Robin Parry has a post on the blog Running Heads entitled “Fundamentalists – Have the Courage of Your Convictions.” In it he writes, I wonder why fundamentalists are so keen to believe in a literal seven-day creation and yet do not campaign against space flight (in case someone crashes into the sky-dome and cracks it) or organize recruitment drives for the Flat Earth Society. If you really want to use the Bible to derive cosmology then it seems the way... Read more
The Doctor Who episode “Inferno” from the Jon Pertwee era is one of the few where the Doctor, rather than going backwards or forwards in time, slips sideways into a parallel universe. The episode thus features the interesting scenario of the Doctor trying to prevent a catastrophe in his own universe, seeing events unfold in a somewhat but not completely different parallel universe, and then returning to his own to try to prevent the catastrophe armed with knowledge from what... Read more
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Fred Clark has a post on his blog focused on the requirement to accept Gentiles communicated in Acts 10-11, as God is described as expanding his people to include those previously excluded. In that connection he writes: I believe that denying LGBT people full legal equality is objectively immoral. I believe that excluding LGBT people from full inclusion, full participation and full equality in the church is objectively immoral — and objectively unbiblical….It’s particularly astonishing that the very same American... Read more
Richard Carrier has posted a response to my review of his book, Proving History. I'm not sure that there is anything that needs to be said by me in response, since he clearly is hedging on whether the earliest Jewish Christians thought that Jesus was a God, accepts what is perhaps the clearest example of a scholarly consensus that reflects bias resulting from religious conviction (the view that Jesus was considered a pre-existent divine person by Paul), criticizes me for... Read more
Mythicists say a lot of ludicrous things, and perhaps it would be useful to highlight some of the more astonishing and laughable ones from time to time. Mythicists like Earl Doherty will accept the existence of Q – a hypothetical source the existence of which is deduced from the common material shared between Matthew and Luke – and even the even more hypothetical stratification of this source into layers by scholars like John Kloppenborg. But they will then go on... Read more
As Steve Caruso and Jim West have mentioned on their blogs, a hacker has brought down GoDaddy sites, including RogueLeaf which is where we have been posting chapters of our English translation of the Mandaean Book of John as we completed them. The plan has always been to move them elsewhere once everything was ready, and organize them, but since that hasn’t happened yet, and the current site is not there at present, the best one can do is peruse... Read more
Scholars and laypeople have engaged in significant debate about the precise meaning of the word/name “Sheol” in the Bible. At times it seems to be an underworld, at times simply the grave, and at times perhaps something else. A student in my class on the Bible has actually solved the mystery and come up with a definitive answer to the question. Sheol is the name of the big fish in the Book of Jonah. The Biblical text which proves this... Read more
If the purpose of the Bible were that we derive from it a systematic theology, you would think that we would have simply been provided with that systematic theology… Read more
I shared an image that came to my attention on Facebook, simply writing “Discuss” above it. People did so, fervently, in surprisingly large numbers. Here is the image: I would indeed be interested in discussion. But first, I noted that sometimes people make a distinction between a “Christian Liberal” and a “Liberal Christian,” and so perhaps I should do the same with Jesus and Judaism, and ask whether anyone prefers the image below. I should also share a song that... Read more
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