The recent ARAM conference on the Mandaeans in Oxford was a delightful cornucopia of different perspectives and scholarly angles on the Mandaeans, from questions about the origins to their present-day situation, with a number of Mandaeans in attendance as well as scholars interested in their religious tradition, heritage and language. Mandaism is, I’m quite sure, fascinating to everyone who hears about it. An ancient Gnostic group surviving to the present day, whose texts are written in a dialect of Aramaic... Read more

I hope no one is getting tired of these double entendre blog post titles. When I chose the title for the book, I was thinking only of John 17:3 and the relevance of that verse to understanding the Christology of John’s Gospel. It didn’t even occur to me what potential entertainment value there was in it! 🙂 Anyway, Jared Calaway has finished reading my book The Only True God and has posted his initial impressions – in particular highlighting the... Read more

While I was away a meme has been going around, which in its latest permutation asks Biblical scholars to list 5 primary sources that have influenced them. Ken Brown tagged me, and since most primary sources have already been mentioned, and because I’m reading Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the God of Israel with an aim to reviewing it here, I thought I’d combine the two and offer five primary sources which have influenced me to think differently about monotheism and... Read more

The Exodus from Egypt, had it occurred in literal fashion as described in the Bible, would have been (at the very least) ancient Egypt’s “September 11th”. Even if it did not wipe out every single firstborn child, and the cattle, not to mention Pharaoh’s army, even an event that decimated (in the literal or metaphorical sense) these elements of Egyptian society would have been noteworthy, to say the least, not to mention deeply traumatic. Those who maintain Biblical inerrancy work... Read more

Amazon.co.uk now has The Only True God available for order. It is listed (as of the time of this blog post) as “temporarily out of stock”, but presumably those who place an order will be informed of an estimated date for shipping. Read more

Did the Resurrection Happen?: A Conversation With Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, edited by David Baggett (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), offers an excellent presentation of contrasting perspectives on the philosophical aspects of the resurrection, all the more compelling because it takes the form of a dialogue between two philosophers whose different views on the matter are set in the wider context of an ongoing conversation between close friends. While those who have followed the historical investigation of the resurrection will... Read more

One of the in-flight movies on the way back from England was He’s Just Not That Into You. This post will mention a couple of points made in the course of the movie, and so if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t want to know even things that happen in the first minute of a movie before seeing it, then consider this a SPOILER ALERT. Nevertheless, this post is not a movie review but a theological reflection on some... Read more

Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue is a transcript (edited and organized to aid readers of the book but otherwise left as it was) of an e-mail exchange between James Sire and Carl Peraino. The book provides an opportunity to eavesdrop on a conversation between two educated individuals with many shared views and assumptions as well as a great many differences. Rather than offering an opportunity to settle disagreements between Christians and atheists, the book rather provides an opportunity to reflect... Read more

I thought I’d share a sermon I preached recently in a church in Romania. Any resemblance to another sermon I preached recently in English is entirely uncoincidental… Noi am privit slava Lui Când am început să mă gândesc la pasajul acesta, Ioan 1:1-18, prologul Evangheliei după Ioan, şi la ceea ce înseamnă când autorul se referă la slava Lui pe care el şi primii creştini au privit-o, mi-am adus aminte despre un eveniment din viaţa unui profesor din secolul al... Read more

I lived in Romania for three years, have been married to a Romanian for seventeen, and have had a lot of contact with Romania and Romanians. I love the surprised look on people’s faces when I tell them that I didn’t really understand the New Testament until I lived in Romania. Romania was part of the Roman Empire at one point, but even had this not been the case, it still would be part of that region stretching along the... Read more