Down But Not Out, Thanks to Southeastern and Beeson – April 20

First, let me begin by apologizing for the blog being down for about 36 hours. Just one of those things.

We were down but not out. So now we are back up and running.

I have returned from presentations at Southeastern Baptist and Beeson Divinity School. My thanks to both schools who were great hosts. The Southeastern visit was to be on a panel of experts discussing the short versus long ending of Mark 16 (I hold the short ending was original). The Beeson visit was on Jesus in the High Definition Public Square. This evaluated how Jesus is being presented to the public and how churches can get preapred to respond by gaining some understanding of these issues. Most of the Jesus material will appear in a book that I am doing with Dan Wallace to be released around Christmas time. I am finding there is a great deal of interest on this topic as I travel– and frankly — most in the church have little idea what is going on or how to discuss the issues that are raised. Our hope is that works like The Missing Gospels and the book to come will be of real help to the average person who wants to discuss these topics and can get them started without requiring a degree in rocket science!

First, let me begin by apologizing for the blog being down for about 36 hours. Just one of those things.

We were down but not out. So now we are back up and running.

I have returned from presentations at Southeastern Baptist and Beeson Divinity School. My thanks to both schools who were great hosts. The Southeastern visit was to be on a panel of experts discussing the short versus long ending of Mark 16 (I hold the short ending was original). The Beeson visit was on Jesus in the High Definition Public Square. This evaluated how Jesus is being presented to the public and how churches can get preapred to respond by gaining some understanding of these issues. Most of the Jesus material will appear in a book that I am doing with Dan Wallace to be released around Christmas time. I am finding there is a great deal of interest on this topic as I travel– and frankly — most in the church have little idea what is going on or how to discuss the issues that are raised. Our hope is that works like The Missing Gospels and the book to come will be of real help to the average person who wants to discuss these topics and can get them started without requiring a degree in rocket science!

One final point on the Jesus tomb. Jim Tabor is summarizing on his Jesus Dynasty blog what he believes to be 20 issues that have not received accurate treatment on the tomb issue. It is worth a look to see where the points of debate are. Many of these we have already addressed so I will not go back through them yet again. One of the things he is most complaining about is a recent story in the Jerusalem Post on experts backtracking on their positions in the special. This newspaper piece was not written very precisely, but the discussion is a good example of what is going on in the debate. Tabor notes that none of the experts backtracked ON WHAT THEY AFFIRMED ON THE SPECIAL (an important but decidedly narrow point in the big picture). Tabor is correct about this. But here is what is crucial in what is going on and being claimed. Every outside expert (except for one – Gibson) cited for a detailed point in the special has come out to say either that they do not hold to the special’s thesis (so Cross, Bovon, Ilan, Pfann) or that the thesis is not provable by the data about which they were asked to give an assessment because not enough data is there to make the conclusion (The DNA expert and the stats man). In fact, Bovon called the thesis "science fiction." So Tabor’s point really does not address the gist of the issue or the point about the central claim of the special, which is that the experts cited in the special have serious questions and reservations about its core thesis and its claims to be scholarly. The fact that they were not asked about this thesis in the special (or at least their views were not presented on it) shows how one sided the actual special was in trying to make its case. What the Jerusalem Post piece shows is that the experts used in the special have gone public with their rejection of the special’s thesis, thus distancing themselves from the special’s basic claim and making clear that any impression that the special reflected a scholarly view or their own views on the key question of it was suspect.