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The Bible and Culture

Museums are fascinating places for those who love history, and know what they are looking at! This post begins our tour of statuary, grave art, and stone inscriptions of relevance to NT studies which are found in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.The first item which is of direct relevance to understanding the NT is the small…

There is a special exhibit at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum on the Temple and cult of Artemis in Ephesos (Ephesus), or the Artemsion. You will see a scale model on the left here of this temple and its precincts, which of course is mentioned at length in the book of Acts. Temples served many purposes…

I must confess a guilty please. I used to enjoy the old Get Smart TV spy spoof. I even like the cartoon remake called ‘Inspector Gadget’ which I watched with my children. I was hoping for some more low camp humor and general slapstick fun, in a summer season of otherwise rather droll or abysmal…

The first stop on my world circling bone-wearying tour was Australia, to do a conference at Morling colleague and to give a lecture on Oral Texts at MacQuarrie University, which certainly has one of the leading Ancient History Departments in the world, when it comes to the study of early Christianity in its original social…

Approximately 15 miles north of Kayseri in south central Turkey are the now famous Kultepe-Kanish Excavations, which are of direct relevance to OT studies, as this site provides us with a clear link between the Assyrians and the Hittites. This site is a rather rare one in Turkey, in that excavations have gone on for…

Set on a hill overlooking the beautiful Aegean is the ancient city of Erythrai. It is not on anybody’s tour itinerary, because it has hardly been excavated. Some of it simply sticks out of a farmer’s plot of eggplants. The theater still has various steps intact and a tremendous view from the top (see the…

Through the auspices of of Perkantas, the Indonesian version of InterVarsity, and other Christian groups, I was asked to come to Jakarta and deal with the issue of the Gnostic Gospels and also the Jesus Tomb theory. The impetus for this was that books on these subjects had been published in Indonesian, some even by…

There has been a lot of loose talk of late about pagan Christianity. I want to say from the outset that most of this sort of rhetoric about pagan Christianity, and it is rhetoric, is either false, or based on half truths. One of the more frequent parts of this discussion has to do with…

Let me take you on a journey into the past. Let us return to a time when people simply walked to church, along birch tree-lined paths, often walking many miles to get to church. The time is the high Middle Ages, and the place is Russia, more specifically one of the cities of the Golden…

Basketball is a North Carolina obsession. It is the other religion in North Carolina. If you don’t believe me, consider the license plate pictured on the left here.Basketball is a game played by the greatest athletes in all of team sports. You won’t see any John Daly’s or Prince Fielder’s or Jumbo Elliot’s playing basketball,…
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