The U. S. News and World Report rankings of colleges and universities for this year (actually for 2011 to be more precise) have just been released. Butler University has ranked #2 in the category of Regional Universities in the Midwest. We also ranked #1 on the list of up-and-coming regional universities in the Midwest.

Rev. Michael Dowd has a new blog post up entitled "Biblical Christianity Is Bankrupt." Whether you feel that statement is obviously true or offensive and false, I would encourage you to read his post, since he has a lot of interesting things to say - even for those who spend a lot of their time pondering subjects like this one.

This post is the latest in a series in which he interacts with Al Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention. For those who may be unfamiliar with Dowd, he is a proponent of religion that fully embraces our current state of scientific knowledge (in particular evolution).

One of my favorite quotes from the Chinese sage Chuang Tzu is this one:

When an archer is shooting for nothing, he has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle, he is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind or sees two targets --
He is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed. But the prize divides him.
He cares. He thinks more of winning than of shooting--
And the need to win drains him of power. One could easily substitute a student for the archer:

When a student is studying for nothing, she has all her skill.
If she is working for an "A," she is already nervous.
If her financial aid depends on her grade, she goes blind or sees two exam papers --
She is out of her mind!
Her skill has not changed. But the grade divides her.
She cares. She thinks more of passing than of learning--
And the need to achieve a certain grade drains her of power. What do others think? Is it good advice to students to focus on learning rather than on grades?

You can bookmark this post and see scrolling text every time you come here! :-) [Alas, it requires Flash]

I've tinkered once again with the formatting on the blog. I know at least some readers found the title bar a bit too much, and I kept feeling frustrated with the tendency of content to overflow the main post area into the right sidebar. And so I've moved everything into two sidebars on the left.

Feel free to voice your opinions about this, as always. For what it's worth, I'm not entirely satisfied with the way it looks now either! :-)

I have yet to read it (since I just saw this mentioned on Ben's blog only moments ago) but anything related to blogging and the academic study of religion in any form is of interest, and so I thought I'd immediately pass this on. Ben Myers has an article out entitled "Theology 2.0: Blogging as Theological Discourse" in Cultural Encounters 6:1 (2010).

Hi everyone. This is just to let regular readers know that I'm enabling comment moderation permanently on the blog. Some of you, if you were subscribed to comments on a recent post, will have had to put up with multiple spam comments from someone who calls himself or herself "DM". I must admit that these spam comments are so vulgar and incoherent that I've never done more than glance at them. But from the brief skims I've given them, they seem to be advertisements promoting Boobquake, since they mention it every time, even though that is a past event. So I can only assume this is a bot that someone forgot to turn off.

Anyway, comment moderation will be left on from now on. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

It appears that others have received the same e-mail I did. The good news is that mythicists only charge non-mythicists for the chance to win the big bucks. You can win $1,000 with no entry fee if you make the case that Jesus did not exist. So why spend $50 to make a case when there is zero chance you'll be awarded the prize? Anyone who reads this blog regularly will have seen how mythicists construct their arguments. So I say to all readers: enter the competition for the mythicist prize! Then you literally have nothing to lose except the printing and postage costs.

The runner-up essay in the 2010 contest actually highlights a theme that I'm reading a paper on in SBL in Atlanta in November. The term in the New Testament that many assume means "Nazarene" as in someone from Nazareth is very likely to mean something else, and is probably related to a self-referential term used by the Mandaeans. That essay gets details about Mandaic language and literature wrong, and illustrates well that this isn't a scholarly competition (if anyone was in any doubt). But the topic itself is an important one, and I'm looking forward to spending time working in this area between now and November.

As I anticipated another wave of objections to my comparison of mythicists and creationists to come flooding in, I received this e-mail:
The Mythicists' Forum is pleased to award $1,000 to anyone who demonstrates that Jesus actually lived. The winning essay will show that the figure 'Jesus of Nazareth,' as grandly recorded in the Christian gospels, was a real person and not the pure invention of the evangelists. Further details of the Real Jesus Challenge (also known as the 2011 Historicist Prize), can be found at http://www.nazarethmyth.info

Rene Salm
for the Mythicists' ForumNow where have I come across a fringe group offering a prize for anyone who can prove the conclusions of mainstream scholarship to the satisfaction of a panelist of adherents of that fringe group? Oh, I remember now! Among creationists! Among the best known of these are Kent Hovind's famous $250,000 prize, and Adnan Oktar (better known under his pen name Harun Yahya) offering ten trillion Turkish lira.

In fact, in this particular respect mythicism seems like it is worse, a money-making scam, since the Real Jesus Challenge web site asks those who submit entries to also each pay $50 for the work that the judges would have to engage in reading their submission!

At least they aren't quite as bad as these guys...and I should be grateful that they actually take the time to e-mail me with evidence of their resemblance to creationists! :-)

From the outset, when I've made the analogy between mythicism and various forms of creationism, I have emphasized that this is an analogy. Historical studies does not provide the degree of certainty that the natural sciences do. My point was simply to hopefully get people who call themselves freethinkers to realize that they were accepting views that run counter to the scholarly mainstream in one area while condemning those who do the same in another area, even using some of the same tactics in the process.

In one respect, mythicists differ significantly from most forms of creationism. Creationists have long been trying to establish scientific legitimacy for their views. The young-earth creationists used to try to get their young supporters to pursue legitimate degrees in biology, geology, or other natural sciences, until they realized that such studies led those who undertook them to change their views. Would that more mythicist young people would pursue degrees in history!

Young-earth creationists and intelligent design proponents also try hard to find some piece of research that they can get through the peer review process and into print in a mainstream scientific journal. Would that mythicists would submit their work to peer review to mainstream history journals! Optimist that I am, I still dare to hope that the feedback they received when their work was rejected might help them understand why mainstream historians would find fault with their claims.

So I'm appealing to mythicists to be more like creationists, and at least try to get their arguments past peer review. If you're successful, it will provide evidence that those of us who work in the field of historical Jesus studies are indeed out of step with mainstream historiography. If you're unsuccessful, perhaps the feedback you receive from the blind peer review process will give you a sense of what mainstream historians make of your claims. Either way, you stand to benefit, whereas if you don't try, then there's no use in complaining that your claims are not treated as academically serious, since you haven't even tried to do things in the manner appropriate to academia.

I like the way a colleague of mine expressed himself recently:
I don't really have a fear of heights, or even a fear of falling.

I have a fear of landing.

It is interesting how turning points in technology sneak up on us. I used to carry around a thumb drive with files on it - articles and books I was working on, student assignments, as well as any files I might need to shuttle between work and home on a given day.
When I began using Dropbox, I still kept the thumb drive with me. It took a while until I began to trust the new system, and a little longer to realize how incredibly convenient it was to have files automatically update on whatever computer I was working on.

A few weeks ago, I put the thumb drive in a safe place and stopped carrying it around with me.

What technological turning points have you experienced recently? Which ones are you still hoping will come about soon?

Mark Goodacre shared this sock puppet conversation between E. P. Sanders and John Dominic Crossan.



I can't help wondering whether a greater or smaller number of people will watch the sock puppet version compared to how many would watch an actual conversation between Crossan and Sanders. But one thing we can presumably all agree on: sock puppets do not appear on biblioblogs nearly enough.

The LOST conference that was to take place in January is going to be rescheduled and relocated.

I could've told them that holding a conference on an island that is always moving and must be approached by a very precise trajectory was going to be a problem...

I was going to call this post "John Byron Used To Be My Friend" but it is always dangerous to joke via electronic communication, where sarcasm is harder to detect. But I'm glad to know that John Byron started blogging about a month ago, even if I had to find out about his blog, The Biblical World, from someone else (Michael Bird mentioned John's blog today).
Welcome to the biblioblogosphere, John!  

In a recent discussion on Facebook, I explained once again that I am not convinced that the penal substitionary theory of the atonement is found in the Bible (which is ironic, given that this is the most popular way of interpreting the death of Jesus among so-called "Bible-believing" Christians).
But I must admit that, if this view of the death of Jesus is correct, it does have a wonderful implication.
On the typical conservative Christian view, Jesus' death and resurrection surely proves that there will be no eternal punishment.
After all, how can someone claim that Jesus' death (and perhaps a subsequent descent into hell, according to some) was his bearing of the punishment for sin that others ought to have paid, if that punishment is eternal, and yet Jesus did not suffer eternally?

Based on the Biblical accounts of Jesus' death and the amount of time he spent in the grave, punishment will last at most a couple of days. And so if you are a conservative Christian, you can rejoice at this implication of one of your core beliefs: Jesus' death frees you from the fear of hell - both for yourself and for others. Hallelujah!

On a related note, here is a provocative cartoon, which provides another reason to think that eternal punishment is a fundamentally mistaken notion. To suggest that a God who calls us to forgive and to treat others as we would want to be treated does not "practice what he preaches" is problematic, to say the least:

Another biblioblogger asked me recently about the genealogies in the Bible, and how liberal Christians make sense of the unbroken line of names connecting mythical figures like Adam or Noah to historical figures like Hezekiah and Jesus, and where the dividing line is drawn. My answer to the last question was that there is no sharp dividing line, since the further back in time we go, the less evidence we have, and thus inevitably we don't know exactly where we first encounter a genuine historical figure in the genealogies. And of course, even if a figure is historical, that doesn't mean that any stories we have about the figure in question provides genuine historical information.

The genealogies in the New Testament are important for this topic, since the show that ancient authors' interests were not in the biological/genetic descent that is our focus. Matthew's willingness to drop individuals from genealogies and be imprecise in his math needs to be considered. So too does the divergence of the genealogies Matthew and Luke provide for Joseph, which clearly shows that ancient authors were willing to creatively fill in gaps in what they knew, or thought they knew.

I was spurred to mention this today because the subject of the genealogies came up over at Jesus Creed.

There have been other posts relevant to the broader topic and issues connected with this around the blogosphere. Particularly worth reading is the application at Blog on the Way of the DABDA model of coping with bereavement to the experience of coping with losing one's fundamentalist worldview. New Scientist has an article about a paleontologist who argues with educated creation scientists on their own terms. Religion Dispatches has a piece about the Discovery Institute's latest attempt to get creationism into classrooms. Answers in Genesis Busted has a survey of recent posts, pages and articles related to evolution and creationism. And Sandwalk shares a video illustrating how intelligent design proponents view information.

Butler University has set up a blog for faculty and others connected with the university to post about their impressions of and experiences with the iPad. I just posted my own first contribution to that blog, which I gave the title "The iPad: Fun and Pedagogically Useful."

By a round-about means, a conversation on Facebook among bibliobloggers led to Tim Bulkeley offering a variation on the famous Dead Parrot Sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. He wrote:
Preacher: This Scripture, Sir, is not dead, merely sleeping, or somewhat lethargic.
Congregant: No I tell you! It's dead, deceased, karked it, it has kicked the bucket right out of the stadium...At which point I immediately thought two things. First, the phrase "It's been nailed to the pulpit" crossed my mind, followed promptly by the desire to share what Tim had come up with on my blog.

In the academic study of any text there is a process of disenchantment (learning to use our critical facilities, to analyse, to probe and in some cases dissect, in a way that increases understanding of a text but often at the expense of the magic it once had for us) and reenchantment (learning to appreciate the text as a living, vibrant thing even after becoming acquainted with issues, aporias, inconsistencies and other things that are part of all human literature). The Bible is no different, in one sense, but in another, getting from enchantment to disenchantment can be more of a challenge, as can getting from disenchantment to reenchantment. Sometimes assumptions about the Bible being the "living Word of God" make people resist learning more about what the Bible really is, while for others, discovering the humanity of these texts robs them of everything that made them interesting.

However, many have found that they can "read the Bible again for the first time" and discover the ability to encounter it as a living, vibrant, challenging and provocative text when viewed from the perspective of such a "second naïveté." And so I find myself wondering whether anyone might have interest in putting together a Monty Pythonesque "Dead Bible Sketch" that explores and illustrates that theme of the Bible's deadness and/or aliveness in a humorous manner.

If you've never seen the original sketch, here it is:

The American Academy of Religion has made videos of presentations at the 2009 annual meeting available online.