“When someone cites Strong’s Concordance, it’s a dead giveaway that they have no training in Greek or Hebrew and don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about.”
– Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin’s, 2025), 115-116.
- The full trailer for the upcoming Nicolas Cage movie The Carpenter’s Son is out! I cannot wait!
- If you’re needing reading material, Wayne Coppins and Jacob Cerone have launched a new website that features English translations of German New Testament scholarship.
- Looking for some reading material on the LXX? You can find Claude Cox’s bibliography of the LXX online! (HT: Drew Longacre.)
- Michael Kok is starting up a new series on Marcion, a figure I’m increasingly growing to find fascinating.
- Dan McClellan has a Ted Talk!
- Carmen Joy Imes has commentary recommendations. They’re by-and-large evangelical commentaries by some of them are nevertheless really good. I love the Word Biblical series, for example, and some of the volumes in the NICOT/NICNT series are good as well. I’ve found the Apollos series less useful, however.
- One thing I recently learned is that sometimes ancient Christians depicted Jesus as holding what appears to be a wand. Robyn Faith Walsh explains what’s going on.
- What happens when your movement’s central prophecy fails? You give it up, right? Of course not!
- My parents reminded me of a scene from the British comedy The Vicar of Dibley that cracks me up every time I think about it. (It’s not biblical studies related but this is my website and I can do whatever I want with it.) It’s also a somewhat sad clip because the character Alice was played by Emma Chambers who passed away in 2018 at the age of 53. I really only knew her from Vicar but I admired her acting. Her goofiness and naivety were so winsome and she was the perfect foil for Dawn French’s Geraldine. Enjoy!
The Amateur Exegete 
Just curious: have you ever read Brant Pitre’s arguments for that Jesus is portrayed as divine within the canonical gospels? I am a christian (a very liberal one but still) so I am biased but I found his arguments to be quite good.
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I’m familiar with some of Pitre’s arguments, though by no means all. I’m also very familiar with Reformed arguments for the divinity of Christ in the Gospels a la various systematic theologies (especially Robert Reymond, Wayne Grudem, Michael Horton, and a number of others). I was a Christian who accepted inerrancy, the deity of Christ, and so on, and I taught teenagers and young adults regularly on those and related topics. I also preached it from the pulpit when given opportunity.
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Yeah its just that Pitre’s arguments in this case dont seem to be backed up by the usual nonsense arguments supporting inerrancy and so on. He seems to put forward an argument for Jesus claiming his divinity in a way that actually explains a lot of things in the synoptic gospels.
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Always of interest to come across people who leave the faith but can’t stop studying the Bible.
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Oh, man. My wife introduced me to The Vicar of Dibley when we started dating back in the day. Such a good show–witty, quaint but a little edgy, and all heart. We still crack up at the scene in which Alice gamely struggles to keep “ſ” and “f” straight. Quite likely the funniest writing about orthography in any sitcom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UySOpb64yc
–Lex Lata
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My childhood was filled with British sitcoms, thanks to my mother. The Vicar was a staple, alongside Good Neighbors and Keeping Up Appearances.
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Ben, do you recognize that there is any book of the New Testament, at least the later ones, that suggests Jesus as divine in the direction of proto-Trinitarianism?
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It’s neat that Robyn Faith Walsh and Mark Goodacre are featured so often. Not only are they bringing some much-needed skepticism in regard to commonly-held assumptions like “Oral Tradition” (in the case of Walsh) or the “Q” Source (in the case of Goodacre), they know how to discuss topics in a way that really grabs your attention.
My current stance is to doubt that eyewitnesses or Oral Tradition was the primary (at least rather than secondary) basis of the Gospels (if they were written anywhere between 60 A.D.-120 A.D., how likely is it that key figures like Mary, Joseph and even most of the disciples would still have been around? Ancient Life Expectancy was 50-60 years and Mary for instance would have been in her 70s or 80s in the 60s A.D. I mean she had Jesus somewhere between 4 B.C. or 6 A.D. and would have had to have been at least a teenager at the time. Joseph was supposedly an older man.) Also, there are too many literary devices in and contradictions between Matthew and Luke to think that some eyewitness or oral tradition gave the authors reliable information. The willingness of Matthew and Luke to edit Mark’s gospel to fit their theologies (for example, as seen in omissions of atonement verses in Luke and his emphasis on the disciples being in Jerusalem after the ascension) also makes me suspicious of any claim of oral tradition.
With regard to the Gospel of John, I wonder if the community or individual author used Greek dramatic tropes (e.g. irony) or made Jesus more Socratic for his audience. It’s weird Jesus doesn’t really sound the same or use similar speech patterns when compared to the Synoptics. Someone recommended a book called This Tragic Gospel by Louis Ruprecht that argues something to this effect.
While I’m not going to discount the possibility of Q, until someone finds a manuscript or partial early quote of some sort, I think its fair to question its existence. The Gospel of Thomas was found after some 1800 years of its being written, which could indicate written sayings documents are serious possibilities, but then again the odds were more stacked against finding Thomas than Q given the condemnation of Gnostic-like texts by the Church authorities in Egypt in the 4th century. (Unless Q was actually somehow heretical or less likely, the Gospel of Thomas was proto-Q.) It’s not an airtight case but if Q was so important to Matthew and Luke, its curious it was lost to history so easily.
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