This is a guest post by Dr. Justin W. Bass regarding his recent debate with well-known atheist, Dan Barker. The debate topic was “Jesus of Nazareth: Lord or Legend?”

“I discovered that there is no evidence for Christianity” –Dan Barker (Losing Faith in Faith, 69).

Dan Barker wrote these words in 1992 in his first book Losing Faith in Faith recounting his de-conversion from a fundamentalist Christian pastor to a promoter of atheism and free-thought.

Dan first came out publicly as an atheist on the Oprah Winfrey show in 1984. Since that time he has been a preacher of atheism and free-thought as a kind of “reverse penance” (Losing Faith, 10), he says, for all the years he proclaimed the gospel.

At 15, he accepted a calling from God to live and preach for Jesus Christ. He was a self-admitted fundamentalist from the beginning believing “every…

The Father and the Younger Son

11Jesus went on:

‘Once there was a man who had two sons. 12The younger son said to the father, “Father, give me my share in the property .” So he divided up his livelihood between them. 13Not many days later the younger son turned his share into cash, and set off for a country far away, where he spent his share in having a riotous good time. 15‘When he had spent it all, a severe famine came on that country, and he found himself destitute. 15So he went and attached himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into the fields to feed his pigs. 16He longed to satisfy his hunger with the pods that the pigs were eating, and nobody gave him anything. 17‘He came to his senses. “Just think!” he said to himself. “There are all my father’s…

An informal debate on the resurrection of Jesus, which began as a continuation of comments on my blog, “Can We Still Believe the Bible?” (http://danielbwallace.com/2014/03/24/can-we-still-believe-the-bible/), has turned into a formal debate. I think you’ll find it most interesting! Here’s the link:

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?7723-Debate-on-the-Resurrection-of-Jesus-Apologiaphoenix-vs-Gary

We have a team from CSNTM working at the National Library of Greece in Athens this summer. A big team—from seven to nine people at any given time. The work is both exhausting and exhilarating. Handling precious documents all day long, while trying to produce accurate, aesthetically-pleasing photographs, can be emotionally draining work. But every new day the teams are ready for more.

Counting Quires

One of my tasks is to count quires. A quire is, medievally speaking, eight leaves or four double-leaves (bifolia) laid down, then folded vertically in the middle. These leaves then form a quire and they are sewn into the binding at the crease. Some scribes numbered their quires by writing, in very faint and small ink, the number of the quire on either first page (recto) or last page (verso) of a quire. Then, when it came time to stitch all the quires together they…