When Was Jesus Born?

A new book by Pope Benedict, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, has caught the attention of the media and, consequently, has generated quite a few questions. In the book, the Pope acknowledges what scholars have long known; namely, that our current dating scheme is off by anywhere from 4 to 6 years. To put a finer point on it, Jesus was not born in AD 1 as most assume (since AD is a Latin abbreviation for Anno Domini, “the year of the Lord,” it is assumed that Jesus would have been born in the year AD 1, the first “year of the Lord”); Jesus was likely born sometime around 4 to 6 BC (“Before Christ”). How can that be?

Jesus' Wife?

Karen King of Harvard has had an academic paper accepted for publication in the Harvard Theological Review which claims that a fourth century Coptic manuscript fragment (seen left) contains a passage that refers to “Jesus’ wife.” For New Testament scholars, that is not news. However, for the popular media, it’s big news!

Leadership in Biblical Perspective

Just read a paper in one of my classes at Liberty University that absolutely nailed it! She wrote a paper on Paul as Paradigm for Biblical Leadership. Unlike most of the drivel out there I read on leadership in the church, she did not fall prey to the temptation to smuggle in the notion that leadership in the Kingdom of God is exactly the same as leadership in the world. Rather, she set leadership in the church in biblical perspective and came away with the stunning, but (if you actually read the Bible!) obvious conclusion that leadership in the church is purely about calling, not the possession of certain “leadership skills” etc.

Baptist to the Bone

The James Ossuary*

A reliquary (stone box containing sacred relics) was discovered back in 2010 on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan (which means "St. John") off the coast of Bulgaria. Inside were eight pieces of bone, including pieces of a skull, face, and a tooth. Because there is a monastery on the island which claims John the Baptist as its patron saint, the excavation leader, Kazimir Popkonstantinov, suggests that the bones might belong to the Baptist. The possibility is strengthened, he suggests, by the fact that found alongside the reliquary was a small sandstone box with a Greek inscription that said, “God, save your servant Thomas. To St. John. June 24.” June 24 is the date celebrated by Christians as the birthday of John the Baptist, and the inscription suggests that a pilgrim had come to the monastery to seek the Baptist’s blessing in the place where, he believed, John’s bones resided. Alternatively, Thomas may have been the patron who built the monastery and, as an act of sanctification, donated the bones of John the Baptist to the monastery as a sacral gift.

The Dumbing of the Church

I wrote a blog recently in which one reader excoriated me for using words like “excoriate.” Noting that my blog is about things theological, he suggested that theology was really quite simple and, therefore, simple words would do just fine when talking about God. He suggested that I lose the polysyllabic morphemes (sorry, I just couldn’t help myself) and replace them with single syllable words on a 5^th grade reading level. Of course, some of us read Shakespeare in the 5^th grade, so that’s no help.

I’ve been hearing this more and more lately, both from laity and clergy. It seems that even when dealing with a subject as complex as the Divine, the motto is KISS – “keep it simple, stupid.” It is symptomatic, I think, of a more serious contemporary ecclesiastical (there I go again!) trend; namely, the “dumbing of the church.”