Around the Web

I'm borrowing this idea from Jeff at the Scripture Zealot.  From time to time he has a post entitled "Around the Web" (He actually just did one yesterday.  I had this written prior to Sunday but scheduled it for release today.  So he beat me by a day!) where he links various items of interest.  I've always enjoyed these and have wanted to do one myself.  Thanks for the idea Jeff.  I hope you don't mind me plagiarizing your title.  If you'd like I can rename my posts to something different. If I do this half as well as you do I will be happy.  These aren't necessarily new they are just items I've either recently discovered or known about for some time but have not had time to do a post on them. 

At First Things I found an interesting, and somewhat disturbing, article called "Are Plants Ethical Beings?"  I'm not at all ready to start talking about the rights of broccoli. 

Mike Wittmer reminds us that the intellectual objections of unbelievers are really simply a smokescreen for their unwillingness to submit to the authority of God.  He says, "Sinners know that they are in trouble with God, and so they raise 'technical difficulties' about God to avoid his claims upon their life." 

My friend Paul Adams has been doing a series of reviews on a new release from Zondervan by Philip B. Payne called Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul's Letters.  To date he has three entries: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. 

William Lane Craig has a Reasonable Faith Podcast on "More Questions on the Resurrection." (dated 2010/01/04) In particular, I enjoyed his clarification of the "myth growth rate" and the resurrection.  It is commonly alleged that myths take a loooong time to develop and there was insufficient time for such myths to develop around Christ.  A. N. Sherwin-White is often quoted to support this. The questioner cited the myths that developed around Alexander the Great and noted that it didn't take long at all for those myths to develop.  Craig clarifies that what Sherwin-White actually said, using Herodotus as an example, is "that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition." (190, emphasis mine.  Page number is to Sherwin-White's book.) The distinction is an important one. 

Scot McKnight has given high praise to Lynn Cochick's new book Women in the World of Earliest Christians from Baker Academic.  He says this "will become the standard for all study of the social location of women in the earliest Christian churches. This is an exceptional book and it will replace Ben Witherington's (now) twenty-some year old study."

Finally, Darrell Bock informs us of the recent Archeological discovery of a house in Nazareth which dates back to the time of Jesus.  You can find the inital report here.