I love Thanksgiving.  Absolutely love it.  For me it’s the best holiday of the year – family, friends, food, and football.  How good can it get?   (OK, a lot of my family and friends would drop the football.)  And it’s always a time for me actually to realize how much good there is in the world and in my life. On the other hand, every Thanksgiving has a darkside for me, a sense of guilt that I myself have so much to be thankful for. Isn’t that a bit triumphalist and self-congratulating, given how awful so many people feel, not because of self-pity (though there is a lot of that also) but because their lives really are filled with pain and misery? These two feelings of gratitude and guilt are simultaneous.  That is weird and possibly paradoxical, but I never try to resolve the tension between them, to make one triumph over the other or to reconcile them to one another.  They are both real and true but obviously at odds.   I think that’s worth [...]

Here is my second post on Bill O'Reilly's Killing Jesus from many years ago.   As you'll see, I was no happier about the book once I started reading it than when I was anticipating doing so.  But here at least I give some reasons that show my fears were starting to be confirmed.  Confirmation bias?  Yeah, maybe.  But well, in this case, I don't think so.... I will say, though, I was much feistier eight years ago when I wrote this thing.... ****************************** I received my copy of Killing Jesus in the mail today and started to glance at it.  I know I said I would read it, but I’m just not sure I can bring myself to do it. The opening “Note to Readers” makes one’s heart sink.  We are told that this will be a “fact-based book.”  Oh, that’s good, the reader thinks: it won’t be biased but will be objective, based only on facts.  Until you begin to read the opening page of ch. 1 “Heavily armed solders from the capital city [...]

This announcement is not directly related to the blog -- but some of you may be interested.  My long-time colleague (of nearly 30 years!) Carl Ernst, one of the leading experts on Islam in North America, will be holding a remote webinar for my Department of Religious Studies, along with another expert (a PhD from our program) on how Islam influenced "Dune" -- both the book (which I *loved* in college!) and the movie (which does look amazing). It will be Saturday November 13.  Interested?  You don't have to have read the book or seen the movie for the discussion to be extremely enlightening.  Here's the info! Webinar on Dune and Islam: How To Understand the Movie   Frank Herbert’s Dune is inspired by themes from the history of Islam that are both direct and subtle. Carl Ernst and Michael Muhammad Knight will discuss the new film and the book it is based on and explore how Islam is part of its foundation on November 13, 2021 on Zoom and YouTube Live. Register here. The webinar is free. $10 suggested donation: https://go.unc.edu/PeckFundDonation Carl Ernst is a leading [...]

Here is an intriguing guest post!  And a controversial one.  Did Jesus actually heal people? As you know, blog members who are at the Platinum level can submit posts for other Platinum members.  Would you be interested in doing so?  Move up to Platinum!  Every month or so, Platinum members can vote on a recent post to appear on the entire blog.  This is the current WINNER. Our guest poster is Doug Wadeson, himself a medical doctor with (obviously) a lifelong interest in healing but also a keen interest in the historical study of the NT Gospels.  In this series he combines these two interests and provides some some unusually interesting reflections.   ****************************** The Gospels portray Jesus as performing amazing miracles.  Some of them have to do with nature, such as calming a storm or turning water into wine.  Most have to do with healing a variety of afflictions, including leprosy and possibly other infectious diseases (like Peter’s mother-in-law, and maybe Jairus’ daughter?), blindness, being mute and deaf, paralysis (or some form of crippling [...]

I have talked a lot on the blog about my understanding of how biblical scholarship relates to Christian faith claims.   Since the early 19th century critical scholars have dug deeply into the Bible and discovered discrepancies, contradictions, historical errors, geographical mistakes, anachronisms, and claims that make no sense in light of what we know about the world today from biology, geology, astronomy, physics, anthropology, and … and well the list goes on. Different people draw different faith conclusions from this kind of scholarship.  Some think it’s irrelevant to their faith;  others think it requires them to change what they believe, possibly radically; yet others think that it negates the possibility of faith altogether  -- either confirming the atheism they already hold or driving them to abandon their faith and become non-believers. Is any of these a sensible option?  Is any of them the obvious and necessary option?  What about the obstacles that stand in the way of change, unrelated to biblical scholarship, such as not being able to leave a conservative evangelical community because of [...]

Soon after Jesus’ death, his disciples claimed that he was God. What did they mean by that?  Did they think he was God *before* he died, during his public ministry?   Did they think he had always been God?  Did they think he Was he the One and Only God, Yahweh? More important still:  Did Jesus himself think he was God?   To find an answer, we have to explore two issues:  does Jesus actually ever call himself God in the Gospels, or give any other indication that he thought he was God?  If so, given the problems with the Gospels -- can we know if they are accurate on this point?  Can we show what the historical figure of Jesus actually said about himself? These are terrifically important questions.   Traditional Christianity, as it has come down over all the centuries, has always claimed Jesus himself is a divine being.  Did that teaching start with Jesus himself? Announcing a Webinar on the Topic! I will be doing a webinar on the topic on Sunday, November 7.  I [...]

In my last post I pointed out that the famous passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44 is thought by some scholars not to have been original to the Gospel of Luke.  I count myself in that number.  One of my very first scholarly articles was devoted to the question; I wrote it when I was a first-year graduate student – or rather, I co-wrote it, with a friend of mine who was in the PhD program at Princeton Seminary with me, a fellow named Mark Plunkett. Mark had done a study of the passage of Jesus’ prayer before his arrest and had realized something about the structure of the passage, which made me, in turn, realize, that if he was right, then the two verses about the bloody sweat could not have been original to the passage.  I’ll say more about that in my next post.  At the time, one of the reasons I thought that was so significant is that it confirmed what was already clear to me otherwise: these verses [...]

I will give just one other textual disagreement that I have with the translators of the NRSV: by “textual” disagreement I mean a disagreement over what the original Greek text of a passage was that should have been translated. For this second example I’ll stick with Luke, and again with the Passion narrative.  The full passage of Jesus’ prayer in the garden in Luke 22:39-46 reads as follows in the NRSV:  39 He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him.  40 When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.”  Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”  [[ 43 Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. 44 In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling [...]

I was very sorry to learn last month that John Shelby Spong died (Sept. 12, 2021; age 90).  Many of you know who he was; for those who don’t: he was one of the most important spokespersons of our generation for a critical understanding of the Bible for the general public, in particular for Christians.  He himself was a Christian.  In fact, for many years he was a bishop in the Episcopal church (bishop of Newark NJ from 1979-2000). Even though Spong never left the Christian faith, he certainly had a rigorously historical understanding of the faith and he spent many years writing influential books and lecturing around the world to proclaim it.  He was not well-loved among traditional Christians, and was openly declared a heretic by other church leaders.  That was because his historical studies led him to realize that the Bible cannot be interpreted as the literal, historical truth. Some other Christian bishops found his views dangerous and many people today, both Christian and non-Christian, do not understand how a real Christian can [...]

Translators of the Bible have a terrifically complicated and difficult (and usually thankless) task.  I always knew that, of course, with my head – ever since taking Greek back in college.  But I did not relate to the problems emotionally until I started publishing translations of my own.  It’s HARD.  My first translation project was a two-volume edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (published by Harvard University Press).  It was at that point that I realized that what translators do is not at all what the rest of us do who can teach the ancient languages and read Greek and assign Greek translation exercises to classes of graduate students.  When you are with a class of students, you can sit around the table, discuss the various options about how a text can be translated, talk about the pro’s and con’s of various English renditions, make a few suggestions for how to provide nuance to a rendering, explicate the fuller meaning of the Greek by paraphrasing a phrase or a clause in [...]