My review of Larry Hurtado’s latest book, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, has just been published in the online Review of Biblical Literature. The book makes a major important point, and does so well, namely that the actual manuscripts of early Christian literature, their physical features and characteristics, are largely unknown to most scholars of early Christianity in anything other than a superficial way. Hurtado’s invitation to remedy this is so important that, in my review, I... Read more

It is not only in relation to the origins of the Israelites that DNA evidence has the potential to solve longstanding mysteries about the origins of a people group. Since the colonial era, when light-skinned Europeans took control of India, it has seemed plausible to many European scholars to interpret the Vedas as reflecting the culture of a people who, like their European cousins, invaded India and took control of it away from other, darker-skinned human beings. Although challenges to... Read more

SNTS (usually referred to as the ‘Society for New Testament Studies’ by English speakers, although it is technically the STUDIORUM NOVI TESTAMENTI SOCIETAS) apparently held its annual meeting this year in Sibiu, Romania, which is my wife’s home town. It would have been nice to go, but for that to have happened, I would have needed to know about it. As someone who aspires to perhaps be a member someday, I will say that SNTS needs to work on improving... Read more

There is an interesting interview of Alister McGrath by Richard Dawkins that is available on Google Video, an interview that never made it into Dawkins’ program The Root Of All Evil: Dawkins says he wants to give McGrath the opportunity to say something intelligent. McGrath does so, but it doesn’t get into the film. Dawkins even says that he acknowledges that McGrath rightly criticized him (!) for misconstruing what Christians like him mean by ‘faith’. McGrath’s explanation of what he... Read more

I’m currently involved in a discussion on the Uncommon Descent blog, and while my post there awaits moderation, I thought I’d share it here. Since those in the natural sciences would generally not consider my field a science (except perhaps in Germany, where it is all Wissenschaft), I won’t get entangled in a debate about the definition of science. [In my religion and science class today we discussed Schafersman’s famous piece on the subject, and found it helpful but also... Read more

I’ve now had the privilege of witnessing total eclipses of both the sun and moon during optimal viewing conditions. Although solar eclipses are somewhat more spectacular, watching the earth’s shadow move across the moon was still a great experience – as was hearing our neighborhood screech owl’s reaction, and getting a better view of the Pleiades than I had before. I remember the dismay I felt hearing a Baptist preacher in Romania claim that the 1999 eclipse was a “supernatural... Read more

In my next religion and science class, we’ll be discussing Steven Schafersman’s “An Introduction to Science: Scientific Thinking and the Scientific Method.” This piece, which the author has made available online, is intended to do what some science textbooks skip, namely introduce the scientific method, which Schafersman considers to be applicable to all disciplines and domains, and which he identifies as the same thing as critical thinking. There is a certain degree of tension in the piece, as he seeks... Read more

I occasionally mention movies on my blog, but only rarely does one impress me to such a degree that I devote a blog entry to it for its own sake. The movie The Good German, starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchette, is such a movie. Filmed in black and white, it is not merely an imitation of the great classic films, it actually does what many have tried to accomplish and failed. This is a genuinely new film that nevertheless... Read more

Stanley Porter and Gordon Heath address a question in their recent book The Lost Gospel of Judas: Separating Fact from Fiction that is also addressed in the book by Jones I discussed in my last blog entry, the question (raised in particular by Bart Ehrman) of whether the views that became later ‘orthodox’ Christianity were in fact the ‘lucky winners’ among a number of diverse but equally early and equally valid viewpoints. When one puts it like that, it is... Read more