Daniel O. McClellan “crashed” a Bible movie meme and then had the audacity to inflict this meme upon others. But I think it is useful to make recommendations, and so I decided what I’ll do is mention some particularly useful Bible-related documentaries that I think are worth watching and even showing to one’s classes: (1) ABC News Presents The Search for Jesus: Peter Jennings visits the Holy Land and talks with Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriksen, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor... Read more

The Center for Progressive Christianity has posted several new articles and links, many of which relate in some way to the intersection of religion and science. John Shelby Spong walks in Darwin’s footsteps, Jack Good ponders mortality after receiving a terminal diagnosis, and B. Alan Wallace has posted a chapter on the “intersubjective worlds” of science and religion. On a related subject, A Feather Adrift has posted on science and truthiness. And more tangentially related, The Panda’s Thumb shared a... Read more

It is time to continue my blog series on John H. Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One. Proposition 11 is that his viewpoint advocated thus far in the book, summarized under the heading “Functional Cosmic Temple”, “offers face-value exegesis” (p.102). His focus is on the recovery of what the author intended, acknowledging that unless one does so one faces the difficulty that the same grammatical constructions may be used in different contexts with different connotations. The understanding we... Read more

The blog Near Emmaus has announced a “a blog conference dedicated to the question of the role of non-Christian religions in Christian theology.” Read more

There has been an interesting discussion in the blogosphere lately about historical study and how it relates to belonging to a religious confession. April DeConick got the ball rolling and subsequently clarified her meaning. A very interesting contribution to the discussion came from April’s husband Wade, who (rather entertainingly) acknowledged that this fact might lead him to be biased, and yet his post was itself about the nature of historical study and the fact that, if it is true that... Read more

Today’s historical Jesus class will look at the mentions of Jesus in Tacitus and Josephus. The latter, in the passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum, has been the subject of much controversy. The discovery of Agapius’ Arabic citation of it has led most to conclude that there was indeed a reference to Jesus in Josephus, one which was then “improved” in the Greek manuscript tradition by Christian scribes. Agapius’ version in context reads as follows (translation provided online by Roger... Read more

“A lot of verbage gets thrown around about the Bible (its perfection, its authority, its goodness) that makes sense only if you don’t read it–or read it seriously. I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t say something about the Bible that isn’t true about all of it. If you’re going to talk about the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice, then you should be prepared to explain why you don’t live your life by all of it.... Read more

A religion major who is soon to graduate needed one more credit for this semester and has decided to meet it by doing an independent study…on LOST and religion! There are so many ideas we’ve both had, and so many possibilities. One interesting suggestion is to investigate whether the light-dark polarity that is part of LOST’s mythology and symbolism is understood in a good-vs.-evil, Zoroastrian sort of way, or in a Yin-and-Yang, Taoist, balance sort of way. I suspect that... Read more

Proponents of Intelligent Design make much of alleged instances of “irreducible complexity”. A colleague drew to my attention an article that deals with the evidence that such complexity is indeed “reducible.” It has the catchy title “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine.” Those interested in this subject will want to take a look. Read more

Among the books available in limited preview via Google Books is E. S. Drower’s translation of two Mandaean priestly commentaries, known as the “Great First World” and the “Lesser First World”. I don’t own a copy of Drower’s translation (which is what is on Google Books), but I am delighted to be the owner of the facsimile of the text that was published together with Drower’s translation. It is in the form of two small scrolls, packaged for safekeeping in... Read more