A new review of The Burial of Jesus has been posted on Amazon.com. It is by J. A. Kidwell, who is planning to post a longer review on his blog in the near future. Read more

“Urgent Business Proposal” was the title of a scam e-mail that made it through my spam filter today. I haven’t posted one of these for a while, and so I thought I’d warn the gullible out there: if this person really was contacting you about business, he’d address you by name. The “Good day,” as an opener is a dead giveaway. But the truth is that no one you don’t know will ever contact you offering you a multi-million dollar... Read more

The teaching attributed to Jesus in the Gospels about divorce is not unique. The Dead Sea Scrolls not only make a similar point about marriage, but even root the argument in the same text from Genesis (see Mark 10:1-12). This would be an esy case in which to suppose that perhaps a general, circulating idea was attributed to Jesus, whether intentionally or by error. One ought to consider, however, the indication that Jesus’ disciples were less than thrilled about this... Read more

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