A while back I was told that there is a Wikipedia game “Seven Steps to Jesus” which resembles the better-known “Seven Degrees of Separation” game involving Kevin Bacon. (And for those keeping count, you will recall that my “Bacon Number” is 3.) I initially didn’t find any online documentation about the game, and so I thought I would share here what I was told about it. It basically involved trying to get from any Wikipedia page to the Wikipedia page about Jesus in at... Read more
Merry Christmas to my blog readers! And please do like and/or follow my page on Facebook for more details! Read more
“His Light In Us” by Kim André Arnesen is a piece intended for Christmas, although its lyrics do not restrict it to this time of year. Here is an excerpt from the lyrics, from the composer’s website: God’s distant call flares in the night, so long expected, so longed for; and all my life, Christ called my name, and now at last, I’ll answer Him. Renewed, his hope, his light in us, incarnate, fragile, our Lord appears, Alleluia, alleluia! Eternal,... Read more
Reading is Believing? Sacred Texts in a Scientific Age CALL FOR PAPERS Academic Colloquium The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, in collaboration with the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge Venue: Clare College, Cambridge 26-‐28 March 2018 Confirmed speakers: Prof. John Barton FBA (University of Oxford); Prof. Salman Hameed (Hampshire College, USA); Dr Mark Harris (University of Edinburgh); Dr Shuruq Naguib (Lancaster University); Dr Colin Turner (Durham University). Abstracts for short papers from any academic discipline are invited for... Read more
It has been a long while since I radically revised my one-semester course on the Bible to focus on information literacy. The has, however, almost entirely focused on the wise use of sources about the Bible, and not what we can learn about bias and trustworthiness from within the Bible itself. But the Bible includes religious and political propaganda, and claims that are most likely historically counterfactual. As one commenter put it when responding to a post about Jesus’ birthplace being Nazareth... Read more
A recent New York Times opinion piece offers what I think is one of the most insightful analyses of Evangelical support for Donald Trump that I have ever read. Here is an excerpt to whet your appetite, but you really should read the whole thing: LifeWay’s researchers developed questions meant to get at both the way Americans self-identify religiously and their theological beliefs. What they discovered was that while one-quarter of Americans consider themselves to be “evangelical,” less than half of that... Read more
Something that the Pope said about translations of the Lord’s Prayer has made the news recently, and connects (albeit indirectly) with a subject that I was already planning to blog about. One of my older posts that continues to generate interest and discussion is a blog post about Neil Douglas-Klotz’s so-called “Original Aramaic Lord’s Prayer,” which in fact offers words that cannot be called a translation of the Lord’s Prayer as we find it in Aramaic or any other language. It... Read more
Doug Chaplin shared the following blue circle plaque that he made for Jesus, of the kind that one finds on important historic and heritage sites around the UK. I like that the plaque states what, historically speaking, we can consider very likely, namely that Jesus was Joseph’s son. On that topic, see also Kyle Roberts’ recent book A Complicated Pregnancy. I provided an endorsement for that book, and the publisher has made a study guide as well as the introduction and first... Read more
A lot more has been blogged that relates to the topic of mythicism. I should begin by highlighting the article by Daniel Gullotta which is now available in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. It provoked the kind of response that one would expect from Richard Carrier, who depicted Gullotta as incompetent, but not as bad as me. Deane Galbraith tackled the way Carrier responds to critics by using his own tools against him. First, he asked whether Carrier calculated the... Read more
If you thought the sausage roll in the manger in Greggs’ advertising was controversial, I wonder what you will make of this cover from a recent issue of Der Spiegel. I haven’t read the article, which I expect is more about online shopping and shipping than about Jesus. But the speech bubbles grabbed my attention and got me thinking about Jesus as a Messiah who was “not what we ordered” and one to be given back and exchanged for someone else... Read more
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