- Shailey Patel’s Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature just appeared as part of the Cambridge Elements series.
- Ethan Schwartz has a review of the recent volume Judeophobia and the New Testament: Texts and Contexts. This volume is on my shelf but I’ve not had an opportunity to really dig into it. Schwartz’s review cautions readers on the utility of the volume.
- Over at History for Atheists, Tim O’Neill chats with Thomas Schmidt about the Testimonium Flavianum, that section in Josephus’s Antiquities wherein he discusses Jesus. Schmidt has published on this in a book entitled Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (OUP, 2025). You can download it for free!
- Drs Kipp Davis and Joshua Bowen continued reading Hebrew together. And Davis lets us know the title of his forthcoming book: God’s Propaganda: Pulling Back the Curtain on What the Bible Wants You to See. I can’t wait!
- Christian apologist Frank Turek, per the Non-Alchemist, is confused about hell. (To be fair, Turek is confused about a lot of things.)
- Paul Davidson talks about the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. (Genealogies typically bore me out of my mind but Davidson manages to make them a bit more interesting.)
- In a recent post for thetorah.com, Jaeyoung Jeon contends that the Israelite encampment formation found in the book of Numbers is modeled not Egyptian military tactics but on Persian ones.
- Phil Long is hosting Biblical Studies Carnival #227. Check it out!
- Michael Kok has started a new series looking at the possible sources behind Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History 3.24.5-13.
- Claude Mariottini talks about the divine epitaph El Shaddai, including its etymology.
- What does “Babylon the Great” represent in the book of Revelation? The standard response is that it represents Rome but Jason Staples argues that it is actually Jerusalem.
- Paul Braterman reflects on the late John MacArthur’s troubling views on climate and conservation. Even during my Calvinist days I was no MacArthur fan and that didn’t change when I left Christianity. His eschatology left something to be desired and his general approach to the Bible was not appealing to me.
Started the Schmidt book, and 10 pages in, already skeptical.
I’ll have a review on Goodreads, sometime next week.
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Hello Ben, I couldn’t find your article that presents your opinion on the resurrection of Jesus more completely. You probably wouldn’t say anything different from the Non-Alchemist or Matthew Hartke, but if you have anything to add, I would like to know.
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I don’t know that I’ve written an article specifically on the resurrection, at least not that I can remember. My thinking on it changes with the wind, though I am incredibly skeptical that Jesus rose from the dead in any meaningful sense. (Dead people tend to stay dead.) But I think *something* happened that gave the earliest Christ-followers some measure of confidence that Jesus was alive and that he would soon return to usher in God’s reign. Was it a hallucination? Was it something metanormative? Was it something more mundane? If I’m honest, at this second I’m really not sure what I think.
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–Lex Lata
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I’ve been reading that series from Hundley! I’ve really enjoyed it.
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