The Patrologist recently blogged about exegesis as reading, warning about two extremes – the tendency to falsely claim to be merely reading and not interpreting, and the tendency to atomize and miss the big picture. Here’s the conclusion: I am constantly amazed to interact with so called ‘critical scholars’ who look at, say, a book like John’s Gospel and see nothing but a pastiche of cut-up pieces that represent a proto-Gnostic text re-edited by a proto-Orthodox edited then re-edited again. Why... Read more
The Ancient World Online drew attention to recent open access publications from the Center for Hellenic Studies. These include Albert Lord's classic The Singer of Tales and Averil Cameron's Dialoguing in Late Antiquity. I haven't figured out how to actually access them yet, but hopefully will soon. See also Brice Jones' blog post and Paul Barford's blog post about Josh McDowell's involvement in plundering mummies for papyri. From the sound of it, it looks like they may have dropped entirely... Read more
The late Maurice Casey described himself as an “independent historian,” but for the most part, that term “independent scholar” has been used for people who dabble in scholarly inquiry, having advanced studies in the area, but who are not employed at a university or similar institution of higher education. I have at times offered cautionary remarks about voices outside the academy. There are two reasons for this. One is that those of us who devote ourselves to academic research as... Read more
Both via Episcopal Church Memes on Facebook. Read more
The BBC has a set or printable Doctor Who Christmas cards on their website. Here’s a sample: And of related interest, Patheos has an Advent Calendar! Read more
Stuff Fundies Like shared this bit of Christian polemic against Satan…I mean, Santa: (If you cannot read the text in the image above, click through to read the chart on the Cutting Edge website). This is exactly the same way that fundamentalists identify ‘predictions’ in the Jewish Scriptures that supposedly match up with Jesus. And mythicists, being mostly former fundamentalists, accept the claims of similarities that cannot be coincidence, and merely explain them in terms of borrowing. But a look at... Read more
A commenter drew my attention to the video above, in which apologists for Pauline authorship depict Paul the apostle interrupting Bart Ehrman’s class to insist that he wrote both 1 and 2 Thessalonians. It seems perfect for today, which is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. But it doesn’t really satisfy – not least because we can’t bring authors back from the past to tell us what they did and did not write, and so we need to deal with... Read more
We often talk about flat-earthers and the view that ancient people once held that the earth was flat. IO9 shared the video above about what it would actually be like to live on a flat world, and how it would differ from ours. Watch it all the way through, to learn about the Big Globe conspiracy… Read more
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