Others immediately challenged the authenticity of the papyrus, accusing King (an expert in ancient heresy, feminist history, and Coptic texts) of buying into a questionable artifact that might too readily suit her academic agenda.
I'm confused as to why nobody fact-checked the gospel for authenticity before the article was published. It would have limited a lot of the drama that occurred around it.
Some of these books were written under the auspices and with the cooperation of National Geographic; others were written to counter its appeal; others placed it in the broader context of "diverse" Christian origins and development.
I find it interesting how much debate came out of the Gospel of Judas being published, especially from historians. I find this interesting mainly because the whole point of it being published is to release information to the public and show another perspective to the Bible that was not seen before that was missing. Because of this I find it interesting that scholars did not like the Gospel being released, although it was in a pursuit of knowledge.
In the early 1980s, "Hanna" took the codex to the U.S. (again, in an attempt to sell it) and, when he was unsuccessful, left it in a safe deposit box in Long Island, New York. There it remained for close to two decades.
The idea that nobody wanted to buy the gospel of even thought to buy it for over two decades is crazy to me. I know the it was very expensive, but at the same time is surprising that a museum or curator didn't want it at the time in order to check its authenticity and when the text was written.
In fact, the memorialization of the Bible—its embedding in the public commons—
I find it kind of crazy that the Bible is memorialized the way it is in American history especially when you consider the separation of church and state. It does not make sense how much is really connected between government and religion when they should be separate.
erhaps contradictory impulses in approaches to the Christian Bible: a desire to have the most "correct" (meaning both technically and theologically accurate) version possible within a community and the awareness that "the Word of God" remains continually open to new versions and new revisions.
Will there ever be a "perfect version" especially since the Bible is open for interpretation just like any sort of text. This is also difficult because the Bible has been translated so many times, that it is possible that words have been lost in translation, so in that way it will not be technically "perfect" and this loss of translation will also cause accuracy to decrease as well.
"official" English translations of the Christian Bible were produced in the thick of the Protestant Reformation.
I find it interesting that English translations weren't really produced before that, especially since English at that point was a well known language in Europe.
Different translations (colloquially known as "versions") have circulated side-by-side, often creating boundaries between groups and tensions among them.
I often wondered growing up why there were so many versions of the Bible when they are all supposed to say the same thing or at least the same message.
Education has never been solely about conveying information or engaging in abstract inquiry: it has always been viewed as the site of moral, political, and social formation.
I feel like this was seen a lot when we were younger with the development of common core where they tried to standardize what every state taught despite each state being different in their culture and goods produced. Education is constantly changed in the United States to where it is sometimes difficult to portray messages clearly.
Any teacher responsible for such reading (the "teacher in charge") who neglected this duty was subject to dismissal.
This is such a crazy thing to think about now because a teacher who reads the Bible in schools in the current day and age when it is not a religious school or a class about religion are subject to dismissal from their jobs due to the vast religions present in public schools
At the same time, the historical role of the Bible in U.S. education took on new relevance.
Because we grew up in a world where school and religion wee separated unless you went to catholic school or any other religious school, I find it interesting to see how religion in school has changed over the centuries. I know it has more to do with American history than religious history, but just the knowledge of how over time in the US we have stepped away from religion and have stepped more towards education and leaving religion for the parents to teach.
All of the novels find Bronson, a highly resourceful London police officer, and Lewis, a bewilderingly polymathic British Museum curator, falling into the search for various lost, stolen, and dangerous antiquities.
This seems very much like the plot of an India Jones or National Treasure type of film. It has a similar context between the two styles of writings.
See above; perhaps the only truly "heroic" figures to emerge in the novel are the Israeli authorities who, it is revealed
I find it incredibly interesting that the Israeli authorities are the heroes of this story especially because we see throughout history that the Israelites tend to get blamed for a lot when it comes to Jesus' death, resurrection, and legacy afterwards.
the "body of Jesus" novel, in which the (theologically problematic) corpse of Jesus is sought, or sometimes even recovered.
I do not understand the obsession with trying to find the corpse of Jesus. It reminds me of how throughout history, people have gone into the pyramids of Egypt in order to find mummies and the bodies of royalty just to put them in a museum and display them for years and study to come instead of leaving them in their final resting place. I can't help but think that if Jesus' body was to be found, this same concept would happen instead of letting the body rest because there would be people who would want to see the body.
These novels fantasize about the Bible as the victim of conspiracy
What conspiracies can there be about the Bible in the long run? Are they specifically about the New Testament? The Old Testament?