Sabio Lantz has begun blogging through The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith – for which I am very grateful! He has created a start page for the review, and will link to individual posts reflecting on the book as he reads through it. The first substantive post is called McGrath’s Faith. If you’ve never visited Sabio’s blog Triangulations before, be sure not to miss the list of ingredients in the sidebar! Read more

A review recently appeared in Review of Biblical Literature of April DeConick’s book The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation. Thus far the review has led to a response by April herself as well as a post by Mark Goodacre. April’s book is fascinating, and I remember particularly being struck by the use of the Pseudo-Clementine literature to help trace what may have been the core around which the more fully developed forms of the Gospel of Thomas grew and evolved. The discussion that... Read more

If you click through to the science blog post from which I got this image, you’ll learn just what an awful pun I’ve made… Read more

Glenn Beck’s advice to Christians to leave churches that emphasize that all-pervasive Biblical theme of social justice has been getting a lot of attention. I tried to add my voice to the others who have e-mailed Beck as part of Sojourners’ campaign to get this point across to him. But, perhaps not surprisingly, Beck’s mailbox was full and the e-mail did not get through. It was just a short e-mail, recommending that he read the Book of Amos, or if... Read more

Here are some pieces by composer Alexander Scriabin from the Internet Archive: The Piano Concerto, performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy! http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.008648623363132657 A piano etude transcribed for violin by Szegeti: http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.6532732143998892 No.2 from Deux Poemes Op.71 http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.902995498899327 Sonata No. 4 http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.4857890448830152 I wish they had Piano Sonata No.3, my favorite of his piano sonatas, but for that you need to turn to YouTube: The good news is that in addition to recordings, you can also find the sheet music online for free... Read more

This cartoon nicely illustrates an unjustified leap that often takes place when people try to argue from appearance of “design” in the universe or the laws of physics to the existence of God: HT Hemant Mehta Read more

“Sometimes I think people like Wright are more clever than the biblical authors themselves… “ — Ken Schenck, “N. T. Wright on the rapture” at Quadrilateral Thoughts Taken out of context this could be badly misunderstood, and so I’ll briefly summarize the overall point of Ken’s blog post: It is about the ability of interpreters to find subtle possibilities, intertextual echoes, and other means of deriving alternative meanings from a text. Ken’s point (as I understand it) is that sometimes we come... Read more

I’m curious whether anyone has ever translated the Hebrew expressions in Genesis 1 not as “day one, day two…” or “the first day, the second day…” but into the English days of the week, “Sunday, Monday…” I’m not sure if it would have a significant effect on the way English readers perceive the text. Do any Hebrew linguists reading this know whether the differences between the modern Hebrew for “Sunday” and the form in which we find “day one” in... Read more

According to Amazon.co.uk, it looks like Jimmy Dunn’s latest book, Did The First Christians Worship Jesus?, may already be available for purchase in the UK. It is listed as being in stock! Then again, this may be an error, since something rather odd happens when you try to explore other ways of purchasing a copy, or look at reviews… Does anyone in the UK know if it is out there yet? If so, I suspect that some may prefer to pay... Read more

Tonight I caught part of a documentary on PBS about Native Americans (Delawares) in Indiana, entitled Long Journey Home. It was interesting in its own right, but given my own particular research interests, it was useful to hear how things that are often assumed to be “unchanging tradition” in Native American cultures are in fact anything but. Certainly there is preservation of stories, songs and customs from the past. But each generation, in the process of recreating the past, changes... Read more