In thy sight all hands are thieving, all lips have lied. Water is in the jordan. In thine eyes, Knowledge of Life, no person is clean: we are slaves who are all sin, and thou a lord who art all mercy. When thou art with us, who shall conquer us and if thou justifiest us who will convict us? – (Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans, #35) Read more

Tom Verenna has posted a response to my blog entry about Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. For the moment, all I’ll say is that Tom seems to treat addressing God as “abba” as though it were the most natural thing in the world. In fact, it seems to have been uncommon, to say the least – not because it meant “daddy” as some have claimed, but because even Aramaic-speaking Jews in this period appear to have used Hebrew... Read more

It is common to hear in sermons that tax collectors in Jesus’ time were hated because they worked for the Romans. In Jesus’ time in Galilee, however, we are still in the era of Herodian rule (in contrast with Judea, which was under direct Roman rule by this time). So wouldn’t individuals like Matthew/Levi have collected Herod’s taxes rather than Rome’s? You don’t have to be collecting taxes for foreign overlords in order to be unpopular, of course… Read more

I wonder how old the name Wadi Hawran is. If it is ancient, then I wonder whether it might not have some connection to, or actually be, the “inner Haran” that is mentioned in (and gives the name to) the Mandaean text Haran Gawaita. This fragmentary text begins in mid-sentence with “…and Haran Gawaita receiveth him and that city in which there were Nasoraeans”. Since the Mandaeans are baptizers, if they originated in the Jordan valley and moved East, they... Read more

HT Archaic Christianity Read more

The big news around the blogosphere is exoplanets. Not just the detection of stars’ wobbling, but actual images of planets around other stars. Two different stars: HR8799 and Fomalhaut. There’s more information at Bad Astronomy, Dynamics of Cats, SF Signal, IO9, and Gumby the Cat. Elsewhere around the blogosphere, David Ker has a fantastic variation of Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater that addresses issues of marriage, abuse and divorce. Jim West has a link to a video about the birth of... Read more

Finally, a day on which I checked my blog’s keyword stats, and none of the recent arrivals had got here via “Barack Obama antichrist prophecy” or anything comparable. That search string is still the one to most frequently have brought people recently, but still, to not have had any of the most recent searches be for these words is a positive sign. Read more

I’m not sure whether my case is common or rare among those attending the Society of Biblical Literature conference in Boston this year, but I made my booking well in advance, not having the confidence to wait and hope for better prices. My flight is into Providence airport, about an hour from Boston, and my return flight is out of Manchester, about an hour from Boston. I think there are probably at least several others who found cheaper flights or... Read more

NT Wrong has a post on the reasons why Daniel is regarded by almost all scholars as a pseudo-prophecy (like just about all the other examples of apocalyptic literature we have from this period). In my class on apocalyptic, I put up a powerpoint slide with the text of a recently discovered ancient apocalypse (one I found while digging for treasure in my garden). Here’s what the text says: And in those days two rulers of the great nation shall... Read more

Rarely do the blogs I follow post even one cartoon featuring Star Trek characters and a transporter, but today there were two. The first is from The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus: The second is from Pencils at Dawn (HT Bay of Fundie): Read more