When I became an evangelical Christian in high school, my first introduction to “apologetics” was through the works of C. S. Lewis.  Apologetics involves establishing reasoned ways to “defend the faith” against intellectual attack and to “demonstrate” the superiority of the faith, intellectually, for inquiring minds, in order to convince people.   C. S. Lewis was many things: a brilliant scholar of early modern English at both Oxford and Cambridge (many people don’t know he wrote serious academic scholarship, e.g., on seventeenth-century English); an author of enormously popular children books (Chronicles of Narnia); and a Christian apologist (e.g., Mere Christianity; The Problem of Pain). In evangelical circles at the time – and still today, in places – Lewis was/is revered almost as a demi-god, or at least an angel, if not the fourth member of the Trinity.  Not so much in other circles.  In graduate school, when I told my Oxford-trained philosophy professor (who was also a Christian theologian) that I was interested in C. S. Lewis, he grimaced and said with some considerable force, “He’s [...]

I turn 64 in just under two weeks – October 5.   I have to admit, for most of this past year I’ve had Paul McCartney ringing in my ears, “When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now….   Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64”…. As I get older, I think more and more about what I value in life, often with regrets for not always valuing what I now, at this point, think is truly valuable, but – for years and years – sometimes throwing myself into things that now seem so ephemeral and rather pointless.  It’s not that I’m a particularly regretful person; on the contrary, I tend to throw myself into the moment with an eye to the future, is i.e., dealing with things I can change/do now, rather than being eaten up with things I can no longer do anything about. But most of the time I find myself narrowing my values and latching on to fewer things, things that I can truly [...]

I have just returned from four days in Quebec City, attending a conference called “Regards Croisés sur la Pseudépigraphie dans l’Antiquité” – “Perspectives on Pseudipigraphy in Antiquity.”    It was focused, obviously, on ancient practices of pseudepigraphy, the practice of writing a book in someone else’s name, claiming to be someone famous (while knowing full well you were not that person).  In the New Testament, for example, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus all claim to be written by Paul, but they almost certainly were not.  They were written by other authors *claiming* to be Paul.  1 and 2 Peter were almost certainly not written by Peter, or James and Jude by their eponymous authors.  And so on. It was a phenomenon widely spread in antiquity, among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians.  The conference papers were all about particular instances, and were never really about whether the work in question really was authentic (i.e. written by the reputed author, or not); they were always about ancient books that have already been known [...]