One of the questions I get asked the most frequently from blog members is how someone can possibly continue to be a believing Christian if they understand the enormous problems presented by the critical study of the New Testament.  I always tell them that in fact it’s not only possible – it happens all the time.  Sometimes they are incredulous, but it’s not only true, it’s so true that my friends who know everything I know about the Bible and are still believers often find the question / issue completely puzzling.  They have trouble understanding why anyone thinks it’s a problem.  As we learned from "Cool Hand Luke" (a great movie, btw, with tons of Christ-images), “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” I have asked my former student and long-time friend Rev. Dr. Judy Siker to write a couple of posts from a personal standpoint, indicating why/ how she continues to be a believer and faithful church person even though she is, at the same time, a critical scholar of the Bible. [...]

I am constantly awed by some fellow scholars,who have not just enormous range of knowledge about so many things but also an inordinate, almost insatiable curiosity.   There aren’t many people like that, but I know some.   At the same time I am regularly puzzled by people who simply have no curiosity about much of anything, who have strong opinions about lots and actual knowledge about little, who just don’t have any real curiosity or drive to find answers to anything. I’m not talking about the BIG questions of life (Why are we here? What is the purpose of it all?  What should I be doing with my life? Etc. etc.) – although I do find it odd that so many people just don’t think about them.  But here I’m talking about knowledge in general.  People simply prefer to sludge through life without looking into anything beyond the headlines, without reading books, without finding anything worth looking into. I suppose I too was raised that way and was that way for the early part of my [...]

I often get asked what I’m doing in my personal research – both long term and, well, what is it I actually do during the day?   It’s all related to the blog, so I thought I’d devote a single post to it, just a kind of overview of the kinds of things I’m working on.  Right now, as it turns out, it’s a wide range. Tomorrow I’m off to Marburg Germany (I’ve been in London for most of the summer, so it’s a short flight) for an international conference of New Testament scholars, called the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas – i.e., Society for New Testament Studies.   It’s an annual affair, mainly of Europeans and Americans, that takes place over four days, with major lectures, less major lectures, and seminar papers.  The latter involves small groups of anywhere, I suppose, from five to twenty scholars discussing papers written in advance for an hour and a half each. I’m presenting a paper I’ve been working on for about a month now on and off, on the Katabasis [...]

I’m back from Greece and Turkey now, with two weeks with nothing to do but work like a  wild-person day and night on my book project on Christian tours of heaven and hell in relation to their Greek and Roman predecessors.   I’m madly into Virgil’s Aeneid just now.  Great stuff.  I’ll say more about it anon. But it seems like a good time for me to pause for a day and take assessment of developments on the blog and get your reactions.  I do this a couple of times a year, as old-timers will know.  My basic questions:  How is the blog going, from your point of view?  And is there anything we should change/do differently?  Any feedback at all is welcome – just let me hear it. The goal, of course, is to keep the customers satisfied and to draw more in.  I’d like to use the blog to disseminate scholarly knowledge of the New Testament and the early Christian movement more broadly, for three interrelated reasons.  First, of course, is that I think [...]