, author of the new book Constructing Jesus, has agreed to answer a few questions on the historical Jesus from our Facebook friends. So, submit a question. Three of the best questions will be passed to Dale for answer that we will post here, and the authors of... Read more

This came via the Hugoye list-serv: PhD Scholarships in Divinity for 2011 Session The School of Divinity is delighted to be offering the following PhD Scholarships once again for applicants intending to commence in the 2011-12 academic session: The Matthew Black Scholarship: for a student working in the field of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible; The Donald M. Baillie Scholarship: for a student working in the field of Theology; The Richard Bauckham Scholarship: for a student working in the field of New... Read more

Via various scholarly list-servs: Bar-Ilan UniversityThe Faculty of Jewish StudiesThe Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish HistoryThe Project for the Study of Jewish Names The Tenth International Conference on Jewish Names Call for Papers The Tenth International Conference on Jewish Names will take place atBar-Ilan University on Tuesday March 22, 2011 at Bar-Ilan University,Ramat-Gan, Israel. The steering committee invites papers on Jewish personalnames, family names, epithets and place-names from the biblical periodthrough the modern age, from all Jewish communities... Read more

HT to Jim West for announcing this forthcoming book from Equinox Press, ‘Is This Not The Carpenter?’ The Question of the Historicity of Jesus, edited by Thomas L. Thompson and Tom Verenna. Here’s the table of contents provided by the publisher: Introduction: Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas Verenna Into the Well of Historical Jesus Scholarship 1. Roland Boer (University of Newcastle) – The German Pestilence: Re-assessing Feuerbach, Strauss and Bauer2. Jim West (Quartz Hill School of Theology) – A Very,... Read more

Baker Academic Press has informed me that they will be having Dale Allison answer some questions on their Facebook page this week. This announcement is not yet posted, but will be soon. Once it appears on the wall there, people will be able post questions, and the publisher will choose the best question(s) for Dale to answer. Those who have their question chosen will not only get an answer from Dale himself, but a free copy of Constructing Jesus! I... Read more

I have once again ended up with two copies of a new book, and the publisher has agreed to allow the second copy to be given away to a lucky reader of this blog. This time, the book is Richard F. Carlson and Tremper Longman III, Science, Creation and the Bible: Reconciling Rival Theories of Origin (IVP Academic, 2010). Since Mark Stevens won the last giveaway, I’ll use his proposed giveaway method, which is to ask readers to recommend that the... Read more

Taking as our starting point Ben Witherington’s statement in his commentary on Revelation, that John’s depiction of Rome as Babylon the harlot in Revelation 17 “involves a comic exaggeration of features, such as we see today in political cartoons” (p.219), today in my class on Revelation I had students make their own political satire cartoons, focusing on any city or world power they chose. We’ll actually do much of our discussion of what they came up with next time, asking... Read more