Dan McClellan links to an article which cites Steve Caruso’s treatment of the “alphabet soup” of characters on the lead plates. Dan also posted the next installment in his review of Jimmy Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?: The New Testament Evidence. Jim West shared a piece by Joe Zias about the lead plates and the motives behind those and other similar forgeries. zias(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s... Read more

David Ker of Lingamish and “Bad Boy Bible Study” fame has turned some of his blogging into a book, called The Bible Wasn’t Written To You. You can read it online, or download it in a number of different formats. It is developed from things he blogged about, and so the content may be familiar – but if you’re familiar with his blog, you’ll also know that it will be amusing, satirical, interesting and thought-provoking. Read more

At the suggestion of a regular commenter, I am going to try to save time in the future with commenters who ask the same questions, make the same claims, or otherwise behave in bot-like fashion. This post will contain in as brief form as possible points to make in response to mythicist claims. I presume that there is no need to restate the claims and “arguments” here – in fact, it will be more fun and more interesting to simply... Read more

Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor I received the news just a few days ago that I have funding for a scouting trip to Israel for this summer. I’ll most likely go during June, prior to the international SBL meeting in London. If you’ll be in Israel this summer in the second half of June, let me know. Recommendations are still welcome for specific hotels that it would be good to stay at with students (the purpose of my trip is to prepare... Read more

I received an e-mail about an upcoming documentary, and was pleasantly surprised (after some dismay towards the media due to the lead books fiasco) to find that it includes interviews from some excellent scholars and other interesting individuals. It is called Jesus: The Cold Case. Below is the second of several trailers available on YouTube. Read more

Via Steve Douglas and Thom Stark on Facebook, I learned that the FBI has released a document supposedly related to the Roswell incident. It purports to be a memo from Guy Hottel to the director of the FBI, indicating that an investigator for the Air Force provided information as to there having been small humanoids in the wreckage of flying saucers that were recovered at Roswell. It is worth noting that the actual source of the information is blacked out. But for the FBI to release a... Read more

Three links to counterbalance the frivolity of the last one with some serious content. First, Steve Caruso offers a chart of the characters on the lead plates, and lists numerous strikes against their authenticity. Next, Jerry Coyne links to a web site that lets you calculate evolutionary relationships in terms of genetic difference and the distance in time to our last common ancestor. Finally, via Remnant of Giants, The Bible’s Buried Secrets on DocumentaryStorm for free. Read more

Jim Linville has a series of cartoons and pictures related to the theme of how the dinosaurs died. Here’s a sample: Jesus Needs New PR shared two gems – one asks for captions on what may indeed be the worst Jesus picture ever (I’ve added my own below): “No seriously, you’re gonna like her better than the tiger. Promise.” And a parody of the National Day of Prayer video: Finally, Brad Matthies shared Star Wars parodies of the Windows 7 commercials. Presumably... Read more

As promised, I’m sharing some thoughts I prepared for the review panel at the 2011 Stone Campbell Journal Conference. The book being reviewed was Jesus Among Friends and Enemies, forthcoming from Baker. Multi-author books are particularly hard to review, and so I will focus here, as I did at the conference, on the final chapter which seeks to point in new directions regarding historical methodology. And here, unlike at the conference, I won’t run out of time, and so some... Read more

Jim West beat me to the blogging button on this one, but only by a little. The Express in the UK draws attention to Peter Thonemann’s view that the lead books are fakes. They call them “scrolls” but that isn’t as bad as calling David Elkington a Biblical scholar. Probably the clearest evidence that he isn’t a scholar at all is found in his attempt at undermining Thonemann by saying “He’s not a biblical scholar, he’s a Greek classicist.” Since... Read more