A commenter on the blog made the assertion that scholars are somehow deferring to popular opinion when it comes to the existence of Jesus. The suggestion is so ludicrous that I thought I had best address it, and am sharing it here as well. Here’s what I wrote: The notion of being “unbiased” is naive. We all have biases, and what is great about the way scholarship works is that it provides methods and a community of experts who can limit... Read more
This cartoon came to my attention via Jerry Coyne’s blog. It seems to me to reflect one of the things that modern atheist critics of ancient religious texts imagine to be possible, but few others do, namely that the Bible’s authors took the truth, which was boring, and turned it into something so different as to be interesting but wholly unlike what actually happened. In most instances, where we know the origins of a religious tradition, we find at its core... Read more
Via IO9 I learned that there is an online comic series about the Whore of Babylon. Here’s a sample: I like seeing pop culture try to tell stories – whether aiming for realism, comedy, or something else – that seek to take cardboard cutout two-dimensional characters from religious texts and give them greater depth, and the possibility of doing something other than inexplicably following a senseless course. Read more
I’ve had the TV show Supernatural on my radar as something I should watch at least since 2009, when a student pointed out to me that a Mandaean amulet got a mention on the show. Today I was nearby when someone was watching an episode, and I did a double take when I saw Syriac writing on the screen! The episode, I learned, is called “Are you there God? It’s me, Dean Winchester.” And I soon found a clip of the... Read more
Creationism says: universities are so much under the grip of atheism that creationism cannot get a fair hearing. Mythicism says: universities are so much under the grip of Christianity that mythicism cannot get a fair hearing. Aren’t these two claims like antimatter? When they collide, don’t they cancel one another out in a spectacular release of energy (presumably in the form of arguments and counterarguments, which presumably may likewise explode in an ongoing chain reaction?) Read more
I thought I would share this to mark the passing of Wolfhart Pannenberg, the famous theologian. The quote image comes from Michael Roberts’ blog. Read more
I’m reading Bart Ehrman’s latest book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, and will begin blogging my thoughts about it soon. Before doing so, let me get out of the way an abundance of blog posts related to the book or to the topic of Christology that is its focus, which have appeared in the blogosphere since my last round-up. Ehrman shared a video of a lecture he gave a decade ago, on “Christ come in the... Read more
In a comment on his blog, Jerry Coyne responded to my recent post by quoting what I wrote and then writing the following: This is a complete distortion of what I have said. I never started out by wanting Jesus not to exist. I had no opinion on the matter, and it was only until the controversy became public that I got interested and saw the paucity of evidence for Jesus. You can distort my words on yoru website,... Read more
I previously blogged about a scene in the Doctor Who episode “The Curse of Fenric” in which the Doctor uses faith to ward off attacking haemovores. The original video clip that I included has been removed from YouTube, and so I thought I would not only update that older post, but also share this one. Not surprisingly, this is one of the episodes that many suggested when I recently asked which two episodes serve best as entry points into Doctor Who’s... Read more
Doctor Who has encountered king Arthur and many other legendaries, and so his dogmatic certainty at the start of the episode that Robin Hood never existed is puzzling. But we find out by the end of the episode that it is less about realism in relation to older episodes, but precisely about heroes and the legends that grow around them. Granted, the Doctor has also been to miniscopes and theme parks from the future, and so he has reason to be... Read more
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