The latest Biblical Studies Carnival has been posted on Will Hart Brown’s blog. I am happy to see that the blogroll I maintain was useful in identifying places to look for interesting posts from the past month. As always, Phillip Long is eager to hear from volunteers who are willing to host a future carnival. Read more
Paul Levinson shared the cover design for the forthcoming book Touching the Face of the Cosmos, in which I will have a short story published. Fordham University Press will be distributing the print version, and the electronic edition will be available from Connected Editions. Read more
Richard Carrier could be a comedian. He recently said on his blog that he wants to make a better movie promoting mythicism than Zeitgeist is. And so he is putting his weight behind a movie called “Batman and Jesus.” No, I’m not kidding. Watch the video and see for yourself: Read more
Daniel Kirk has been offering a fantastic survey of what the Bible says about homosexuality, contextualizing it in the context of ancient patriarchy, which considered it shameful for a man to take on characteristics of weak, passive females. In his latest post, he notes the modern tendency to read Romans 1:27 as a reference to sexually-transmitted diseases. And yet that is very unlikely in its ancient context. And so he comes up with a better interpretation: The idea that men... Read more
Eldad Keynan has been looking for archaeological evidence of ancient Jewish Christianity in Israel for a long time, and has turned up a number of intriguing finds. His most recent, and possibly most important, is what appears to be a Jewish Christian mikveh – the only one of its kind. Click through to read his article about it in The Bible and Interpretation. Read more
I’m not the only blogger who was at the York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, by any means. I am glad to see that Eric Vanden Eykel was inspired to revive his blog, and has posted a recap of the conference. Timo Paananen has also posted a recap of day 1. There was also a very strange post on G. W. Schwendner’s blog which was trying to interact with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife session through online blog summaries, and which got both... Read more
An English conservative Christian website drew on Barna research and put together a study, which includes the statistic that about one in five people without a church background in England think Jesus was a myth, and roughly the same number are uncertain whether there was a historical Jesus. Conservative Christians are concerned for different reasons that secular historians will be, and are just as concerned that people don’t think Jesus was God as that they don’t think he existed. But for... Read more
I came across the above walking tour of the Old City of Jerusalem. For those who have visited at other times of year, the city will seem surprisingly uncrowded, since the video was made in December. You can also take a virtual tour of Jerusalem using Google Maps street view. Read more
It isn’t NASCAR (although there was some discussion of whether it would be mostly funny or mostly confusing to try to get the acronym of this new organization to have an ‘R’ at the end). NASSCAL is the newly-formed North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature. Please pay a visit to their website, and if you work in this field, register for free. Tony Burke provides more details on his blog, including that this organization will replace the York Christian Apocrypha... Read more
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Alpha Testing The World Table
You will now see that in addition to Disqus, you have the option to comment using The World Table. This is an opportunity to alpha test this new system and provide feedback not only about technical issues, but also about some things that you already began to talk about on my previous post – the question of whether this system will facilitate high quality interaction or will encounter issues and problems in relation to that. Please try it out,... Read more