Top blogging of April-June 2026

 This is, per Blogger stats (which may or may not include bot hits) the most-read posts of the last three months. That does not necessarily mean they were written in the past three months, and "evergreen" posts will be noted.

The usual counting backward, per Tom Lehrer and Wernher von Braun:

 

No. 10 is about the ahistoricity of the last one-quarter of Acts, even when judged by the historicity of the rest of the book and is from 2022.

No. 9 is about what John Drinkwater got wrong on Nero, Tacitus and early Christianity, in his bio of Nero and is from 2021. 

No. 8 is new, from within the last couple of months, about what Texas Observer got wrong vis-a-vis Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico's liberal Presbyterianism within larger Presbyterian, and mainline Protestant, denominationalism.

No. 7 ties broadly to No. 10, but is new; it's about Berenice, sister of Agrippa II, and it is more specifically about reality vs legend in her life. 

Four straight posts about wrongness of others' interpretations, eh? 

No. 6, also new, continues the trend, as I excoriate an article about "Catholic" "womenpriests." That's scare quotes for both because per the excoriated article, both are earned. It's also raised my skeptical antennae about the site that posted the original link.

No. 5, is also new, and my take on a great article by Bruce Chilton talking about "godfearers" in Acts. In this case, it's him pointing out what others have gotten wrong. 

No. 4 relates to No. 10, and also to the theme here. I call out Adam Gopnik for a semi-fail on his understanding of the historical Paul.

No. 3? Even more so. I refudiate philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci over his defense of determinism. (More refudiation is upcoming, related to the Stoicism and neo-Stoicism that is a prime driver of his determinism.) 

No. 2? An oldie but a goodie: "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha." Indirectly, it's also a refutation of Robert Wright. It's from way back in 2007.

No. 1 is about fascism, or "lutefash," in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and of added importance with appeaser LCMS incumbent president Matthew Harrison just being elected to another term, with a whole 50.1 percent per this Substack. It's from 2023.

And, of course, besides the countdown idea in general, Lehrer's piece ties well with No. 1 on the list. 

A roundup of biblical criticism stuff in re Amateur Exegete

 Uhh, no, librul evangelical on Patheos, Paul's family didn't become Roman citizens when made freedmen of the Sergius Paulus family. First, being freed did not have to guarantee Roman citizenship. Second, Paul himself was not a Roman citizen.

Uhh, no, independent scholar of Christianity (I am one, too) Acts is not highly accurate. Instead, especially in the last one-quarter, it's HUGELY INaccurate. 

Both of those (and more) came from one of the worst recent posts by Amateur Exegete, who also there has a video clip of Robyn Walsh telling you "Paul was not a Christian." No shit, sherlock. (I'm not that high on her in general.)

An otherwise very good article on Mark and the Messianic Secret undercut itself by claiming Herod was not Jewish. I agree with the locale and the likely dating (though I would date it much more narrowly around 71 CE and not have such an open-ended terminus ad quem).

Speaking of, I found his Goodreads page. Per books we have in common (don't know if this will show for third-party readers) I'm more underwhelmed, especially on his love for Ehrman. Worse yet, he's touted one of the books in which he's way wrong on one of his posts. (We're only two stars apart, not three, that said.)

A seeming deliberate wrongness on James Talarico's belief system within larger America

Fresh off throwing secularists at least halfway under the bus and not looking very deeply at the roots of Hanukkah in a piece at the Observer last December, which I eviscerated, Texas Christian University professor David Brockman now writes that Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is firmly within Presbyterian tradition.

And, let's get to the headline now in this expanded and sharpened version of my piece from my main site.

I can only, in terms of personal honesty, assume that Brockman's misframings, in making that above statement, are deliberate and willful, given his professional background. If not, and he's actually uninformed on the information I'm about to present, he has no business teaching at TCU. 

The first big fail is pretending that the Presbyterian Church USA is the only Presbyterian denomination in the United States, or such is how he leaves himself open to being seen as. Wrong. The PCUSA is the biggest, but even with setting aside splinter groups, it's far from the only one. Wiki has the details. It list the PCUSA at 1,045,000 members. The conservative Presbyterian Church in America, which split off from the southern half of the predecessor to the PCUSA, is at 400,000, or 40 percent of its size. Yet another split off the PCUSA, the ECO, has 125,000 members. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church split off the Northern Presbyterian predecessor to the PCUSA back in the 1980s and also is at 125K.

OK, adding up the three main conservative groups and you're at 650,000, or 65 percent of the PCUSA. So, we've got a fail by Brockman right there. Or a lie by hand-waving. That's right, Prof. Brockman.

Now, the big differences, per this site which does not list the ECO, but does have a 1930s splitoff from the northern Presbyterians, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

PCA is men-only pastors; ECO and EPC, that's an adiaphoron. All three non-PCUSA at the link believe in an inerrant bible. Homosexual acts are a sin. I'll presume the ECO has the same stances. Again, this is held by assorted Presbyterian groups 65 percent the size of Talarico's PCUSA.

Brockman claims Talarico is also within the mainline Protestant tradition. Wrong. While conservative Lutherans may not add up to 65 percent of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, they break 50 percent. Actually, they break 75 percent; I didn't realize, per Wiki, that ELCA membership has cratered in the last decade or so. (It's 55 percent, per Pew, if you talk about people who "affiliate with" the different wings.) The United Methodist Church, now entering the schism world, lost 25 percent of its US churches after its 2024 general conference.

It remains an open question as to whether the fundagelical or the librul branches of traditional mainline Protestant denominations are losing members faster, but neither one is making new adherents, whether formal members or even "affiliated with." That would be a modern version of "God-fearers" or something.

Brockman also is lying by omission in another way.

He nowhere discusses Talarico's claim that the Annunciation in Luke is about being pro-choice, which I have noted elsewhere is bullshit. Beyond political pandering, since abortion is not really discussed in either the Tanakh or the He Kaine Diatheke, it's theological pandering to boot.

Speaking of? 

The three non-PCUSA churches in my link, and I will venture the ECO as well, all consider abortion wrong.

Finally, near the top, Brockman talks about "MAGA Christians." Not all conservative Christians, Protestant or Catholic (strangely missing from Brockman's piece) are enamored of Donald Trump. Within Christianity, both political liberals and conservatives at times politicize their beliefs. 

Indeed, Brockman himself wrote a piece in 2018 about two North Texas evangelical pastors who are part of a movement breaking with MAGAts on immigration. 

Interestingly, per the "mush god" stereotype of librul Protestantism, he's a very easy grader and prof in general, per Rate MyProfessors. 

Look, Prof. Brockman, if you want to just say you're "chill" with Talarico from your personal religious perspective (he was at SMU before TCU, and says in one piece that he's "high church Episcopalian"), say so. Because Episcopal church property rules are largely similar to Catholic ones, Episcopalian splinter denominations don't really exist; you have splinter movements within, or people leaving the denomination.

But, don't think you can bamboozle all readers out in the wild like freshman college students in a 100-level class. 

In 2018, for the Observer, he wrote about Southern Baptists facing up to a denominational history of sexual abuse. Actually, the denouement on that was sweeping it under rug and forcing dissenters out of the denomination, as much as possible. The reality is that at this year's SBC convention, both of the candidates for president say the SBC does not have an abuse crisis.

We can't have an honest discussion of the role of religion in American life, and certainly not of the role of Christianity in American life, political and larger sociological life, if both duopoly parties are going to have intellectuals going tribalist. 

Otherwise, in all the non-Episcopal mainline Protestant denominations with both conservative and liberal wings, both wings are losing membership at about the same rate. So far, I think that the "nones" who are "spiritual but not religious" are mainly upset about conservative tribalism, but that could change. Among the agnostic and non-metaphysical, I will bet that, even outside of Gnu Atheism, there are others who, like me, call a pox on both tribalist houses already. 

No "book of Leviticus" eh?

Here's an interesting post from "The Amateur Exegete". about the The SBL (Society for Biblical Literature) Study Bible's Leviticus volume, noting that the Torah was put into five scrolls as is because of scroll length and that Leviticus, at least, doesn't stand out as a separate book.

I pull quote what Ben the Amateur has: 

Despite having its own title, there is really no “book” of Leviticus in any meaningful sense. Leviticus never existed as an independent literary or textual unit at any stage of its development or incorporation into biblical canon. The Pentateuch is not five independent books cobbled together but rather a single literary work presented in five volumes, the division having been based on the material limits of scroll technology. The essential continuity of Leviticus with what comes before and after is apparent from both a broad perspective and from a close reading. The very first words of the book, literally “He called to Moses,” lack an explicit subject in Hebrew; the English addition of “the LORD” is assumed from preceding verses at the end of Exodus. Who Moses is, where and when the events of Leviticus take place, what the nature and historical background of the relationship between Israel and its deity is – none of these are explained in Leviticus itself but are dependent on the story that has been told from the beginning of the Pentateuch to this point.

Interesting, per the author, no translation of Leviticus puts "The LORD" in square brackets at the start of Leviticus 1:1, not even the new RSV.

That said? Here's the end of Exodus 40:

34 Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. 35 Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. 36 Whenever the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on each stage of their journey, 37 but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out until the day that it was taken up. 38 For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud[a] by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey.

And, the start of Leviticus 1:

1 The Lord summoned Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, 2 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When any of you bring an offering of livestock to the Lord, you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock.

There you are. It is a "flow" of sorts. 

I do think Baden overstates his case, though.

Genesis as seen today was presumably a separate unit. It stands separately, being pre-Egypt times except for the tail end. Only the Tesserateuch, to riff on Tatian, is really a single unit. (On biblical criticism, I still believe in some version of the old documentary hypothesis. I believe that there is a separate E source, and that it and J were written, revised, edited and updated in response to each other in a sort of scriptio continua, to riff on the Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant lectionary term. There is of course no D material until Deuteronomy, and there, there's multiple D layers, with perhaps the earliest being what Moses Wilhelm Shapira found, per Idan Dershowitz. Or, Genesis, a "Triteuch" then Deuteronomy. See also Dershowitz and my take on the documentary hypothesis in general. And, per a 2009 book by him that's a revision of his PhD thesis, he appears to broadly agree with me.

On the matter at hand, I don't know if Baden addresses this, but the issue is WHY the Exodus-Leviticus division is where it is on modern scrolls. Exodus 35, after the second giving of the tablets of the Ten Divarim, gets to Yahweh's instructions for the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant and such. Breaking Exodus after chapter 34 and attaching the rest to Leviticus makes much more sense.  

Of nonexistent "womenpriests" and Christian Scientists

 Re the Amateur Exegete's May 24 piece, and as I commented at YouTube on the actual video, there IS no such thing as a "Roman Catholic womanpriest." There's women who want to be priests in the Roman Catholic church, but having wanting in one hand is like having shit in the other.

Yes, there is an organization that ordains such women, but such women are automatically excommunicated, like a dead man's switch, upon ordination. So, they're no longer Catholic.

And, of course, the interviewer, Shirley Paulson, asks the woman-not-priest about gnosis. AND? Beyond New Agey, which was my first guess? Shirley Paulson is a Christian Scientist.

And, this is yet another reason why, although I keep Ben on my blogroll to be reminded of, and cash in on, free ebooks, he's otherwise not very useful and not very critically minded. 

Adam Gopnik — a semi-fail on the historical Paul

 New piece by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker. One takeaway early on:

A detailed story of Paul’s travels and mission, Acts is also generally agreed among scholars to be largely, if not entirely, fictionalized, containing an improbable number of shipwrecks and prison breaks and snakebites and other twists typical of Greek storytelling from the period.

While not expressly citing A.N. Sherwin-White, who noted in "Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament," that the "we" passages of Acts were essentially a literary trope from this type of Hellenestic "historical romance" or whatever we should call it, of the 1st-2nd centuries CE, this clearly reflects similar thinking. More here.

Second point he notes is the genuine letters of Paul fall on one side of the Jewish Revolt and Acts, along with everything else with the possible exception of a Baptizer-disciple core of Revelation, is on the other.  

Third, some of Paul's own rhetoric gets a reality check:

He became aware of the Jesus cult very shortly after its emergence, in the thirties C.E., and at first, by his own account, he “persecuted” the new faith—though, given how small the cult still must have been and how few public powers were available to Jews to enforce their prejudices, this was more likely persecution by argument than by torture.

Right. But why? And, if we identify this as a rhetorical trope, it spurs us to look carefully at other such tropes, ie, "Pharisee of Pharisees." 

But then Gopnik has a big fail:

The most remarkable thing that emerges from these texts is what you might call Paul’s emotional availability. He instructs, cajoles, gives shrewd advice—“be all things to all people” is his positive counsel on how to build coalitions—and sometimes engages in what certainly sounds like the hyper-cynical placation of opposing poles: cagily paying off that rival Jerusalem sect, warning against heretical influences, begging his far-off correspondents to avoid “splitting,” praising competitive apostles, and taking exasperated digs at obscure obstacles to his work, oddly personal in tone for one so inspired by the Lord. “Alexander the coppersmith,” he sighs at one point, “did me great harm.” Then Alexander and his copper disappear from the record.

We all know that 2 Timothy is not Pauline and is from the second century. So, Gopnik is not so well read on this subject after all. (There's no authorial caveats by Gopnik in this or surrounding paragraphs, and Gopnik frames it just as though Paul were the author.)

It then gets worse, when he compares Paul to Trotsky, leading him to this:

His mode of argumentation resembles nothing so much as Marxist dialectics, sinuously arguing from opposites and forcing a desired conclusion upon unobliging texts.

Uhh, the Stoic diatribe already existed, Adam. 

It sounds like what he is doing is Hegelian dialectic, with the thesis of Greek Paul, the late 20th century move to Hebrew Paul, leading to the synthesis of Hellenistic Paul. In reality, no such moves are needed. For starters, much of Jerusalem, let alone diaspora Judaism, was never implacably opposed to Athens.

One might think he recovered somewhat with the idea that Paul's letters were literary performance as much as anything, and perhaps weren't even actually sent. He notes Nina E. Livesey as a leader in reading a revisionist Paul, including with the idea that even the authentic letters are second century. It's an idea I reject, including the comparison with Seneca's letters, but it's interesting.

That said, what would that do to Marcion? Maybe Livesey postulates him as the author? Her book is here; one 1-star reviewer, speaking of that, says she's overly dependent on Markus Vinzent. It also has a Wiki piece. Per it, Jesus mythicists have lapped up her book. Shock me. Some even use it to support their claims of Paul mythicism.

Gopnik appears at least fairly open to the idea. I think he's wrong. 

The truth about Berenice, sister of Herod Agrippa II

 

As in the Berenice mentioned with him late in Acts.

Per Bruce Chilton, not only will you not find it in Acts (shock me), you also won't find it in Josephus.

First, background. Given Paul's accusation of taking goys into the Holy Place, when he said it was for Jews fulfilling a Nazirite vow, Chilton notes that a couple of years later, she completed her own such vow, complete with shorn hair. That was after Florus replaced Festus. He then notes it was Berenice, not Agrippa II, who appealed to Florus, head still shorn, at this point. Josephus will tell you that, as he'll later tell you that she started an affair with Titus, which drew the ire of later Roman historians such as Dio Cassius.

But, he'll also claim Berenice and Agrippa II had an incestuous relationship. That said, he attacks her morals, not his, in a mix of sexism and probably some sort of political triangulation.

Chilton later scores him on that issue.

This is part of a new book by Chilton. In a later paragraph, he explains why:

Part of the enjoyment of conducting research was that Berenice made an impact on Roman sources, and evaluating them made a break from the attention to Aramaic texts that has preoccupied me in recent years. Yet whether in Latin or in Greek, whether or not pagan, and whether Christian or Jewish, the ancient sources are palpably wary of Berenice. Acts is not the only writing that doesn’t let her come to voice. (Oddly, Luke in Acts 24:24 does not even mention that Drusilla, the wife of Festus’ predecessor Felix, was Berenice’s sister.) Other members of the Herodian dynasty were also controversial, Herod the Great most of all. But Herod had an apologist, Nicholas of Damascus, who permitted that vicious but effective king to come to voice in the pages of the Jewish historian Josephus. Berenice had no such defender, and Josephus—who might reasonably have taken her part—joined in the rumor that Berenice engaged in incest with her brother, Agrippa II (Antiquities 20 §§ 145-146). In regard to Berenice, Josephus showed himself more the partisan of Rome than he was the advocate of Judaism that he liked to pose as. Indeed, he becomes incoherent in his desire to please his Roman patrons, ridiculing Berenice as libidinous but extolling Agrippa II, her alleged sexual partner, as noble. A woman who provoked the pushback that Berenice received from so many quarters obviously deserves attention, and tracing antipathy to her is an education itself.

Indeed, she deserves more attention. 

That said, Chilton adds that Josephus' rumor may have started with Cynic critics in Rome, perhaps in an attempt to block a marriage to Titus. It worked, as most biblical and classical historians know. Titus dismissed her when he took the imperial throne. She died sometime not too long after his own death, it appears. He dismissed her once earlier, in the mid-70s, and may have intended to recall her again in a couple of years. 

That said, the last one-quarter of Acts is far more nonhistorical than Chilton mentions. I discuss that in much more detail.