Yesterday in my Sunday school class we continued our study of Romans, reaching the start of chapter 3. In trying to sum up Paul’s seemingly conflicting points about the advantage of being a member of the Jewish people (yes there is an advantage, no we are not any better off) I used the analogy of gym membership. I wonder whether others find this a useful analogy for illustrating Paul’s point. Paul’s contrast in Romans 2 can be compared to a... Read more

The Bible and Interpretation has an article by Tom Verenna on the lead codices and the role of bibliobloggers in making more reliable information available. Read more

We have reached the end of Part 1 of Earl Doherty’s book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus. In assessing the case and claims he has offered so far, I found myself inspired by GakuseiDon’s comment mentioning Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit (inspired by Carl Sagan’s). I thought I would apply that kit to Doherty’s book thus far, as a way of assessing what it has offered as well as bringing in an additional... Read more

I’m grateful to Doc Artz for pointing out that May 23rd of this year is the one year anniversary of the series finale of LOST. Having had almost a year to reflect on it, or put it out of your mind, or rewatch the whole series with the ending in mind (perhaps even blogging about it every 108 minutes), what do you think about the series in general, and the finale in particular, a year later? Given how important LOST... Read more

It may be that different readers are getting a different impression of my treatment of Doherty’s book depending on whether they have read the extended ongoing conversation about mythicism that preceded it here. And so I thought that I would post here, for the convenience of anyone who may be interested, a round-up of my previous blogging about this topic. I posted a round-up on January 26th, 2011, and so I will link to that round-up to cover my earlier... Read more

I just noticed today that there is a mythicist group on Facebook, “Jesus Birther Movement (Demand his birth certificate).” Poe’s Law seems to apply here… Read more

Peter Kirby has posted an open letter expressing serious concern about the way I have expressed myself in my recent post and more generally in my treatment of Earl Doherty’s self-published book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. I suspect that eventually the comment I left there will appear, but since it has not yet, I will include it here. Peter, thank you so much for posting this. I have all along struggled with what the appropriate tone for my discussion... Read more

On a couple of other blogs I’ve encountered some criticism of my supposedly not having adequately presented the full extent of Earl Doherty’s claims and arguments in his book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus. When someone offers a homeopathic remedy as a solution to an illness, I don’t see the need for a defender of mainstream medicine to point out that it is water and staying hydrated is a good thing, and can... Read more

The blogosphere is still recovering from Blogger’s outage. Posts that had been deleted seem to be being restored. Here are some interesting things from around the blogs that are still there for your reading pleasure. Marc Cortez shares the nine steps of commenting on the internet. Dan McClellan mentions a book on religion and the X-Files that sounds interesting: We Want to Believe: Faith and Gospel in the X-Files. Jim Davila mentions a news piece on the lead plates, which ignores... Read more