(5 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)
Loading...Want to help celebrate the beginning of year 15 of the blog? Choose one of your favorite posts (even if you started, say, last week) for us to revisit (see belowe for details)
We celebrated our 14th anniversary on April 3 (this year, 2026). Whoa. Never saw that coming. We’re gonna keep celebrating for a while.
First I should say that this longevity entails some interesting numbers. We have had 4300 posts (most by me; but some by guest scholars and occasionally Platinum members); on average that means about six a week. These posts have generated about 165,710 comments from readers, so around 228 per week; and about 55,000 of those are my replies to questions, so about 75 per week. OK then.
More important, we have raised a boatload of money for our charities, nearly $3.5 million since we started; with the last three years being by far the best for our, nearly $1.5 million combined. The vast chunk of that has come from membership fees — that is, from your generous decision to join up for the fun. Many thanks! (As you know, we have never taken a dime of overhead out of the membership fees — every penny goes to the charities; we do separate fund raising for our costs/operating expenses.)
So: to celebrate a bit more, I’m about to start a thread of fourteen posts from April of each year of the blog’s existence, starting with the nextr post. These are simply ones I’ve chosen that seem to me interesting and worth repeating here at this juncture of our existence.
BUT, on TOP OF THAT: I thought we could have 14 fan favorites as well. Is there a post that you found particularly interesting or meaningful? We want to compile a list of the 14 top favorites, from any year, and post those as well.
If you have one you’d like to recommend, it’s easy schmeazy: send us an email at [email protected]. In the email, include this information:
- Title and Date of the blog post
- A short explanation of why you especially liked it (from a sentence to … however the spirit moves)
- Your name, if you don’t mind revealing it.
At the end of this month, we will collect the 14 top entries and I’ll post them with your name, if you’d like (and NOT, if you’d prefer), explanation, and the post.
Many, many thanks for being a part of this endeavor! In fourteen years we’ll be doing this again. 🙂
Did Luke Have a Doctrine of the Atonement? (September 24, 2017)
Your post above and your podcast on this topic were very meaningful to me. When you suggested that Luke seems uncomfortable with the idea of atonement as a sacrificial act, it made me wonder whether Luke may have had little interest in sacrificial systems in general, whether in Jewish tradition or in other ancient religions.
Personally, I had always assumed that repentance alone would not be sufficient for divine forgiveness—that repentance and atonement were both necessary before God could forgive. I suspect this assumption came from my tendency to read the Bible as a single unified document.
I had also taken sacrificial rituals somewhat for granted. Similar practices existed in many religions. In ancient Japan, for example, there were traditions of human sacrifice in early Shinto contexts, later replaced by clay figures called haniwa. Even so, the idea of sacrifice still feels rather disturbing.
Your explanation helped me understand that Luke’s theology (including Acts) may differ from that of John—for example in John 3:16—and that the Paul portrayed in Acts may differ from the Paul in his own letters
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For me this was truly eye-opening.
Shinji@Tokyo
In your Jan 26, 2020 post you mentioned the possibility of a graphic textbook/novel version of the New Testament. I take it there was a delay but is that still on your list of things to do? Recently archaeologist Erich Cline collaborated with an artist to produce a graphic version of his 2015 book about the Bronze Age “collapse”, 1177 BC. Very well done.
It ended up not happening, alas . Too many other projects pushed it off the back burner .disabledupes{8f83ec5bedb019e2494a8ebf69e7c7f9}disabledupes