Note: This is a post written by Chris H. (@unicornwiz) in response to a recently published piece by @GodlessEngineer entitled "Inanna's Descent Matches Jesus' Passion Narratives." Chris can be reached on Twitter or at his email address biblicalhistoryskeptic32ad@gmail.com. Well, today I’m going to do a basic treatment of Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld for one... Continue Reading →
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuiOLNLVhyc&t=45s Texts discussed: Genesis 1:26, 3:22, 11:7; 1 Kings 22:19-23; Job 1:6, 38:7; Psalm 82:1. Recommended reading: Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 38.Mark S. Smith, The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (Fortress Press, 2010).
So I decided to host my first livestream discussion and did so with Chris H., a brilliant guy who has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and its relationship to Ancient Near Eastern cultures. We talked about the Gospel of Mark, the Pentateuch, the Canaanite pantheon, textual criticism, the Sea Myth, and so... Continue Reading →
@andrewmarkhenry of the YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast recently published a short video on the number 666 that appears in Revelation 13:18. Following most scholars, Henry notes that the number is likely an example of gematria, the practice of using the numerical values of the letters in one's name to come up with a value... Continue Reading →
Candida Moss (University of Birmingham) wrote a piece back in March on Apollonius, the miracle-working son of God that is often compared to Jesus. In it Moss, a prolific writer and scholar, observes that many in the ancient Mediterannean were considered the son of this or that God and that the miracles of Jesus "weren't completely unprecedented."... Continue Reading →
"What would lead people to make all this stuff up – all of it – from scratch? Not just embroidering or adding to existing stories about an existing person, but inventing all of the above, including the bits that clearly work against their purposes? So far, I have not heard an adequate explanation for this.... Continue Reading →
It’s gotten all mixed up, you see, as it was bound to after thousands and thousands of years of dogma and tradition. Religion doesn’t spawn morality. Intelligence spawns morality,which inevitably gives birth (in intelligent enough species) to religion.Now, some people find that religion helps hone and focus their morality, that it gives their morality a purpose... Continue Reading →
"All translations of great works are of course no more than approximations of the original, in some places happy ones, in some necessarily imperfect. But respecting the sheer physicality of the Bible’s language together with a stylistic decorum appropriate to the Hebrew diction can help readers sense something of the world quite different from ours... Continue Reading →
"One would certainly not expect any literary reference to Christians or Christianity or Jesus himself in Roman authors of the first century. Christianity was simply a tiny (TINY) religious movement that no one had heard of. Most Romans would not even have heard the name Christian until probably the middle or end of the second... Continue Reading →
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