Peter Bekins sent me the following by e-mail, and I thought I should share it with readers here, with his permission: _______ In light of the recent Facebook discussion on your wall re the flood and the Grand Canyon in which one gentleman was adamant that the Bible predates the Babylonian myths and since you seem to take an interest in these sorts of things in general, here is one for your file. I [recently had someone argue] that the Genesis... Read more
Today I am a panelist in an SBL session about Bart Ehrman's book, How Jesus Became God. I thought I would share my notes here both for regular blog readers not attending SBL, for those at SBL who wanted to attend the session and could not, and for those at the session who may find it useful to see my thoughts in writing. _____ Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee features all... Read more
The quote from Gregory C. Jenks comes from an article on the Progressive Christianity website, written back in 2011, “Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally.” Click through to read it. Neither the Bible nor God is well served by any tactics that seek to protect the Bible from scrutiny. We must, therefore, resist any temptation to treat our sacred texts differently than the way we treat other people’s sacred texts. Legend and self-serving fiction are to be found in... Read more
I’m traveling today to San Diego for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. I have scheduled some posts to appear during this period, and also hope to blog about the conference while there. But I thought I should mention my travels, both as prelude to such posts, and as explanation of why I may not chime in with comments as quickly or as frequently as I usually try to. Read more
As readers of this blog probably know, I wrote a short and focused review of one aspect of Richard Carrier’s book On the Historicity of Jesus for The Bible and Interpretation. I am planning to follow up with another such focused review, probably focused on the use of the Rank-Raglan scale in assessing historicity. But there are lots of other points that deserve to be made about specific details in the book, and so in addition to writing review articles, I also plan... Read more
IO9 shared an infographic about widespread misconceptions. Those relating to religion and to science intersect with the focuses of this blog, and so I thought I should share it in a post of its own (I mentioned it in a post previously). Read more
I support the separation of church and state, and am pretty sure that the President of the United States has no business quoting Exodus or any part of the Bible in an official speech. On the other hand, contrary to what conspiracy theorists are sure to come up with soon if they haven’t already, this statement from president Obama has nothing to do with Roswell… Read more
When I heard this piece, I looked to see what I could learn about the composer. Not only was she a great composer in her own right, but Nina Makarova was also the wife of Aram Khachaturian! Read more
The Blogger session at SBL will include two papers, offered by Kimberly Majeski and Jim Linville, to be followed by a panel which will include Chris Keith, Anthony LeDonne, Dan McClellan, and perhaps others (if you are a biblioblogger who will be there, and want to participate, please feel free to get in touch – there have been some cancellations and unexpected conflicts, and so we might have room for one or two more). Here’s the description from the program... Read more
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