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Via Reddit Read more
The latest Biblical Studies Carnival is up at the blog SansBlogue. Many thanks to Tim Bulkeley for putting together such a diverse and interesting carnival! Read more
Steven Moffatt promised a moving and fitting farewell to Rory and Amy. I think he pulled it off in the end, although in many ways, the episode faces the problem that “The Caves of Androzani” faces: we knew when watching it that the Doctor would regenerate, and there were so many perilous moments that at the end, the feeling was more satisfaction of curiosity (“Oh, so that's what gets him”) rather than tragic surprise (“Oh my gosh, the Doctor regenerated!”).... Read more
A friend shared this cartoon from the Answers in Genesis web site on Facebook: On the one hand, I don’t find the notion of waiting two millennia to pee funny. On the other hand, I find the idea of Noah’s flood being before the ice age hilarious – but I suspect that the maker of the cartoon didn’t intend that to be the joke. Does this mean that, since young-earth creationism is itself laughable, none of their attempts at humor will... Read more
I am struck by the prayerful pose of Amy and Rory in this poster for tonight’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Angels Take Manhattan”: As we fans of the show brace ourselves for tonight’s episode, feel free to discuss what you expect might happen, what you fear will happen, what you will be sorry if it never happened, and what you will miss most as things change when Doctor Who returns at Christmas, if not sooner. Read more
Discussions continue in the blogosphere about the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. The most important thing to work out, if we can, is the date of its composition – dating the text is important both in terms of figuring out whether the text is authentic, but also, if authentic, what period in history it tells us about. The text seems to depend directly on the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic, and thus is unlikely to be a Coptic translation of an... Read more
This is…a plea that we follow Augustine and divest ourselves of the notion that interpreting a text literally means taking it as an historically accurate account of things that happened in time and space. If the text isn’t an historical narrative, then treating it as an historical narrative is not properly a literal interpretation. — Chris Heard, “Interpreting Genesis 1 ‘literally'” on the blog Higgaion Read more
Timo S. Paananen has written a brief piece which takes the methods that Francis Watson and others have used to argue for the inauthenticity of the papyrus fragment known as the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” and applies them to a fragment of known provenance and authenticity. I hope it will be widely read and circulated, since it offers what I feel are really important insights about the methods that some have used or proposed using to detect alleged signs of... Read more
The Boston Globe has an article about the conversation among scholars about the fragment. Bart Ehrman is quoted as saying what many cautious scholars would say based on the currently-available evidence: “[T]he jury is out still, but it’s not looking good for authenticity.” Mark Goodacre shared updated copies of Francis Watson’s pdf articles. Andrew Bernhard posted another pdf article. In drawing my attention to it, he also wrote the following: Just to clarify in case there has been any confusion, my... Read more
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