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this sux. I am totally unable to write in face book n
ow.

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Jesse Albrecht said…
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8/05/2020 03:08:00 PM
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How Many Children in Bethlehem Did Herod Kill?

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the slaughter of the innocents. Therein, I argued that some of the skepticism about the account was unjustified. One argument I made was that the number of children killed in Bethlehem would likely have been no more than 20. Though obviously an act of great evil, the killing of 20 children would be much less likely to be noticed by historians of the time than the slaughter of thousands as later traditions speculated. In response to the post, Peter Kirby asked a few questions. He has patiently waited my response, continuously delayed by work, family, and the completion of my Acts article . Two of the questions had to do with how the amount of 20 was determined. Others with the omission of the account by Luke and the reliability of the tradition recounted by Macrobius. Peter also mentioned that there were other reasons to doubt the story's historicity beyond just the silence of other sources. I ...
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The Bogus Gandhi Quote

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I first made this post in 2012, and since then I've made a sort of mini-career out of tracking down bogus quotes like this one (including a video version below). It's a sort of fun microcosm of the way information is mishandled in the Information Age. ** I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mahatma Gandhi A Christian can probably expect to get this quote thrown at them at least once in their lifetime, and waved in their face many more. I had it put to me recently, but my experience with this sort of thing immediately led me to wonder -- is it real? The evidence at this point seems to be no. The first signal of a problem was that anywhere I found it, no source was given. That's often a sign that something is being passed around uncritically. Whether online sources or books, no one seemed to have a source for this quote. A second warning was that the quote has been given more than one context. As ...
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Where did Jesus say "It is better to give than receive?"

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Do you say this of your own accord? (John 18:34, ESV)

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On the Prior Probability of the Resurrection

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Recently a friend on Facebook argued that Christians have no business declaring the Resurrection of Jesus to be the most probable ( a posteriori ) explanation for the relevant facts, since they are unable to first pin down the prior probability of the Resurrection independent of those facts. I think that's a reasonable enough objection and deserves a reply. After all, posterior probability by definition is a function of both likelihood on the evidence and prior probability. [1] Clearly, then, one cannot determine posterior probability without some idea of the prior.   My friend went on to say that the prior probability of a hypothesis is typically established as a ratio of previous instances of the event and total opportunities for the event to have occurred: "Normally we determine the probability of X by how many occasions of X we have seen out of how many opportunities for X there have been. Is the resurrection of Jesus some kind of exception?" This amounts t...
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Ignatius' Reliance on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians And More

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Why Christian Theism Is Almost Certainly True: A Reply to Cale Nearing

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Discussing Embryonic Stem Cell Research

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Is the Secret Gospel of Mark a Modern Forgery Based on a Cheesy Christian Novel? The so-called Secret Gospel of Mark (SGM) was discovered by Morton Smith, then a graduate student at Columbia University, in 1958. The SGM was reportedly found by Smith while he was cataloging the manuscripts held by the Mar Saba Monastery. Notably, Smith’s cataloging trip was not his first visit to Mar Saba. He resided there while stranded in Palestine during the Second World War. Mar Saba is a Greek Orthodox monastery located in a particularly desolate part of the Judean wilderness 9 miles east of Bethlehem and 12 miles south of Jerusalem. It was founded at the end of the 5th Century by St. Sabas and is reputed to be the oldest inhabited monastery in the Holy Land. Though it once had a few thousand monks in residence, today only 13 reside at Mar Saba. While cataloging the monastery’s manuscripts, Smith reportedly found “a three-page handwritten addition penned into the endpapers of a printed bo...
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