“They say ignorance is bliss, and, yeah, maybe, but it’s still fucking ignorance.”
– Rachel Harrison, Play Nice (Berkley, 2025), “After”
- The latest issue of Vetus Testamentum is out and there are a few open access articles that look pretty interesting, especially Idan Dershowitz and Na’ama Pat El’s “The Forgotten Meaning of אֹות.”
- Alexandria Frisch talks Moses and his extra-biblical portrayals, including that he was apparently a pretty baby.
- Meredith Warren appeared on Shirley Paulson’s The Bible and Beyond Podcast to talk about anti-Jewish readings and how they affect our understanding of the New Testament.
- John Nelson talks about what came before the Gospels, including a helpful overview of form criticism, what it got right and wrong, and its demise.
- James Davila provides links to two obituaries for archaeologist Gabriel Barkay. I had never heard of Barkay and, as it turns out, a lot of his work was written in Hebrew with very little in the way of English translation available to those outside of Israel.
- Free (for a limited time) book alert! Ky Heinze’s has written the latest entry in the Cambridge Elements series on early Christian literature. This one is titled Origen on Demonic Executioners and the Problem of Evil. Get it while the gettin’s good!
- Andrew Mark Henry discusses the Roman emperor Nero and the historical background of the belief he would return that is reflected in the book of Revelation.
- After the rape of their sister Dinah at the hands of Shechem, Levi and Simeon, through a clever ruse, get revenge and murder her assailant and his entourage (Gen 34). This upsets the rather callous and self-serving Jacob who on his deathbed effectively denounces the brothers. Shauf Bar talks about these texts and their later reception, noting how some readers believed that Levi and Simeon were in the right, bring to fruition God’s plan for Shechem.
The Amateur Exegete 
Thanks for the new round-up. I couldn’t agree with the opening sentence more: to use a well-worn metaphor, a commitment to the truth and inquiry requires that we continually fight the urge to return to the cave. (It’s certainly a still a great existential struggle though).
I think what really shows that a person is committed to the whole process is when they persist even though they feel unease, maybe “nausea,” or have nothing else to gain in their investigation. To use another oft-hijacked (film) analogy, even though it took a while to adjust to the stark new world he was faced him, Neo still refused to return to his old programmed life in the Matrix.
There were two other things in particular that kind of stood out for me:
1.) The talk about the Roman Empire and the anti-Christ reminds me of my days at a private evangelical middle school and learning about the whole “rapture.” Some teachers basically admitted that the Left Behind series was their source of inspiration. (To this day, the whole concept still both amazes and disturbs me. Why all the talk about leaving articles of clothing behind?!)
While I accepted the concept of the second coming as an evangelical, treating the book of Revelation metaphorically was what resonated the most. The Roman Empire and emperor always made the most sense as the villain. This perspective led to some interesting discussions with others at the school after watching Youtube clips of what the Rapture would “look” like. (I still have respect though for some of the authors who denounced the problems caused by belief in a rapture while presenting the case for Nero as matching the number of the beast- I think Hank Hanegraaf’s The Apocalypse Code was the first substantial book I read on the subject.)
2.) The discussion of anti-Judaism in the New Testament was interesting as I have been reading through a book that touches in part on proposals to address the historical use of the Bible for antisemitic purposes.
While I had reservations about other parts of the book, I found myself generally agreeing with the idea that it is simply time to “call out” parts of the New Testament (such as the repeated use of phrase “the Jews” to assign blame in Acts). There was also a critique of one proposal to give the general public a “watered-down” translation of the Bible so that only “qualified” professionals get to see translations closer to the original Greek.
This idea strikes me is particularly disingenuous in light of common assertions on the part of Christians to blame a different group (say Muslims) for modern antisemitism. When dealing with historical promoters like Martin Luther, it’s unlikely that Islam could be the culprit for the majority of cases in Europe before the mid-20th century.
Also, sorry again about the length and number of my posts. (Someone recently suggested I should look into getting my own website.)
-J Source
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Naked people floating up into the sky?!? Too sexy for ‘Left Behind,’ for sure. I do remember that being one of the things I believed when I was a teenager, thanks largely to Lahaye and Jenkins.
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Nero is not, and cannot be, the Antichrist. That’s because antichrist (small letter is better), “the beast” and “the man of lawlessness” are three different characters, with different characteristics and attributes, from three different New Testament books by three different authors with different theological emphases related to these different characters.
I’ve written about this in some depth: https://wordsofsocraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2019/12/antichrist-vs-man-of-lawlessness-vs.html
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I found Gadfly’s point above to be a good insight and wanted to clarify my post about Nero’s correspondence to the number of the beast.
While Nero (or the Roman Empire) does seem to match the symbols given in Revelation, if the author was a different John from that who wrote the Johannine epistles, the original intent behind the term “antichrist” might have been more general. (I wonder if Christians kind of conflated “the beast” with the “Antichrist” over the centuries in an attempt to reconcile the books because of an assumption that the writers of the letters and the apocalypse were one and the same.)
The discussion of the “man of lawlessness” in 2 Thessalonians is interesting as I have heard several apologists try to identify the figure in a way that accommodates both Pauline authorship and inerrancy.
One such proposal is the identification with the future emperor Vespasian (apparently because Nero was already ruler during Paul’s career). I suspect (with the caveat of needing to do some more reading on current scholarship) that the author of 2 Thessalonians might have been using a vague term to calm apocalyptic fears, though with the caveat of needing to do some more reading on current scholarship. (Vespasian seems like a very unlikely figure in due to the relative lack of persecution during his reign and his reputation as one of the more restrained emperors.)
On another note, does anyone else have stories about encountering the idea of the rapture and finding it to be sort of “awkward”? (Maybe similar to later interpretations of the Song of Songs in light of its obvious context.)
Thanks,
J Source
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