“Life is a heartbreaking, gorgeous blip in the universe. Everything matters, and nothing does. What has always been certain: time is both forever and achingly finite. But what a shame it would be not to live every moment.” – Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1 episode 9, “The Life of the Stars.”
- Zach from What Your Pastor Didn’t Tell You breaks down the bad arguments and emotional manipulation Answers in Genesis uses, in particular their attacks on fellow Christian Hugh Ross. (For my part, I find the arguments of both Answers in Genesis and Hugh Ross [and Reasons to Believe]) to be often eisegetical and pseudoscientific.)
- Neil Godfrey talks about the use of Bayes’ Theorem in historical research. He even touches on Richard Carrier’s use of it.
- Scholar of the Acts of the Apostles Steve Walton gave a talk on the book and has provided the slides for it for your downloading pleasure. I appreciate his breakdown of the language Luke uses in the work, language that points to Luke’s theological outlook.
- Over at Ancient Jew Review, Tyler Wilson reviews Mark Goodacre’s The Fourth Synoptic Gospel.
- Bart Ehrman appeared on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times to talk about Jesus, the resurrection, and more. (This was my first time engaging with Douthat’s work and I can’t help but find him immeasurably insufferable.)
- Michael Kok discusses his paper for SBL International 2026 for the section on John. He’s going to be talking about Cerinthus, something he’s discussed before in a paper from 2024.
- I think my reading has slowed down somewhat. Maybe that’ll change this summer!
The Amateur Exegete 
Found myself nodding along to Godfrey’s piece about the conceptually (not mathematically, to be sure) Bayesian nature of rigorous historiography. When done right, the discipline of the historian is a probabilistic, provisional, and corrigible endeavor. No source is accepted uncritically at face value, and certainty is a rare luxury.
Even today, [REDACTED] decades later, I remember my first Roman history professor’s routine warnings about the speeches, intimate conversations, subjective motivations, troop numbers, etc. appearing in ancient texts. “Now, of course we should take this with a MOUNTAIN of salt,” he’d say at least weekly, arms miming the shape of a huge hill, his ponytail bobbing for emphasis.
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