The Roundup – 1.5.24

I hope that both of my readers had a wonderful Christmas (or, if you don’t celebrate, an amazing Wednesday) and a Happy New Year! For those of you at Bluesky, come find me there. I’d like to make the switch from Twitter to Bluesky soon, keeping my Twitter account up for a while before eventually getting rid of it completely. (At least, that’s the plan.)

• Over at the YouTube channel The Inquisitive Bible Reader, Paul Davidson talks about the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres. For readers of the New Testament, those names may be familiar as they appear in 2 Timothy 3:8 in connection with Moses and the Exodus. But this is the only time they appear in the canonical New Testament, and they make no appearance at all in the Hebrew Bible. So, who were they? Where did those names come from? Davidson’s videos is a really helpful intro to their origins.

• Matthew Hartke and Erik Manning had a discussion about the apologetic approach of the McGrew’s over at the YouTube channel Potential Theism. It confirmed my view that the McGrew Crew (i.e., Manning, Jonathan McLatchie, and Lydia McGrew herself) just haven’t spent much time reading critical scholarship on the topics they wax elephant about in their blog posts, videos, and books. I also found a point of disagreement with Hartke! (I’m a little shocked!) He said he thought that the classic contradiction of the number of women in empty tomb narratives was little more than a “rhetorical punch” and that it is an example of reconcilable variation. I think precisely the opposite, especially if we take seriously the respective narratives of the Evangelists qua narratives. Regardless, it was an interesting (if not frustrating) discussion.

• Back in November, the Non-Alchemist posted a video explaining why Bart Ehrman is the favored punching bag of evangelicals. I’ve lost count how many times evangelicals (e.g., Erik Manning mentioned above) spend inordinate amounts of time attacking Ehrman while being blissfully unaware that many of his positions are either mainstream among scholars or are somewhat passé. Apologetics is always reactionary so it rarely keeps up with scholarly trends. You can expect it to be often a generation or so behind.

• Recently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of Islam who left the religion for atheism in the early 2000s, converted to Christianity, writing a piece entitled “Why I am now a Christian” to explain her embrace of it. In response to this, Emerson Green posted a video over at his channel dissecting her piece, noting that it doesn’t really offer any arguments for Christianity and doesn’t mention Jesus at all (though she does briefly refer to “Christ’s teaching”). Green offers a balanced and reasonable take on Ali’s conversion that I think is worth your time.

• Randal Rauser also had some things to say about Ali’s purported conversion, cautioning us about the rise of celebrity conversion stories. He writes, “[W]hile I am delighted to hear about another conversion, that should not keep us from providing an honest and unvarnished critical response to the reasons given. Apologetics that quickly and uncritically embraces weak apologetic conversion stories may gain a shorterm victory but it does so at the cost of its longterm credibility.”
  
• Over at Bart Ehrman’s website, Joshua Schachterle wrote a piece on the historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles. He offers a good introduction to the complicated subject of Acts as a historical source and outlines in broad terms the scholarly consensus on the second volume of “Luke’s” work. “It turns out that the book of Acts is historically reliable on some things and unreliable on others,” writes Schachterle. To find out why that’s the case, you’ll need to read his piece!
  
• Shirley Paulson of The Bible and Beyond Podcast interviewed Rabbi Evan Moffic. I’m not sold on everything Rabbi Moffic had to say about Jesus (e.g., that he wasn’t an apocalyptic prophet) but he offered some interesting insights from a Jewish perspective.