Then and Now
The Bible is an incoherent document. This is not news. It was noticed long ago and has spawned some two centuries of biblical criticism that has focused on answering the very simple question of how the biblical texts came to be incoherent - that … [Continue reading] about Biblical Criticism and the Human Element
As is well-known, the Jews of Palestine largely refrained from using figural art from around the 2nd century BCE (or a bit earlier) to the third or fourth century CE, including the creation of statues. There were, of course, exceptions to this … [Continue reading] about The Second Commandment… Not
Reading the twitter feed of the Al Qassam Brigades during this ongoing crisis is a bit surreal. Many of the tweets are dry, simple facts: how many "projectiles" have been fired where. These tweets appear (from cross-checking with those … [Continue reading] about Parsing the Al Qassam Tweets
"Regular public reading of the Torah," Wikipedia (as of today) reports, "was introduced by Ezra the Scribe after the return of the Judean exiles from the Babylonian captivity." The original source for this claim was certainly not the books of Ezra … [Continue reading] about Did Jews in Antiquity Know Their Bible?
In the year between graduating from college and beginning graduate school, I stumbled on a book that profoundly changed the way that I thought. Gerd Theissen's Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Fortress, 1978) presented a way of reading … [Continue reading] about The New Testament in its German Context