As you know, Platinum members of the blog are allowed to submit posts for other Platinum members, and other members vote on which of them should be provided to the blog as a whole (It's a nice perk. You should think about moving up to Platinum.  There are other perks too--one, of course, is that you are contributing a larger amount to the charities we support!)   The most recent winner is this intriguing post by Dan Kohanski, about why most Jews had no interest in joining the Jesus movement. Dan will be happy to respond to your comments and questions. ****************************** Why did only a fraction of one percent of all Jews in the empire or even in Judaea ever believe in the message of the Jesus Movement?[1] The answer starts with that message itself. The first members of the Movement were all Jews themselves, saw themselves as Jews, and argued that Jewish traditions and beliefs inevitably led to their version of Judaism. However, the way they used those traditions and beliefs to solve the [...]

I am pleased to announce that I will be doing a six-lecture online (recorded) course called: “In the Beginning:  History, Legend and Myth in the Pentateuch.  Part 1.  The Book of Genesis.”   This will not be in connection with the blog per se, but there is an important connection worth noting for blog members (see below). The plan is to make this course the first installment of a rather long series of courses that I am calling, “How Scholars Read the Bible.”  (The next six-lecture course – no surprise! – will be the rest of the Pentateuch after Genesis).  Each lecture in this course, and the ones that follow, will be thirty minutes of length. We will later be announcing the release date of the course (it will probably in February).   But I want to let you know about it now, so that it can be on your radar screen.  And because there is a special opportunity connected to it.  I will be delivering the lectures to a live audience (remotely), and anyone who purchases [...]

I have finished a draft of my book on Revelation and am now having readers take a look at it, both layreaders and experts.  Once I get their comments back I'll make revisions and then get it sent out to the publisher; the plan is to have it published in the spring of 2022. I may change all this, but here is how at this point I'm planning to start the book, in ch. 1. ****************************** I was expecting a good deal of culture shock when I moved to North Carolina in 1988.  I had spent ten years in New Jersey, four of them teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.  It was a position I loved: teaching New Testament to students who were curious but not, as a rule, particularly invested in the subject before taking the class. Most of my students there were Roman Catholic, at least nominally; others were Jewish or completely secular.  Not many were Bible-reading evangelicals.  I was pretty sure things would be different in the south.  The University of [...]

Here we are at the end of the year.  What a year.  We thought we would see the end of the pandemic and the good times would roll.  Well, not exactly.  They sure seemed about to roll but, nope, just when we thought the thing was ending … hello Omicron!   I hope you have come through it OK so far, and that you can keep safe as we move forward. Not for all, but for some there have been bright spots through the darkness, and we should certainly celebrate them.  It’s been a very good year for the blog – the best ever – and so that part’s good.  We started this blog venture in April of 2012, so this is the conclusion of the ninth calendar year.  We now head into year 10!  Who woulda thought?  Certainly not me…. As you know, I have had two goals for the blog from Day 1, and have never wavered on them. I’d say we’ve done unusually well this year in achieving our goals for the blog, [...]

We've been doing short stories in this thread, and now I will introduce two more.  These are from the "Apocrypha."  This is the term that Protestants use for a group of Jewish books not in the Hebrew Bible that are, however, accepted by both Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians as having a secondary canonical status.  In these denominations, therefore, they are called "Deuterocanonical Books." There are some terrific narratives among these books.  Here I describe two of the best known, Tobit and Judith, again from my textbook on the Bible. ****************************** Tobit Tobit is a work of historical fiction—by which I mean it is a fictional tale set within a real historical context. Originally the book was written in Aramaic, either in the late third century B.C.E. or the early second. The narrative is set in the eighth century B.C.E. in the city of Nineveh, where the hero of the story, Tobit, has been exiled from his town in Galilee during the conquests of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. In other words, the account is [...]

Here now is my second post on that intriguing little article by Louis Markos in the journal First Things, which he entitled “Errant Ehrman.”   If you’ll recall from my last post, Markos starts the article by indicating that he felt “great pity” for me because I was the wrong kind of fundamentalist back when I was a conservative Christian.  My problem, he indicates, is that I applied modern standards to decide whether the Bible was inerrant.  Here are his words: He [Ehrman] was taught, rightly, that there are no contradictions in the Bible, but he was trained, quite falsely, to interpret the non-contradictory nature of the Bible in modern, scientific, post-Enlightenment terms. That is to say, he was encouraged to test the truth of the Bible against a verification system that has only existed for some 250 years….. And so, as I pointed out last time, the right kind of true believer is obviously one who does not “test the truth of the Bible” by modern standards using modern criteria, but only by pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment [...]