In my Sunday School class we have been working through Scot McKnight’s book The Blue Parakeet. In the chapter we are up to, entitled “The Year Of Living Jesus-ly,” Scot asks readers to consider some commandments found in Leviticus 19 and check off which ones they think should be followed today. I encourage readers to do the exercise too, and I think it is important to read the whole chapter, since there are some very famous and popular commandments in... Read more

(Matthew 11:15) Read more

Photo by Tom Bolin. HT Jim West and Tom Verenna, both of whom rightly observe the irony… Read more

Congratulations Butler Bulldogs! Job well done! Good luck in the championship on Monday! Read more

The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter provides a wonderful opportunity to reflect on historical misconceptions and uncertainties as well as important theological questions. In the case of the latter, where you think Jesus was on that Saturday nearly 2,000 years ago provides indication of how you think not only about the afterlife but also about human nature in general. As for the historical issues, the textbook I am currently using in my class on the Bible, Stephen Harris’ Exploring... Read more

HT Stalin’s Moustache Read more

The title might of course lead some to fear that this might be a post about something unpleasant, indeed downright disgusting. And depending on your point of view, you might be right. Exploring Our Matrix ranked #2 on this month’s list of the top biblioblogs. Thank you, readers, because this is your doing! And congratulations to Joel Watts who came in at #1. Read more

The question of whether “scholarship excludes the possibility of resurrection” by definition has been raised by Brian LePort. Do pay his blog a visit and chime in. My own view is that, if one is talking about scholarship in historical study, there is no way that a historian, whose job it is to assess probabilities based on available evidence, can ever legitimately conclude that it is more likely that an individual who was killed had been raised bodily into the life... Read more

I just want to quickly draw attention to two items from the biblioblogosphere, both related to the historical Jesus. First, Judy Redman blogged about her latest article which has just appeared in JBL. The title is “How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010) 177-197. I am really looking forward to reading it (the digital version has not appeared on the Society of Biblical Literature web site yet). Meanwhile,... Read more

HT Sojourners (also shared by Living in the Kingdom, Bold Faith Type and others). Read more