Sturtz Stuff

The book by Rachel Evens titled " A Year of Biblical Womanhood " is not out yet but is already causing a stir. I was aware that she was in the process of writing about her experiment to earnestly try and live out literally (in the flat) what the Bible commands of women. Rachel Evens book does not come out until October 30 so I offer the link to Roger Olson's blog where he reviews his advanced copy. This topic of trying to be a "Biblical women" seems to touch on a frustration that many Christian women and men sense. That often the stereotypes of men and women are placed on top of scripture and then told this is what it means to be a Biblical man or women. Thus all real Christian women are "submissive" which is code for meaning something like the man of the house gets to do what he wants when he wants  and all real men are warriors which is code for meaning something like real men hunt. It seems to me that many Christian men and women are all confused...

Mark Goodacre, Associate Professor of Religion at Duke, recently posted some updated stuff about the so called "Jesus Wife" fragment. He offers some solid research and evidence that it is mostly likely a modern day forgery.  Here is what was posted on October 11, 2012 by Mark Goodacre: If you would like to view this post on Mark Goodacre's blog then click here . Just when you might have thought that the story of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was dying down, there is another twist in the tale. Andrew Bernhard has just published the following piece: How The Gospel of Jesus' Wife Might Have Been Forged: A Tentative Proposal I am going to cut to the chase and offer an "executive summary" of what I regard as the most important contention:: Line 1 of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment copies a typo from a website interlinear of Coptic Thomas And now a little more detail. One of the difficulties with the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is th...

Who can be against progress? G.K. Chesterton points out the problem. The problem with progress is that it does not mean anything. You cannot have progress unless you have established what your goal is. Progress itself cannot be a goal. Progress cannot be an ideal. Chesterton says, the word “is simply a comparative of which we have not settled on the superlative.” In Heretics (1908) pages 16-17 Chesterton writes: Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word “pr...

Here is a great blog post from Richard Beck a professor at Abilene Christian University . I recently did a class here at ACU with my friend and colleague David McAnulty about the challenges of religious belief today. In telling my part of the story (some of which I've discussed before on this blog) I began with the analysis of Peter Berger and Anton Zinderveld in their book In Praise of Doubt . In the book Berger and Zinderveld evaluate "secularization theory," the notion that as modernity advances people will give up religious belief and become "secular." According to Berger and Zinderveld if we look at the evidence secularization theory has been falsified. Belief continues to flourish in modernity. What has happened in modernity, argue Berger and Zinderveld, is not secularization but plurality . What we see around us isn't a binary choice between faith and unfaith . Rather, we face choices amongst faith s , unbelief being one choic...

Prof. Francis Watson (Durham) has just produced an intriguing line-by-line analysis of the Coptic of the newly-publicized “Jesus’ Wife” fragment, in which he argues that it is a collage of phrases, mainly from the Gospel of Thomas, by some modern forger/prankster. You can read the essay here .

In Acts 8 a little known disciple named Philip is told to take a southern dessert road down to the city of Gaza.    Gaza, at this time, was a city that had been destroyed 100 years earlier and would not be rebuilt for another 30 years after this moment. This means that Philip was sent to a city that did not exist. Gaza was a ghost town. It was also about 50 miles southwest of Jerusalem which equals about a solid two day walk. It is fascinating to look at this story and see that this is sometimes how God works. Sometimes he will plant in us some vision, direction or hunch. A hunch that we are to go someplace and do something that does not always come across as the best strategy. Philip is being sent to a ghost town which does not sound like the best strategy. As Philip journeys to Gaza he discovers that the real goal was not Gaza but who he meets on the road. Along the route to Gaza Philip meets an Ethiopian, shares the good news, performs a baptism and then seems to vanis...

 Here is a recent blog post by Larry Hurtado on the so called "Jesus' wife" text that has been announced. Larry is a New Testament and Christian origins scholar. Here is his take on the Jesus wife buisness from his blog .  It would be helpful to other scholars to have Prof. King’s full paper, but in the meantime, the Harvard Divinity School page on the item gives a proposed transcription, translation, and a “Q&A” section as well here . For her own personal, initial “take” on the item by a respected scholar in ancient “gnostic” texts, see April DeConick’s blog posting here . Aside from the need to have further analysis of the likely date and authenticitity of the fragment, there are also a few other matters that make some of the news claims . . . exaggerated, or at least premature. The Coptic of line 4 of the text appears to have Jesus referring to “my wife/woman”, but it is actually not explicit that this refers to the “Mary” mentioned in the preceding line as “...