Nick's Baiting Me

And anyone else with half a brain who has seen both LOST and Heroes.

[]-ing Jesus

A new entry over at the Forbidden Gospels Blog.

This is a test post via SMS.

Best Argument Yet for Intelligent Design

Publius:

For an $800 billion proposal, I was actually impressed by how sound and non-wasteful the underlying proposals were. There's nothing silly or wasteful about things like pandemic flu preparation, volcano monitoring, and even "honeybee insurance" (i.e., livestock decimation insurance). God seems to agree -- we've already seen volcanos and flu outbreaks that seem Intelligently Designed to poke fun at certain stimulus critics. I suspect a more general livestock famine isn't far away.

:)

Gospel of Thomas Listserve

Both Mark Goodacre and Loren Rosson recommend you join it. I followed their advice. So should you!

Weird

My phone has been receiving blank text messages from the past and the future the last few days...

auto-tune the news.

Since I linked to this video yesterday, I've seen it at Kottke, Matt Yglesias, Reihan Salan, again at The American Scene, and at Nick's blog. I've watched it every time. It gets better. Every. Time. One more time...

History and the Bible (Recent Discussion)

I've been enjoying the discussion (or at least interval-ed volleys--so far, there doesn't seem to be much "discussing") between John Hobbins and James McGrath on Christianity, Inerrancy, and particularly, the book of Joshua. But I agree with Jim West that this sentence by Hobbins is a bit...shall we say "weighty" (in a non-positive way):

The accounts in the book of Joshua are historical, not in terms of chronicle, but in a structural-anthropological sort of way, as historicized foundation legends typically are.

Jim critiques:

To argue with such a claim we have to know

1- what a ’structural-anthropological sort of way’ is and

2- what a ‘historicized foundation legend’ is.

And if we are to take the word ‘legend’ with any sort of seriousness or in any normal sense, then the concept of ‘historicity’ is immediately undermined.

Now, I don't know that I would completely agree that 'legend' and 'historic' have to be mutually exclusive,* but it depends a lot on the context (i.e., are we using the term 'legend' in a genre-identification sense [which it appears Hobbins is], a popular sense, or a dictionary sense). Either way, it seems like John could have been a bit more clear off the bat in how he means Joshua to be historical.

McGrath:

• Review of Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus From The Church
• Inerrancy, Historicity, Maximalism and Minimalism

Hobbins:

• How not to frame the inerrancy debate
• McGrath reads the Bible like his fundamentalist friends
• In what sense is the book of Joshua historical?
  

* Doing a modicum of research, I looked up the dictionary.com definition of "legend" (I know, the Ph.D. programs can't throw money at me fast enough for my research skillz), and the primary definition is indeed "a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical" (e.m.). So, what do I know?

awesome

wait for the part with katie couric...



[via The American Scene]

one man's hate

so influential.

Journaling GNT

I wonder if I could make my own, or if there's one similar to the Journaling ESV for sale...

[Via Mark Driscoll, though I recoil from claims like "the ESV Study Bible is the new standard for study Bibles"]

Wes Anderson

This is more for me than anything else, but Matt Seitz recently put together a pretty cool series of posts on Wes Anderson and his influences. I love Wes Anderson, but have been disappointed by his more recent work. I haven't had a chance to look at the videos yet, but they're supposed to be awesome.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Exciting TC News

ETC is reporting that the Virtual Manuscript Room will launch in July. Along with CSNTM (and possibly, it looks like, Open Scriptures), things are looking up for web-based text critics.

Something for Everyone

Yesterday was my birthday. No, not April Fool's, it really was my birthday. It was quite a long day, and included:

• A police officer stopping me and giving me a speeding ticket (even though it was my birthday!)
• My classroom having been vandalized (very disappointing)
• Turning in the final draft of my thesis (yes!)
• A supersized BSC (that i haven't even read 1/10th of the way through yet)
• The first episode of LOST this season that I haven't been able to watch
• The greatest birthday celebration ever, put together by my lovely fiancée
  

All in all, it was quite a day. Hopefully, at some point, I will now return from blogging hibernation, as the thesis is off my head.