Photo via Matthew Paul Turner on Facebook. I added the text. For those who may not know the original version, 1 Corinthians 11:14-15a reads: “Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?” All jokes aside, it is an important text for illustrating that what Paul meant by “nature” and “natural” isn’t what we mean by... Read more
My article “On Hearing (Rather Than Reading) Intertextual Echoes: Christology and Monotheistic Scriptures in an Oral Context” has finally appeared in the latest issue of Biblical Theology Bulletin. If you are not a subscriber and don’t have access to the journal through your library, you can read a pre-publication version via Butler University’s Digital Commons. Thanks to David Stark for mentioning that the issue had appeared! Read more
I chuckled when I read this in a student assignment today: A common argument, analyzes the lengths of each of the synoptic writers. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never come across an attempt to compare the lengths of the writers of the Synoptic Gospels. I don’t know how one would go about undertaking such a study, or how it would help resolve the Synoptic problem… 🙂 Read more
The question of how life began (or in more technical terminology, abiogenesis) is one that often comes up in debates between the anti-science young-earth creationists and everyone else. Ricky Carvel has posted some interesting thoughts on the topic on his blog. He suggests that, if one posits a living God as creator of life on this planet, then that is not the beginning of life. It is simply the creation of life by an entity that already lives. The debate... Read more
When not too long ago I shared N. T. Wright’s entertaining reworking of the Beatles song “Yesterday,” making it about Genesis, it got me thinking that it might be fun to do something similar. And so here is a reworking of another classic Beatles tune with new, Genesis-related lyrics, for your amusement. Lyrics follow below the video, as well as being embedded in the video itself. Let There Be On the first day of creation God made light so we could see... Read more
From Glue – The Comic, by Jason “Danger” Block, via Steampunk Boba Fett on Facebook. There are quite a few other good ones on the comic’s blog, including this one about people who say “I don’t believe in evolution”: Read more
I went today to hear the lunchtime talk by Terry Mortenson of Answers in Genesis. The title was “Was Darwin Right?” The title reflects the classic young-earth creationist tactic of focusing attention on individuals and work done in the past – quoting Darwin on gaps in the evidence a century and a half ago, without ever mentioning someone like Francisco Ayala, a contemporary Christian geneticist who points out that there are no longer any gaps thanks to the availability of... Read more
There are several interesting topics that I think I can bring together under this heading. First, Mark Goodacre has blogged about the strange experience of having a peer-reviewed journal article be written which interacts with a post on his blog! And so he raises the question of whether this is flattering or worrying, since often times we post our ideas on our blogs in a less polished form than we would in the final submitted version of an article. See... Read more
Below is a song I wrote a while back, but haven’t shared publicly until now. I wrote it after a discussion in my Sunday school class about creeds, in which I asked whether a list of beliefs ought to be what characterizes us, or something else. Here are the lyrics, which are also in the video: Creed I believe in God, the boundless Love that never knows an end A love for enemy as well as friend I believe in... Read more
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Two Recent Commentaries on the Gospel of John: Introduction
I am grateful to Eerdmans for having sent me review copies of two commentaries on the Gospel of John which they recently published. As I am teaching my course on the Gospel of John this semester, I hoped to blog about both commentaries as I encountered points of note or interest. Alas, it has taken me until now to get around to blogging about the introductions! The two commentaries are those by Urban von Wahlde in the Eerdmans Critical Commentary... Read more