The sermon at my church this Sunday was about Cornelius in Acts 10. In the story, Peter sees a vision in which he is told to kill and eat all sorts of things that were prohibited by the Jewish Law. Peter understandably refuses to eat such unclean things, only to be told by the heavenly voice that he should not call unclean what God has cleansed. Eventually he comes to understand this as a point about God cleansing not only... Read more

I just discovered that E. S. Drower’s English translation of the Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans is available for searching online (although it cannot be downloaded) at Google Books. Read more

In the comments on a recent post, some mythicists are showing how their perspective is similar to that of creationists. (I once compared their viewpoint to inerrancy, but young-earth creationism in this instance provides a greater resemblance). For those who may not have encountered this particular viewpoint, mythicists claim that Jesus was not a historical figure around whom legends and mythology developed, but rather was a purely-invented figure, created from scratch in the imagination of early Christians. What are the... Read more

Do not deceive yourself into thinking you have refrained from picking and choosing, just because the verses you have picked and chosen are ones that speak against picking and choosing. Read more

Those interested in science, biology, creationism and intelligent design may remember a small but significant detail from the Dover trial and its aftermath. It became clear at one point that there was an experiment that could be done within a relatively short time frame to check Michael Behe’s claim that structures like the bacterial flagellum are irreducibly complex and could not be produced by evolutionary processes. Well, it looks like someone did the experiment. Visit the blog A Simple Prop... Read more

Frum Heretic mentioned this in a comment, and I thought it deserved to be highlighted in a post of its own. Far from Barack Obama being the antichrist, using Gematria one can find evidence that he is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah! Read more

Many bloggers have attempted to debunk the recent attempt to convert words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament into Hebrew and then interpret them as a prediction that Barack Obama is the antichrist. It is important to ask what is at the root of such an approach to the Bible. Many people treat the Bible as a book of secret codes, and I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that when they try to read... Read more

There are plenty of athletes who are public about their religious beliefs – whether in the form of some show of appeal to divine intervention in their favor during a game, or writing books and doing interviews in which they take advantage of their celebrity status to talk about their faith. But I have yet to see such a person advocate playing Christian sports. What might it mean to take a distinctively Christian approach to baseball, for instance? Perhaps some... Read more

In recent discussions and reading, I’ve encountered on more than one occasion mentions of James the brother of Jesus as having been skeptical of Jesus during his public activity, and also mentions of him and Paul as two skeptics who were “converted”. I have no particular wish to counter that claim, if it is correct. But I certainly do have an interest in critically evaluating it so as to evaluate whether it is likely to be correct or not. And... Read more

So you’ve made it through a course or textbook on introductory Syriac. You’ve started reading the Syriac New Testament with the help of the Clavis Syriaca freely available on the Internet Archive. You’re starting to feel almost proficient – or at least like you’re ready to start diving into some of those very interesting and on the whole neglected sources in Syriac. So now what? What’s next? The next step is to go over the the CPART web site, and... Read more