Billy Madison is Every Biblical Dilettante

I Don’t know Who Translated That…

But it’s not even close.

Would people just stop it.

‘Bathsheba’, not Bathshebah’

If so called bible scholar @ostrachan can’t spell Bathsheba correctly why would anyone trust him about anything? I bet he spells Galatians ‘Galations’ too.

There’s no ‘he’ (Hebrew ‘h’) at the end, Owen….

As Suspected, That ‘Darius Inscription’ Is a Fake

Hate to say I told ya so… but I told ya so.

Israel artifact bearing name of King Darius the Great revealed to be fake

The forged “artifact” was discovered earlier this week after a foreign researcher left it behind at the excavation site last summer.

An allegedly ancient artifact inscribed with the name of Persian King Darius the Great found in Tel Lachish National Park earlier this week has been revealed to have been fake, the Israel Antiquities Authority admitted on Friday afternoon.

The fragment of pottery, which was reported to have been 2,500 years old, has been revealed to be a forged piece of work, placed in the national park last summer by a professor of archaeology.

According to the IAA, the piece of pottery was left behind by the foreign researcher who was conducting an exvacation in Tel Lachish last August. During her time there, she demonstrated the ancient Aramaic language to a group of students by writing “Year 24 of Darius” in the original script.

However, she then accidentally left the fragment behind, where it was discovered by unsuspecting hiker Eylon Levy earlier this week.

“The Antiquities Authority takes responsibility for the incident,” IAA chief scientist Prof. Gideon Avni said in a statement on Friday afternoon.

“The pottery was studied by Dr. Hagai Meshgav, a world-renowned expert on ancient Aramaic script, and by the archaeologist Sa’ar Ganor, who studies Tel Lakish, but it turns out that we came across an ‘inscription in disguise.'”

Told ya so.  And honestly, as I said before, you could look at the thing and tell the inscription was recently made.  And I’m not an epigrapher.

But it fooled the IAA?  That’s downright sad.

Michael Bird Has Read the Garbage the ‘Gospel Coalition’ Published so You Don’t Have To

Here’s his report.

And, FYI, as I’ve said a number of times and reiterate now- The ‘Gospel Coalition’ is trash.

Rupert Murdoch Owns Zondervan and He’s Turned it into The Fox News of Christian Publishing

Which is why they can actually, probably with a straight face, call Grudem a trusted theologian.

Yet More Evidence of Why It’s Unwise to Get Your Theology From People Who Aren’t Theologians

Today’s example is from someone called Bnonn Tennant (sounds like a fake made up name to me).  This chap has zero business offering theological opinions.  He writes of himself

I have a background of sorts in philosophy and writing…

Clearly you don’t have a background in or even a basic understanding of Christian theology.  Here’s the evidence:

Don’t get your theology from people like this.  They simply exude ignorance.

The Jesus of History and the Christ of your Own Imagination

The only Jesus most people see when they look for him is the one they’ve created in the greenhouse of their own biased imagination.

They see nothing of the actual historical Jesus.

Consequently, if you tell me how you see Jesus  I’ll tell you how you see yourself.

How to Make an Awful and Useless Video About Zwingli’s Successors: Ignore Bullinger

You’d think a Seminary could manage a better job than this.  Alas…  How the devil do you talk about Zwingli’s successors and pass over Bullinger with nothing but a nod?  Ridiculous.  Appalling.  Poorly done.  Unscholarly.

What Abject Nonsense

Shameful trash by Zeit Online.  Trash.

This is Why I Despise ‘Archaeology News’: It’s Pure Sensationalistic Trash- The Idiotic Tale of the ‘Tomb of Jesus’ Midwife’

Tomb of ‘Jesus’ Midwife’ Revealed in Extraordinary Photos

How wrong could a headline be? That wrong.

Photos from excavations conducted at an ancient tomb in Israel that is purported to be the resting place of a midwife present at the birth of Jesus have been revealed, providing a fascinating glimpse into what is considered one of the most impressive burial caves in the country.

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) released the images following archaeological work that has yielded new insights into the 2,000-year-old-cave, said to be the burial place of Salome, who according to some Christian traditions assisted in the birth of Jesus.

What pure trash speculation. The IAA knows better than to make unsubstantiated impossible claims.

The tomb may well be impressive.  And it may date to the first century.  But all the rest is historically unverified and frankly unverifiable rank and senseless speculation.  The public deserves better.

My lord but this is infuriating.

No, Don’t

If you did, you would be making a ‘category error’.  The bible may well contain novella (cf. the Joseph story) but it also contains a whole range of genre, and to read the whole as though it were a novel is not only a recipe for disaster, it is wrongheaded and inadequate.

So, no, don’t.

PS: it should be $6.66.

This Could Not Be More False (and it’s Still False)

If you ARE reading the Old Testament allegorically, you aren’t reading the Old Testament at all.  You’re reading INTO the Old Testament the fevered imaginings of a lunatic.

If you ARE reading the Old Testament as a revelation of Christ, you aren’t reading the Old Testament at all.  You’re reading INTO the Old Testament the fevered imaginings of a lunatic.

I Can See Why People are Annoyed…

I would have walked out.

Dr. Michael Banner, the dean of Trinity College, said Joshua Heath raised “legitimate” speculation in his Evensong sermon during which the researcher claimed from the pulpit of Trinity College chapel that non-erotic portrayals of Jesus’ penis in historical paintings “urge a welcoming rather than hostile response towards the raised voices of trans people,” according to the Daily Telegraph.

“In Christ’s simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” Heath said.

The quest for ‘relevance’ leads inexorably to absolute irrelevance.

If You Have a Children’s Bible That Does This, Throw It Away

If it will mislead about something so simple, it will mislead in important things.

Stephen Wolfe Proves Tertullian Right

Stephen Wolfe, author of the nauseatingly bad ‘Case for Christian Nationalism’ (which to be fair should really be called ‘Mein Kampf’ (reviewed here and here) appears to teach at Kepler (new to me, I’ve never heard of it) and also appears to have

“… completed his PhD in political philosophy at LSU in 2020”.

Philosophy…  Well he manages to do one thing- he proves Tertullian’s dictum true:  ‘Philosophers are the Patriarchs of heretics‘.

Don’t Be Like Costi Hinn

Well that’s quite the generalization isn’t it sparky. You realize, don’t you, that generalizations like this are also known as lies- because they lack the one element essential to be true: truth.

What an absurd tweet. How sad that some church trusts him to lead.

Don’t be like Costi Hinn.  Don’t be a liar.

This is What Happens When a Sociologist Attempts to Describe Protestantism

He gets literally every point wrong.  Why is he wrong?

When he suggests that non Protestant religions are centered on embodied practices, sacred spaces, and community belonging, and then that Protestants don’t, he clearly demonstrates that he has no idea that

• Protestants center everything they do on embodied practices (the life of discipleship)
• sacred spaces (churches)
• and community belonging (participation in the local church)

It’s as though he has no idea how Christianity functions or what it is.  Further,

• Protestants don’t center their religion around ideas- they center their religion on a Person, Jesus the Christ.
• Protestants don’t minimize bodies, they declare their sacredness by calling for holy living.
• Protestants have built more hospitals and schools out of a concern for the larger society than any other religious group in America.

Sam doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  And that’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about Protestantism.

#ICYMI – Complete Nonsense

The Holy Bible Feminine Translation Version is a word-for-word translation commonly known as a literal translation. It attempts to provide as close as possible a direct translation of the words themselves. The focus is on accuracy. It is not a popular thought-for-thought translation, where the focus is on readability with opinions and commentary oriented to a particular denomination.

The FTV Bible uses the American Standard Version of 1901 (ASV) for its starting textual base. The ASV is the product of the work of over 50 Evangelical Christian scholars that has been called “The Rock of Biblical Honesty.” The goal of the FTV Bible is to carry forward this legacy of biblical Honesty with recognition of the feminine attributes of God as well as His masculine attributes.

So it’s just a lazy revision of a translation that’s out of copyright and thus freely available.  And most absurdly of all

This hidden, recurring, phenomenon is timeless, because it has consistently structured Scripture that spans a time period of 6000 years of human history using 40 different human authors. It is called Jesus’ Witness Cipher, or simply JW’s Cipher. It is a 77 page encipherment through both Old and New Testaments for reading, deciphering and understanding the Bible, where the Bible interprets itself. Validated with the discipline of biblical numbers, this timeless Cipher bears witness of a single divine author of the Bible. Like nothing ever before, it illustrates how the Cross is the consistent destination of Seven Spirits of God that answer seven questions in divine order.

Any edition that tells you it offers decipherment of secret codes is pure garbage.  Garbage.

That Stanford University ‘Reconstruction’ of Joseph is Really Just their Portrait of Andre the Giant

Thanks to Chuck Grantham for reminding me who ‘Joseph’ resembles.

And here’s the Stanford ‘scientists’ reconstruction of Joseph:

Yeah, he’s a dead ringer…