The Bible Places Blog (BPB) draws our attention to a new book edited by James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary entitled, Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith?: A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture . It looks like a quality resource....
Biblical History
Bart Ehrman Smacks Down Jesus Mythicism
New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, well known to non-specialist readers as a critic of evangelical views of Jesus (Ehrman is an atheist[1. This is my estimation. Ehrman actually isn’t clear on whether he’s atheist or agnostic — but he’ll answer...
Israelite Kingship: Good or Bad in the Eyes of God?
When God tells Samuel, Israel’s judge, to anoint a king for Israel according to their demands with the words “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Sam 8:7), many Bible readers and students assume that...
The Dating of the Last Supper
Colin Humphreys’ proposal to date the Last Supper on a Wednesday has been making the rounds on the internet this past week. Mark Goodacre has an informative post on it here on his New Testament Gateway blog. Certainly worth a read.
Reflections on Jesus for Liberal Theologians and Their Hermeneutic
A little more than a month ago I attended the Northwest regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. The society had invited two guest speakers: Craig Blomberg, a professor at Denver Seminary and Marcus Borg, now professor emeritus at Oregon State. Both...
Biblical History, Biblical Fiction
I thought I’d post two items that I have my ancient Israel class read each year. Both are from V. Philips Long’s important book, The Art of Biblical History . The first is the book’s introduction , which uses a painting and its interpretation as an...
More Bart-Capades
Boy am I tired of getting questions on Bart Ehrman’s stuff. Put simply, Bart is a fundamentalist, someone for whom his pet subjects only have two answers: his and the one he wants to caricature. Bart sees no gray areas; tolerates no nuancing of questions and...
Item of Interest on the Jesus Seminar
My thanks to my friend Mark Goodacre, NT professor at Duke, for blogging this. I get asked about the Jesus Seminary from time to time. Mark writes: Bruce Chilton offers reflection on the Jesus Seminar and the Jesus Project in an article over on Bible and...