Can’t believe I forgot to post this when I wrote it a few months back. LBD is available for free with the download of the Faithlife Study Bible (I did the notes for Genesis through Judges on that). Anyway, here’s my article on “Rephaim” in PDF:...
Afterlife / Sheol / Hades
James Tabor’s Essay on Early Christianity’s View of Resurrection: A Review
I have to this point confined my thoughts on the “Jesus Family Tomb” (Talpiot A) and the more recent adjacent tomb (Talpiot B) to my PaleoBabble blog, but my thoughts on James Tabor’s recent blog post entitled, “Why People are Confused about...
Of Mustard Seeds and TIME Magazine
We’re all familiar with Jesus’ statement about faith and the mustard seed. Now there’s something else I’m not sure I have enough faith for: Larry Hurtado’s post that there’s something of a biblical-theological nature worth reading...
Jesus and Reincarnation
I’m happy to announce that my article “ Did Jesus Allow for Reincarnation? Assessing the Syntax of John 9:3-4 ” has finally appeared. It is the first article for the new online peer-reviewed Scandinavian Evangelical E-Journal for New Testament...
Sheol: The OT “Bad Place”?
In the last post I sketched out how the OT does indeed contain the idea of some sort of afterlife with God beyond and external to Sheol for the righteous. In this post, we’ll look at the unrighteous who are left in Sheol. Does the OT have any sort of view of the...
Sheol: Does the OT Have a Concept of Eternal Bliss or Heaven?
Good to be back blogging on the NB. I lost my laptop for a week and posting was spotty. But thanks the Geek Squad at BestBuy, I’m back in business. By now you’ve had plenty of time to read through the file I posted with all the occurrences of Sheol. Â You...
Returning to Sheol
I’ve been getting asked about Sheol and the afterlife a lot recently, so I thought I’d return briefly to the topic. (I had blogged about this in relation to ghosts in the OT). Â Specifically, here is the question: Â does the OT contain the idea of either a...
Jesus as “Ghost” and “Phantom”
Here’s another article to file under contextualizing the Bible with respect to its literary conventions. If you’re like me, you’ve heard Christian apologists say something like “the New Testament resurrection stories are like nothing in the...
Discerning the Dead, Part 3
We’re at the point now in our intermittent forays into the biblical realm of the dead to flesh out (again, pardon the pun) who’s who in the Underworld. I noted at the start that I wanted to start with the term metim to see if that term spoke of the human...
Discerning the Dead, Part 2
Here is the short list of passages (from the last post) we need to consider: Deut 18:11; Deut. 26:14; Deut 28:62; Psa 88:5; Psa 88:10; Psa 106:28; Psa 115:17; Eccl 9:3; Eccl 9:5; Isaiah 8:19; Isaiah 26:14; Isaiah 26:19 Continuing on in our efforts to parse the dead...
Discerning the Dead, Part 1
I’m going to start going through the passages from the last post that I pulled out for examination from the list of occurrences in the OT for “the dead” (metim). Recall my working hypothesis: The term “the dead” refers to those things...
Whittling Away at the Dead
As some of you, no doubt, I’ve had time to go through the PDF file of the occurrences of (Hebrew) met and metim (“the dead”). You no doubt noticed that the overwhelming majority of these instances are pretty straightforward and refer to dead human...
A Biblical View of Ghosts
This might seem like a weird way to kick off the Naked Bible blog, but it’s actually a good subject for illustrating what will make this blog different than any other Bible study blog on the web. How? Just stay with me through the series. Christians typically...