I had a piece on the website “The Toast” drawn to my attention. It pokes fun at the way women are depicted in artistic renditions of Solomon and his wives. For one example, it gives the painting below with the added caption shown: Click through for more examples, as well as the funny introduction. There are serious things that may be worth talking about, too. The way that patriarchal societies keep women alienated from the reins of power, and then present even... Read more
In case you missed it, the hashtag #TrumpBible has been trending on Twitter. Several questions about the Bible have been addressed to Donald Trump lately, and several answers he has given suggest that he is – how shall we put it – not very familiar with the contents of that famous collection of books. Trump said “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.” The hashtag #TrumpBible is exploring the Bible as Trump might... Read more
Hemant Mehta drew attention to a statement by the dean of Liberty University’s law school, claiming that the government has no authority to legislate or require anything, except that which is scriptural. It was pointed out in a comment on the post on Facebook that this claim is the exact opposite of the point Paul makes in Romans 13. He doesn’t say “obey authorities, but only inasmuch as they do what we know in advance from Scripture that God wants.” He... Read more
Hemant Mehta shared some nice reworkings of a popular right-wing meme about prayer in schools, which were created by Tracey Moody. All of the depictions of children praying in the memes on his blog are ones that he would support – except for the one in which a teacher is leading children in prayer, and thus imposing something on the inevitably diverse group of students. Children praying of their own initiative is not prohibited and never has been – nor will it ever... Read more
Another instance of me sharing a post of mine on Facebook, and finding in the process of creating a “blurb” for it that those words might themselves be worth sharing. The Bible’s real usefulness is in its connecting us to people in the past. But to truly benefit from this, we have to avoid the extremes of either assuming that the authors whose works are included in the Bible somehow always know better than we do, or conversely, assuming that we always... Read more
I have a new article published in The Bible and Interpretation: “Mythicism and the Making of Mark.” I think that this will be my last article in this series about Richard Carrier’s book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, not only because I am now on sabbatical and have other things to focus on, but because (as my articles about the book hopefully make clear) I honestly don’t think what Carrier has argued is significant or interesting... Read more
Steve Caruso drew attention to a video that Charles Häberl has made of a Neo-Mandaic folk tale, narrated by Nasser Abu Issa Sobbi. If you are interested in the Mandaeans, the Middle East, or modern spoken Aramaic, you should definitely watch this video. Read more
The sermon last Sunday was about Galatians 1, where Paul talks about the Galatians having turned aside to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Ironically, those who are the most prone to accuse most of their contemporaries as proclaiming a “false gospel” look a lot more like Paul’s opponents than Paul himself. Paul’s message to the Galatians was not that they were failing to be strict enough, or that they were not maintaining doctrinal purity by... Read more
The only explanation I can think of for why the media is focusing attention again on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is that Tony Burke persuaded them to give some free publicity to the upcoming York Christian Apocrypha Symposium. Via the Archaeological News Tumblr, I learned of a LiveScience article by Owen Jarus which essentially says that tests are being done, and information is available, which could potentially yield results that might indicate something one way or the other. That... Read more
For students: The syllabus is to the course you are taking what the instruction book is to a video game, or the manual is to your driving test. Of course, in our day and age, many are used to situations in which you can just learn by doing and consult the instructions if and when you find you can’t figure it out yourself inductively. But until such time as you are taking a course that mirrors that approach, and lets you fail over... Read more
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