We’ve reached a turning point. On the one hand, there is the entry posted on my blog, claiming to be from my future self. Is it authentic? If so, am I telling the truth, or is this simply an indication that, in the future, I’ve joined the upper eschelons of the Guild of Biblical Minimalists and am now responsible to guard its secrets and market its wares? If that’s the case, will I ever be one of those in the... Read more

This post is being backdated from the future. By this time, in the year 2038, it has been proven impossible for individuals to travel through time, but transtemporal blogging has been shown viable. Using top secret research about which I can say no more lest I rewrite history more drastically than I already plan to, I am posting this to my earlier self and other bibliobloggers. Give up the quest for NT Wrong’s identity. It will only cause you heartache.... Read more

Armed with this new information, I was determined to confront James Crossley at SBL in Boston. I finally tracked him down at the Sheffield reception. After I secretly poisoned his champagne and he was unaffected, he had to admit the truth. Yes, he is indeed descended from two of those resurrected saints of lore. Yes, he is immortal, and one day hopes to visit the Scottish highlands himself. But no, he emphasized, is not NT Wrong. He pointed out to... Read more

The book has been listed on Eisenbrauns. It doesn’t seem to be completely into the system, but it seems to be possible to order it. Try it and see! The Burial of Jesus:History and Faith by James F. McGrathBookSurge, 2008142 pages, EnglishPaperISBN: 9781439210178Your Price: $12.34www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~MCGBURIAL Read more

I admit, for a moment or two I suspected that Roland Boer might have created NT Wrong, Chris Tilling, and Tom Verenna merely with the aim of then proving none of them existed. But such an investigation, I soon realized, could only distract me from the important clue which has very recently been removed from NT Wrong’s blog (presumably at the same time at which he changed the photo to allow us a better glimpse of his chin). What led... Read more

That’s how I ranked in the quiz that Jim West directed us to. And that sounds about right. There seems to be an increase in willingness among at least some Evangelicals to be self-critical. And one good but challenging place to start, if you haven’t already, is by watching the video excerpt from God on Trial that Fred Anderson shared on his blog: Read more

That NT Wrong might be a fictional creation occurred to many. That the same might be true of Chris Tilling will have come as a shock, but in fact a simple search on Yahoo! for “Chrisendom” turns up evidence that it has existed for hundreds of years. But where does the trail to the real individual or individuals behind NT Wrong lead from there? Who would have a motive to create not one but at least two fictional blog personas?... Read more

“The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.” — Heinz Pagels, Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Simon... Read more

In the case of identity of the mysterious NT Wrong, surely Chris Tilling is above suspicion, right? Perhaps when it comes to the question of earlier underlying sources. But when it comes to the identity of the ecclesiastical redactor, the one ultimately responsible for the final form of the NT Wrong blog (which, from the perspective of literary-critical blog-reading, is all that matters), then who else could be at once so ecclesiastical and so redactional as Chris Tilling? The name... Read more

Some have suggested that NT Wrong may be multiple people. He has been identified as a straight white male, and as a black lesbian woman. She has been identified as a scholar of Hebrew Bible, of the New Testament, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or of Monty Python. Since this puzzle relates to a biblioblog, we should bring the most powerful tools that Biblical studies can offer to bear on the question. When we do so, the solution to the... Read more