A wise man once told me that seeing someone’s flaws is cause for prayer,  not gossip.

B”H

My original reason for not reading Robert Price was hearing him speak in various interviews.  He knows that his views are ridiculous and that scholars in general don’t take him or his views seriously, but he espouses them for kicks and giggles.  But after reading Tony Costa’s review of Price’s Jesus is Dead I’m given yet another reason to not read Price.  I’ll say it again, and again, and again: Christ Mythers aren’t worth anyone’s time…

B”H

Just not at the same time.  I’m talking about the Strikeforce fights tonight.  The Miller vs. Shields fight was terribly boring.  A slow paced grappling match.  Shields kept taking Mayhem down and he held him there.  It was enough to win, but not enough to keep me interested while sitting through it.  Emelianenko vs. Rogers on the other hand was great, but you have to turn down the commentators to fully appreciate it.  Rogers opened up with a good stiff jab that cut Fedor’s note wide open and you’d think that he killed the guy from the way the commentators were talking.  There was another time in the first round when Rogers got off a couple of punched while Fedor was on his back.  Again, the commentators were acting as if Fedor had never been hit before.  But Fedor has fought guys bigger and better than Rogers in the past and he’s been in trouble before.  He has a knack for keeping his composure and he did so in this fight.  He went for various submissions in that first round (I saw at least an arm bar attempt, a kimora attempt, and an arm triangle attempt), but early in the second round he caught Rogers sleeping and put him to sleep with one punch planted firmly on Rogers’ jaw.  It was a good fast-paced fight and well worth sitting through Miller/Shields to see it.

B”H

Who’s Derek you ask?  Just a long time commenter over here and I know from his thoughtful comments, love for video games, and disdain for Christ Myth arguments that his blog will be worth reading.  So add The Faith Alchemist to your RSS feeds and check him out.

B”H

In less than an hour Strikeforce will be having its first big event on CBS and Spike TV will be re-airing UFC 102.  I’ll be recording them both and I suspect I’ll be switching back and forth between the two.  As far as the UFC event goes, I already know who won.  But for Strikeforce it’s anybody’s guess.  The fight that I’m looking forward to most is Fedor Emelianenko vs. Brett Rogers.  Fedor hasn’t lost in a long time and Rogers is still pretty new to the game.  But Rogers is huge and he hits hard.  Anyone can win it, but my money is on the smaller but more experienced Fedor.  I’m also looking forward to Mayhem Miller vs. Jake Shields for the  middleweight title.  Some might know Mayhem Miller from hosting MTV’s Bully Beatdown but I’ll always remember him as the other guy (besides Nick Diaz) who knocked out Robbie Lawler.  Jake Shields is a longtime training partner of Nick (and Nate) Diaz and he also beat Robbie Lawler, although he did it by submission, which is what he’s known for.  I don’t care who wins this one but I think for some reason that Mayhem will take it.  We’ll see what happens in a couple of hours.

B”H

In a word it was ‘weird.’  In a few words, I didn’t like it, am annoyed that I wasted nearly 2 hours watching it, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.  After I left the theater I kept trying to think of things to like about it but I couldn’t come up with any.  The plot makes no sense, the story is hard to follow, it’s a period piece (mid-70s) for seemingly no reason other than they felt like making it one, and it’s a flick that I guess you’re supposed to think about after you’ve watched it.  I hate movies that try to make you think.  Just put something entertaining on the screen and let me go on living my life when it’s done.  Don’t encroach on my thoughts with some kind of subtext that you didn’t feel like making explicit.  In any event, don’t see it, not now, not ever!

B”H

I took my car to get inspected and I failed.  Suffice it to say I’m annoyed!  I was happy that the whole ordeal took less than 20 minutes, but I expected to pass.  So now I have 45 days to spend money I don’t have to fix a car that for all intents and purposes runs perfectly.  Who the heck makes the machines at the DMV inspection stations anyway, and what do they expect?  Again, I’m annoyed!

B”H

Last week I mentioned an email exchange that I had with Nate who has been struggling with some Christ Myth arguments so when I came across a post I wrote two years ago that had links to a series that Darrell Bock did in response to Christ Myther Earl Doherty’s book The Jesus Puzzle I sent it along to Nate.  He emailed me back with some doubts about Josephus’ usefulness as a reference to the historical Jesus.  This is what he said:

Thanks, I have been looking over it this afternoon. [This is?] What I have been thinking about Josephus lately. So Joe was a Jewish guy from Galilee, who fought the Romans and then sided with them when he lost. He wrote a couple books Antiques and War, it is said he wrote more but we don’t have them. Now, in Antiques there is a reference to Jesus called the Testimonium Flavianum, but most consider it corrupt but believe it does mention Jesus. One problem, the earliest copies of that part of Josephus are from the 11th century and the early church fathers never mention the TF, even the partial, until Eusebius, and he endorsed lying to spread the Gospel. Am I missing something? Josephus doesn’t seem to be a good reference for the historical Jesus.

Here’s my response:

I must be missing something in your reasoning. I’m trying to figure out why Josephus wouldn’t be a good reference for the historical Jesus. To start, there are two references to Jesus in Antiquities (18.63; 20.200) and the latter is not disputed at any point while the former, as you mention, is disputed but still believed to originally have mentioned Jesus without the trumped up ‘wise man messiah’ language. But if Eusebius writing in the fourth century quotes the Christian interpolation of the passage, it means that the unaltered text occurs at least before the fourth century, so how would the earliest extant manuscript dating to the eleventh century be a ‘problem’ exactly? Also, again, we need to discern the genre of writing in which Eusebius quotes Josephus. Eusebius wrote a ‘history’ of the church. The other church fathers that preceded him didn’t. They wrote apologies, homilies, commentaries on the Bible, etc. Furthermore, the existence of Jesus was never a point of dispute (just as is the case in Paul) so there was never a need to argue for his existence. Also note that Eusebius doesn’t quote Josephus for the reason of proving Jesus’ existence. Also keep in mind that the material that Eusebius quotes from Josephus with regard to John the Baptist is not in dispute, so if your reference to Eusebius endorsing lying to spread the gospel is supposed to intimate that perhaps he fabricated the quotation then I’d have to say I highly doubt it. In any event, I just can’t see why Josephus isn’t a good reference for the historical Jesus.

And coincidentally Mark Goodacre just posted a video with Geza Vermes talking about the Testamonium Flavianum from 1984:

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, apparently you can win $1000 if you prove that Jesus didn’t exist.

B”H

After all of Bryan L.’s raving about James Barr’s The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (here & here) I just ordered a copy.  The price on the hardcover dropped to $10 and change so I had to grab it.  I also got a copy of Gerald O’Collins’ Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus.  I had two Amazon gift certificates just waiting to be used and this seemed like the perfect time.  When it was all said and done I ended up spending $1.15 out of pocket.  Not too shabby.

B”H

Rick Brannan has graced us with his The Didache: A Translation with Notes.  Make sure to check it out.  Thanks Rick!

B”H