Early Christian History

The Anti-Polygamy Raids

If one searches around the bloggernacle, you’ll find a snarky comment about how the church traded polygamy for statehood, or that the church just wimped-out on polygamy.  Such comments don’t seem to take into account how much pressure the US government was putting on the church–it was literally trying to snuff it out if the […]

Knowing – Nicolas Cage

I just saw this movie last night.  I had never heard of it before, and literally knew nothing about it.  I told my wife to pick a movie, and I thought she would pick a chic flick.  She said she thought I might like it because it had something to do with numbers and predicting […]

Did Moses Copy Hammurabi’s 10 Commandments?

A friend of mine let me know about this news item at Signature Books.  Apparently, one of their authors (David Wright) has a new book published by Oxford University Press.  For those of you who don’t know, Oxford is known as a pretty tough place to publish.  They have pretty high scholarly standards, so getting […]

The Documentary Hypothesis

The 8th Article of Faith for the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints states: 8 We believe the aBible to be the bword of God as far as it is translated ccorrectly; This has to be one of the most oft-quoted articles of faith by members of the LDS church.  In one of my […]

Pres Veazey on Scripture Literalism

Thanks to FireTag for letting me know about a recent statement by the current prophet of the Community of Christ.  He talks about scriptural literalism.  The videos can be found on the CoC website, and this quote comes from Chapter 4.  Let me quote from Pres. Veazey directly:

What if Christ’s Bones Were Found?

I don’t know why, but I love to learn about archaeology, especially religious archaeology.  A few years ago, Simcha Jacobovici came out with a documentary and book called The Jesus Tomb.  In it, he makes a claim that the bones of Jesus may have been located in a tomb unearthed in Jerusalem.  Of course, the […]

Apostle Paul’s remains?

I came across an article about the Apostle Paul.  After Emporer Nero burned Rome, he blamed the fire on the Christians.  Various apostles were rounded up, and tradition has it that the Apostle Paul was beheaded around 60 AD.  A basilica was built to house parts of his body in about 390 AD.  (Oddly, his […]

Comparing the Book of Abraham and the Gospel of Judas

Ok, comparing these two books might seem a bit odd, but let me explain.  First of all, I’ve already done a few posts on Abraham.  In the first, I compared the Book of Abraham to the Koran, and wondered if Joseph might have translated an Islamic text, because the story found in the Book of […]

Academic and Mormon Views of Easter

So, I’ve been checking my blog stats, and with Easter upon us, it seems my post from last year about why Mormon’s don’t celebrate Easter is getting the most hits.  While last year’s post was a little negative-that I think Mormon celebrations of Easter are lacking compared to other Christians’ Easter celebrations, I hope to […]

Jewish, Muslim, and Academic Perspectives on Abraham

I’ve been talking about doing a post about Abraham for a long time. People often reference Abraham when talking about things like Joshua’s Unholy War, the Priesthood Ban, or polygamy. Usually the reference is to the sacrifice of Isaac. So, this post is to serve two purposes: (1) to show some different perceptions about the […]