This is re-post of part 2 of an interesting set of comments from exactly eight years ago by my friend and colleague Jeff Siker, a New Testament scholar who agrees with most of the critical views I have of the New Testament but who is still a believing and practicing Christian.  To make fullest sense of this post, you should read it in conjunction with the one from yesterday. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia.   ****************************** Like Bart, I became interested in pursuing an academic career, but with some grounding in the life of the church.  And so after my BA and MA (Religious Studies) at Indiana University, I went off to Yale Divinity School.  And so my trajectory from Young Life in high school to Indiana to Yale was rather different from Bart’s trajectory from Moody to Wheaton to Princeton.  Whereas much of Bart’s education involved the study and practice of Christian [...]

Bart speaking:  I often get asked how someone can be a scholar of the NT, understand all its critical problems, and yet still remain a Christian.  That's a mystery to many people.  But it's not a mystery to biblical scholars.  I was looking back through old posts and saw that in the first year of the blog, eight years ago now, I asked my friend Jeff Siker, a well-published NT scholar and long time professor of NT at Loyola Marymount, if he would explain why despite all he knows, he remains a believer and an active member of the church.  He has agreed to allow me to republish the two posts he made and is happy to answer questions about them. Jeff is the author of a number of books, including Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Homosexuality in the Church, and Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital Age. Here is the first of his posts. ***************************** When I first went to Princeton Theological Seminary to begin the Ph.D. program there in New Testament [...]

I started this thread on the problem of suffering because I wanted to respond to a specific question from a member.   My original idea was simply to give the question and then write the response – and do it all in one post.   When I started writing it, I realized it wouldn’t be possible, that it would require several posts, and that in fact, it would make the best sense not to give the question in the first post but in the last.   Here now is the question I received, and my response. QUESTION: Faith-wise, why is the problem of suffering a breaking point for you, Bart, but not for Nick Vujicic? RESPONSE: When I first received this question I had an immediate reaction, and started to write a simple email in response, saying only that I had never heard of Nick Vujicic and didn’t know what is views were, and so couldn’t explain why he didn’t think so much suffering in the world should be an obstacle to faith.  I do know what lots and [...]

I have started a short thread on why suffering is such a problem for many people when trying to understand the Christian faith – or many of the other faiths.  If God is one who is active in the world, helping people, answering prayer, doing what is best for them – how can we explain the heart-wrenching pain and agony so many people experience, even those who believe deeply in God?  We are not talking about pain being experienced by, say, a hundred people in the world.  We’re talking in terms of millions.  Billions.  How do we explain that? People do have explanations, and I do not want to discount any of them.  All of us have to come to a resolution of the “Big Questions” in our own minds.  And when it comes to matters of faith, it is very much a personal decision – and even inclination – of what seems right and natural to you. In my next couple of posts I try to address the issue head on in what is [...]

As many blog members know, I left the Christian faith because of the problem I had with understanding why there could be so much suffering in the world if there was an all-powerful and truly-loving God in control of it.  I have sometimes received questions about that, and will deal with one of them soon in a separate post.   But before doing so I want to provide a bit of personal background. In this post I want to make it clear that – as I’ve said a number of times on the blog before --  I did not leave the Christian faith because of my scholarship on the Bible or on the history of early Christianity.  On the contrary, virtually everything I know and think based on my scholarship on the Bible is known and thought by many, many biblical scholars, who continue to be committed Christians.  Including friends who serve as pastors of churches.  BUT, they are obviously not fundamentalists or evangelicals.  Far from it.  They moved on from that long ago, and have [...]

As long-term members of the blog will know, I have always said that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.   I have to admit, as I get older (and older), many of the holidays that were once a significant part of my life – even as an adult – have more or less faded away for me: Fourth of July; Columbus Day; Halloween.   I do continue to love Christmas.  It’s a period of joy for me still: I love the season as a whole, there’s still an excitement about it, and I’m unusually fond of many things connected with it: Christmas trees, lights, and carols.  I especially enjoy the stories and myths of the season, and find the weeks leading up to it very moving.  Christmas is increasingly complicated though.  The commercialism and greed and lust for useless things just drives me nuts. The absolute need to buy things that others don’t really want or need but expect.  Still, despite all that, I try to focus on the good parts. Thanksgiving on the other hand, for me, [...]

Here now is the final post in my series of Favorite Posts from the Past.  We are now in year nine of the Blog, and this post came from earlier this year. Sometimes I am in a feisty mood when writing a post, especially when I am dealing with arguments that strike me as a bit mind-numbing, made by highly religious people of one religious tradition or another, in support of their views.  I should probably tone it down a bit, no?   In any case, here’s an example of that kind of thing.  (I actually have edited this one a bit so it’s not quite so, uh, snarky.  :-) ****************************** I’m always puzzled about why smart people make (and believe) such bad arguments.  We see this all the time, of course, in political discourse and family disagreements, not to mention department meetings, but since my field is religious studies I hear it the most in connection with the great religions of the world.  Actually, I guess I find it less puzzling than aggravating. A lot [...]

This post will not be about the history and/or literature of earliest Christianity per se, but on a more explicitly religious issue.  In fact, the religious issue. Let me preface it by stating two rather obvious things about myself, specifically what I am not.  At least the first is obvious to me, and the second is, I’m sure, obvious to everyone who will be reading this. The first is, I am not a missionary for my particular religious views.  I have no particular difficulty with people who *do* want to convert others to their perspectives, but it’s not something I’m much interested in doing myself.  I’m an atheist, and if you yourself choose not to be, more power to you!  About the only thing I’m seriously missionary about are ideas, views, policies, social agendas, and political figures intent on helping people rather than hurting them (and not just a certain slice of my fellow American citizens).  I see all kinds of religious fundamentalism as hurtful rather than helpful, so I oppose them.  I also see [...]

For a very long time I've been interested in the question of how to translate ancient texts, such as the Greek New Testament, into modern languages. Early in my scholarly career my interest was piqued by the work I did as a graduate student working as a research grunt for the translation committee for the New Revised Standard Version. My Doktorvater, Bruce Metzger, was the chair of the committee and he asked me, during my graduate studies, to be one of the scribes for the Old Testament subcommittee. In that capacity I recorded all the votes that were taken by the translators for revisions of the text of the Revised Standard Version, in whichever subsection of the committee I was assigned to. Normally the subsection would have, maybe, five scholars on it. They would debate how to modify the text of the RSV, verse by verse, word by word; they would then take a vote by show of hands; and I would record their decision. This was an eye-opening experience for me. Bible translation (or [...]

It is very difficult to be a sentient human being just now and not wonder occasionally or, well, obsessively: “Why is this happening to us?”  I’m not speaking of the scientific questions of how Covid began and spread, how it is like and unlike other viruses, how it works, how it spreads, how… well, there are a million scientific questions and we read about them every day.  I don’t mean those, but the more existential question.  How do we make sense of it all? It is is less of a problem for naturalists, who do not believe that there is anything beyond the physical universe (in any sense), any non-material superior being, for example, or any non-material thing at all, that has any dealings with it.  For hardcore naturalists, the universe and everything in it, living or not, is all particles; sometimes the particles line up in ways that are not conducive for us to survive, let alone thrive.  And so the existential “why” something happens, for many naturalists, is a pointless question.  It’s only [...]

One of the most important discoveries of critical Biblical scholarship over the past two hundred years – arguably the single most important discovery – is that the Bible does not have a single message about virtually anything.  The Bible is an extremely diverse, multi-faceted book, written over many centuries by many different authors with many different views.  The fact that these sixty-six books were all gathered together and called “Scripture” does not change the fact that the author of one of the books may well have a very different view of a particular matter, even an extremely important matter than another. Let’s take the question of how we are to treat those who are not like us.  People who aren’t from our same nation; who don’t look like us; who are of different ancestry; who are not from our own cultural background; who do not share our political views or religious beliefs; who are of a different gender or sexual orientation or race.  How do we treat such people?  Depends whom you ask within the [...]