I was finally able to listen to part 2 of "Pete ruins Exodus" over at the podcast The Bible for Normal People. As usual, great material looking at the beginning stages of Moses' call to Egypt, including that bizarre scene in Exodus 4:24-26. The next installment of Koine Greek's reading of the Gospel of Mark... Continue Reading →
"We do not need a scholar to help us know whether the New Testament is a reliable narrative that we can trust. I believe that we can know this ourselves if we simply read the text and study it as it is, without commentary from anyone else."- Robert Clifton Robinson Readers of my blog know... 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 →
"When Jesus calls Herod Antipas a 'fox' (Luke 13:32), most modern European readers will automatically think this means he considered Herod to be particularly clever or craft....The same association would naturally have occurred to a Greek reader in the 1st century. In Greek literature, the fox is proverbially a crafty animal. In Jewish literature, however,... Continue Reading →
"The 'Amalgam Jesus' idea boils down to little more than hand waving. It is a vague and grudging admission that there may be some historical kernels in the story, but a rather muddle-headed attempt to keep this from becoming an acceptance that there was most likely a historical Jesus. As such, it is not so... Continue Reading →
"For atheists, I would say your life is not meaningless even if you no longer believe you are for something like a hammer is for hammering nails- or even if you believe the universe is absurd! Just because you are not an instrument of someone else’s will, it does not follow that you cannot live... Continue Reading →
In light of a recent blog post by a certain pop-apologist,[1] I thought it might be appropriate to lay out a brief case for seeing the two accounts of Judas Iscariot’s death in the New Testament (Matthew 27:3-10; Acts 1:18-19) as contradictory. To begin with, let’s consider each passage in turn and then compare them... Continue Reading →
"To be clear, some religious people evaluate their subjective experience as a piece of the evidential pie without taking this strong of a stance – but I want to address those who attempt to build atop the 'unshakable' ground of religious experience. The epistemology illustrated creates a host of problems. If taken seriously, it is... Continue Reading →
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