The following is my contribution to a discussion on skeptics.stackexchange.com where someone asked "Is there any verifiable historical and/or scientific evidence that Jesus really lived?" People ahead of me had already listed (and quoted) the few relevant passages from Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius. . . . Read more

For those who might be interested, I just posted a new resource page with handouts and links related to New Testament textual criticism. You can find the page here.

I've just uploaded a new diagram I've made of the Jewish year. This includes the primary festivals celebrated around the late-first century CE, the rainfall and agricultural cycles, and a rough correlation between our modern months. This is still a work in progress, so if you see any errors or omissions please let me know. The diagram is (c) me, but I make it available here under a Creative Commons Attribution license (i.e., you can use it as you like, just give me credit as its creator). The image thumbnail here links to an 800x600 png version which isn't very usable. . . . Read more

I'm still settling in with my iPad (a first-generation device--yes, I'm bitter), but I keep being surprised by the pace of improvements in the third-party apps available. I recently discovered that Amazon is starting to roll out proper (i.e., static) page numbers for many of the books available for the Kindle app for iOS. This solves the biggest problem with ebooks for academic use: the lack of a reliable way to reference them. . . . Read more

Have you ever been reading a blog article or web-page and thought "I wish I could use a highlighter on this!" Well, I've discovered a great service called Diigo that makes it possible. Diigo is known first and foremost as a social bookmarking site. Instead of saving your internet bookmarks on your browser, you can install a Diigo plugin or bookmarklet in the browser of your choice and then save your bookmarks to your account on Diigo's servers. That way your bookmark collection is always available, no matter where you are. To this extent Diigo is a lot like Delicious or X-Marks. . . . Read more