John Shuck has kindly offered a short review of my book, The Burial of Jesus, over on his blog. What more appropriate day could there be for this than today? Read more

Here’s Bart Ehrman’s return to the Colbert Report (HT Ben Witherington): The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Bart Ehrman colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest Read more

The unexamined faith is not worth having. Religion has had many critics from without, and still does. But one characteristic feature of the Biblical tradition is that it is full of critics from within, those who examine their own tradition and challenge themselves first, and then their contemporaries, to rethink it and to live it differently. There are those who would like to avoid such critical introspection and self-examination, perhaps at all costs. “Leave us alone”, they might say, “we’re... Read more

In a book I’m reading I encountered a quote from a highly fragmentary text from Qumran that is usually known as 4QInstruction. The fragment 4Q417 includes the words “for engraved are the ordinances of God, about all the [iniquities of the] sons of Seth, and a book of memorial is written before him”. [The picture on the right is not of 4QInstruction, lest anyone enlarge it and be disappointed – I couldn’t find an image of this particular text online].... Read more

The Pluralism Sunday blog has the text of a lecture the late Krister Stendahl gave on the subject of Christianity and religious pluralism. He deals with the standard texts that seem to support exclusivism in a thoughtful and pastoral manner. Stendahl is famous among New Testament scholars, but for those who may not be familiar with him, he served during his life as (among other things) Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm and a professor at Harvard Divinity School. Read more

“[T]he doctrine of biblical inerrancy has the effect of inspiring its adherents to pay more attention to a text than to the neighbors they are called upon to love. Sometimes it even inspires them to plug up their ears with Bible verses, so that they can no longer hear the anguished cries of neighbors whose suffering is brought on by allegiance to the literal sense of those very texts.” — Eric Reitan, at Religion Dispatches Pulpit Also at Religion Dispatches... Read more

The service our pastor arranged for Maundy Thursday was powerful and profound. He got members of the congregation to recite (and in some cases they performed) monologues reflecting various participants in the events leading up to the crucifixion: Judas, the high priest’s servant, Claudia Procula and Herod. It was interspersed with readings and hymns, we celebrated communion, and near the end the pastor and I performed “Thief” by Third Day. When it was over, we left (as we had been... Read more

In the most recent episode of LOST, as in other earlier ones, we saw the “smoke monster” make someone confront their past, with the aim of bringing about repentance and a change in them. In my recent visits to Triablogue, it has been somewhat like encountering the smoke monster. I was met over there by views and attitudes that once would have been mine. As I try to extract myself from the attempt at interaction, unsubscribing from the comment updates... Read more

One doesn’t have to be committed in advance to history’s inability to deal with miracles in order to begin to realize that one cannot claim that Christianity is grounded purely in history while other traditions are at best shrouded in myth. One simply has to apply the most basic Christian principle to one’s investigation of the competing claims. That’s what happened in my case. I didn’t know that much about historical methodology yet as an undergraduate interested in defending and... Read more

The subject of historical study and methodological naturalism has come up in a recent bloggersation, and since Easter is approaching, I thought I’d share a particularly poignant passage relevant to this issue that I came across in a recent book: Why was the tomb supposedly empty? I say supposedly because, frankly, I don’t know that it was. Our very first reference to Jesus’ tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in... Read more