“Jude certainly felt naive when she bowed to pray to her mother’s god, as silly as a little girl wishing on shooting stars, dandelions. What could he give her that hadn’t already been denied? Strength? Resilience? Mercy, maybe, if such a thing existed.” – Yah Yah Scholfield, On Sundays She Picked Flowers (Saga Press, 2026), ch. 1.
- Robin Walsh asks Mark Goodacre if all the Gospels are hypothetical.
- And Goodacre responds!
- Are we all ancient Christians? This is John Nelson’s query as he tours with Alex O’Connor. (For my part, I’m not sure I entirely buy what Nelson is selling but he’s a brilliant scholar and always worth a read.)
- What’s up with all those giants in the Bible? Ronald Hendel explains.
- David Frankel discusses Moses’s radiant face, the veil he put on to temper it, and the problems in the story that reveal the work of a redactor.
- Interested in learning Sahidic Coptic? You can download Bill Manley’s textbook on it for free! (HT: Charles Jones.)
- David Litwa talks about Polycarp and the nature of our sources about him.
- I’m still reading!
The Amateur Exegete 
Aww, man, you didn’t include the new video clip of Titus Kennedy mischaracterizing Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 (yet again) with Stephen Meyer? 😉
Anyhoo, I guess Meyer joins Frank Turek, Sean McDowell, Dave Armstrong, and others on the list of apologists who’ve been misled specifically by Kennedy on this topic. In their defense, most apologists aren’t scholars of antiquity and haven’t studied classical Hebrew or Semitic linguistics, so I understand why they accept an allied archaeologist’s (mis)take on the Papyrus. Kennedy, however, has a doctorate, should have studied at least a little biblical Hebrew in a formal setting at some point, and has no excuse for continuing to get the linguistics/onomastics so wrong here.
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What is it with Kennedys and being wrong about stuff?!?
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Ben, I’d like to know whether you think the Q source exists or not. I apologize if you’ve already answered this somewhere else.
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I’m not convinced there was a Q source. I think literary similarities (like those between Matthew and Luke) demand if not literary explanations themselves then at least their consideration. Positing a hypothetical source like Q while not illegitimate seems, nevertheless to me, unnecessary when we can plausibly explain similarities by positing either that Matthew used Luke or (as I understand it) that Luke used Matthew.
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Titus Kennedy is a “doctor” alright; of doctor-ing data and texts in order to make them fit into his phony-baloney mythology. He has manipulated texts, dates, dating, populations of Biblical towns and locales, archeological discoveries, and anything else necessary to paper over all the holes in his phony research and supernatural ideas.
You cannot have a legitimate or even serious “search for truth” while doctoring data to conform to a mythological pre-conceived, stone-age, folklore; just doesn’t work. You cannot take such “scholars” (to use the word loosely) seriously; they are just not serious – or “scholars” for that matter – in any way.
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