The Pokey Finger of God

Here’s something I’ve enjoyed greatly this last week: Stephen Williams’ Diocletian and the Roman Recovery. This book from 1985 was apparently one of the first biographies of the man written in English.
The genius here is the clear and concise comparison between the Empire under the “Good Emperors” and the Empire under “Crisis”. Williams provides several [...]

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Recently, I have enjoyed Death and the Emperor by Penelope J.E. Davies. Dr. Davies teaches Roman art and architecture at UT Austin, and is apparently working on a book focusing on the Republic[1]. This study of the purpose and meaning of a variety of the funerary remains of the great Roman emperors.
This work is full [...]

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I just got pointed to P.R.F. Brown’s amazing site. He has posted quite a bit of research to his site — including a few projects I had started myself and am right glad I don’t have to finish them, now, like the list of all known writers in the ancient Western world, categorized and dated. [...]

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Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of having minority, if not crackpot, opinions about the Bible. They indicated several times that they felt he was not qualified to interpret the Bible. They wailed and gnashed their teeth at the wonton destruction laid bare by Barack’s unauthorized lay-opining. Oh, will the nation ever repair from this grievous wound? Then they changed the subject and repeated the process.

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After I posted my review of Marvin Vining’s Jesus the Wicked Priest, he contacted me to thank me for the review and asked me to send him questions. Heh, heh, heh. So I did. My questions:

You claim that Essenes were the dominant culture and that their leader, the “Teacher of Righteousness,” was also the [...]

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I was looking to see what content wiki had on early Christianity, when I found a link to a digital version of papers written by Martin Luther King, Jr, when he was in divinity school. Most immediately, I’ve enjoyed his study of Mithraism and his paper on Mystery Religions in Christianity.
It is at this point [...]

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April D. DeConick, The Thirteenth Apostle. (c) 2007, Continuum. London, New York.
This scholarly translation of the recently discovered Gospel of Judas attempts to address some inaccuracies and misrepresentations made in the original translation. DeConick’s translation work began the day the plates from the National Geographic scholars had been released. Reading from the original Coptic, it [...]

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Marvin Vining, Jesus the Wicked Priest. (C) 2008. Published by Bear and Company, Rochester, VT. www.MarvinVining.com
This work is a fascinating reading that combines sources from Dead Sea Scroll materials and Biblical exegesis to produce a surprisingly personal story of conflict between characters in the gospel stories. Vining brings to life a vital, aggressive Jesus, along [...]

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I’m beginning to accumulate an unwieldy quantity of historical Jesuses. Less useful in that I’ve moved to a primary narrative that leaves Jesus out altogether. Even so, in the absence of an actual, historical Jesus, we may still create a number of literary Jesuses, each distinct and beloved, and required for generational continuity of the [...]

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Here’s a site that offers a unique, hi-res view of daVinci’s Last Supper. Very useful if you’re caught into a controversy regarding the gender of the ‘beloved apostle’ or the owner of the knife.

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