Brian Bibb has written an insightful post about bibliolatry. He writes: Judges 17–18…mocks Micah for believing that human-made objects could actually be gods. He is presented as a kind of fool who admits that he has constructed the objects that he calls God, saying “you have taken the gods that I made!” Micah’s anger reminds me of the outrage that certain Christians express when scholars ask difficult questions about the Bible. When scholars point out facts that challenge the view... Read more
The above chart comes from NonStamp Collector, via Hemant Mehta. In addition to Biblical inerrantists ignoring the most obvious and reasonable explanation of what is in the Bible, they are actually ignoring the most Biblical explanation. The contradictions, discrepancies, and difficulties are there within the Bible, because human beings have put these texts with their differences into the collection we call the Bible. The only way to claim that the collection is inerrant is to allow one’s doctrine about the... Read more
It is Easter, and I celebrate and proclaim resurrection. I am not referring to a peculiar event which some claim happened in history roughly 2,000 years ago, in which a human (or, according to some, a just barely human divine entity) was raised to life in a body he didn’t need, before being exalted to heaven where such a body is out of place, to be seated at the right hand of a God who most would say is everywhere... Read more
Most readers of my blog will know that I wrote a book a few years ago, available as an ebook, on the relationship between history and faith in connection with the events that are on the minds of Christians around the world today through Sunday in particular. The book is The Burial of Jesus: What Does History Have to Do with Faith?. It asks what it means to take the tools of historical study – and their limitations – seriously... Read more
Commenter Hydroxonium mentioned the first quotation. In looking for it, I found the second one as well. Both seemed worth sharing. Read more
IO9 shared this quote from Ibn al-Haytham’s book Doubts Concerning Ptolemy: The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the... Read more
That’s one way of depicting the resurrection. Via Christian Funny Pictures. Read more
Marcus Borg, Kimberly Winston, and Jim Naughton all raised the question of whether Christians need to believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Their conclusions are different, in interesting ways. What do readers of this blog think? Of related interest, Mark Goodacre shared a video of an interview Karen King recently gave: And Bart Ehrman responded to someone who seemed to have reviewed his latest book without reading it. Read more
I give the Jesus mythicists a lot of hassle. But theirs is nowhere near to being the most ludicrous claim about Jesus one can find on the web. All Mesopotamia pointed out an article which mentions a view found among Hungarian nationalists: the Hungarians are in fact Sumerians – just like Jesus! I recently learned that there is a whole blog dedicated to debunking geocentrism. Do we need one to tackle the Sumerian Hungarian Jesus hypothesis too? Read more
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