When I started the blog back in 2012, I had two main goals. The first was to take the historical study of the New Testament and early Christianity out of the academy and make it available to anyone who wanted to learn. The second was to do some good with it. From the very beginning, every membership fee has gone straight to charity. That’s now added up to more than $3 million for organizations fighting hunger, homelessness, and more. But here’s the reality: because every membership fee is passed directly to charity, the blog itself doesn’t keep a penny to cover its own expenses. Running this site costs money (staff, technology, infrastructure, growth). Those costs have only ever been met by a handful of generous supporters working quietly behind the scenes. Without them, there would be no blog, no community, and no charitable giving. Now we’re opening that small group of supporters more formally, and inviting you to become a Blog Steward. (You can proudly call yourself a BS’er!) What It Is A Blog Steward [...]

I have come up with a new way of thinking about our finitude, about the fact that we all die and (in my view) that’s the end of the story.  At least I think it’s a new way.  I don’t recall ever hearing or reading it.  If it is a common view, or a least a view that is out there (and/or long has been!), I have no doubt some of you will tell me. First, some background: My new (to me) thought is predicated, as I just indicated, on my personal opinion that death is the end of the story for each of us, an opinion many of you will heartily disagree with.  I began to hold this opinion when I became an agnostic/atheist some thirty years ago or so.  I don’t think we have souls  that are somehow separate from our physical/material beings or that will live on after we die.  I think this bodily existence is all we will ever have. Many people find that view deeply depressing and [...]

Now that I have discussed the themes, emphases, authors and occasions of the “Johannine epistles” (1, 2, and 3 John) I can provide some suggestions for further reading.  These are all important works written by scholars for non-scholars.  I have given brief annotations for each book to give you a sense of what it’s about and so help you decide which, if any, might be worth your while. I have divided the list into three sections: Books that provide important discussion of one or more of these Catholic epistles, and of the problem of persecution dealt with in 1 Peter. Commentaries that give lengthy introductions to all matters of importance about the book of Acts and then go passage by passage to provide more detailed interpretation (that’s where you can dig more deeply into “what does this particular word actually mean?”; “what is the real point of this passage”; how does this passage relate to what Luke says elsewhere in his two-volume work or to what we can find in other parts of the New [...]

In this post I continue my summaries of the books of the New Testament “In a Nutshell” by turning to the letters of 2 and 3 John.  Because these are so brief, I will deal with them together in a single post, explaining their themes and emphases and exploring the question of who wrote them, when, and why.   For a one-sentence, fifty word summary of the two together, how ‘bout this:   2 and 3 John are letters by an author called the “elder,” the first addressed to a community and the other to one of its prominent members, warning against believers who preach a false understanding of Christ and who refuse to welcome Christian travelers because they disagree with their views.   I can now move on to a more extensive overview of these two books. On one level, they are not nearly as difficult to read as, say, the Gospel of John. Each of them is short and direct, taking up only a page each, about average for most [...]