Features

Is There a Gospel of Q?

19Try to imagine flying to a non-existent island on an airplane that has not yet been invented. Even if this impossible trip were to take place during the thirteenth month of the year, it would not be as fantastic as the tale, recently christened as scientific certainty by some New Testament scholars, concerning the […]

Abraham & Yahweh
A case of male bonding By Philip R. Davies

24 This article will offend some readers. It will jar many more. Why then are we publishing it? Because it makes us think. If we reject the author’s textual analysis, we should know why. In this way, it has the capacity to take us to a deeper level of meaning—our own meaning. The author […]

Lost in Translation*
* Do we really need to read footnotes? By Daniel N. Schowalter

“Read the fine print,” the lawyers tell us. They’re usually talking about contracts, but the warning also applies to the fine-print footnotes in some editions of the Bible—such as those for the New Testament in the Oxford edition of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV),a which will serve as our examples. These footnotes reveal […]

Naming is Creating
Biblical women hold the power By Savina J. Teubal

40 In the biblical world, nothing exists unless it is named. The power of naming is linked to the power of creating: In one inseparable motion, God creates, and then immediately names, Day and Night, the Sky, the Earth and the Seas (Genesis 1:1–10). In the same way, when children are born in the […]

Departments

Revelation and the Militias
It is a terrible irony when the Book of Revelation is used not to comfort victims of oppression, as its author intended, but to justify violence against the innocent. By Marcus J. Borg
The Most Basic Law in the Bible
It is easy to “love” the war-ravaged Bosnians, the AIDS-stricken Zaireans or the bereaved of Oklahoma City. But what of the strangers in our midst, the vagrants on our sidewalks? By Jacob Milgrom