My entire time at church today seemed to bring together thoughts and discussions related to this theme of belief and practice and the relationship between them for Christians. In my Sunday school class, having had a guest talk about the views of the Latter Day Saints last week, we planned to talk this week about the mainstream historic Christian tradition as reflected in such creeds as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. But before diving into those, I asked... Read more
This post will hopefully illustrate that serious thoughts can be generated by frivolous content on blogs. Allan Bevere shared this amusing image of “John the Southern Baptist”: That got me thinking of the question “What sort of Baptist was John?” – imagining various “baptists” fighting over a claim to him. And that led me to wonder whether we might not have gotten the logic of John's moniker backwards. It is often thought that, since there were so many ritual washings... Read more
Unvirtuous Abbey apparently started it, but Rod the Rogue Demon Hunter blogged about it and Storified it. I am referring to the Twitter meme #JediHymns. It is definitely worth checking out, whether in Rod’s post or on Twitter. It includes a lot of gems, of which the following are just samples: If you’re Jedi and you know it / Use the Force This lightsaber of mine; I’m gonna let it shine! It only takes a spark, to get a Death... Read more
On Cracked.com, an article appeared today with the title “5 Miracles Deleted From the Bible For Being Too Awesome.” While the idea that the contents of the extracanonical Gospels and Acts were deleted from the Bible is simply wrong, it is very cool to see the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of John, and other such sources getting this sort of attention. Many of the stories in them do indeed deserve to be widely known than they are. And of course,... Read more
I read the words below in an article in today’s New York Times about the blurriness of the lines between history and historical fiction in recent movies. How do you think its points relate to the depictions, reworkings, and interpretations of history in the Gospels? I for one doubt that the majority of people in the audience of movies about historical events, any more than the majority of readers of the Gospels, have the kinds of historical discernment and sensibility... Read more
Rick Brannan’s edition of the Greek Apocryphal Gospels, Fragments, and Agrapha for Logos offers an important new resource that anyone interested in the early history of Christianity will want to have. There are in fact two “volumes” – the Greek texts themselves in the original language, and an English translation with an introduction to each text, explaining its history, contents, and significance. When older editions either of the Greek text (e.g. Tischendorf) or English translations (e.g. M. R. James) have... Read more
From the web cartoon series Shortpacked. Read more
For those who appreciate atrocious puns as much as I do… Read more
My review of Dennis R. MacDonald’s book Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias’s Exposition of Logia About the Lord has been published by Review of Biblical Literature and can be read online. Here is how the review begins – hopefully that will inspire readers of this blog to click through and read the rest! Works that bring about a sea change through their radically innovative approach to a scholarly question are rare. Whether Dennis MacDonald’s Two Shipwrecked... Read more
If “liberal Christianity” means Christianity that reflects the cosmology and worldview of a particular era, then the earliest Christianity is liberal Christianity. It is only later, as cosmologies and worldviews changed, that some insisted on clinging to the views of an earlier era, because those happened to be part of the worldview of previous generations of Christians, including the Bible’s authors. That is why “conservative” Christianity ends up being a very radical departure from earliest Christianity, even in the process... Read more
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