James 24:7

Hi!  Sorry to have disappeared there for awhile.  I've been adjusting to "grandpahood" as well as trying to keep up with the usual demands of the Easter season.  Hope you had a good one; we sure did!

Lately I've received a lot of questions about such things as "The Gospel of Judas" and some of the other books and programs that assail scripture or Jesus.   These kinds of things have been around a long time.  I can remember preachers railing against various hot theories back when I was a kid. 

There is something new about today's claims.  They are being carried along by the unbelievable power of mass media and mass marketing.  Way back when someone would read a book or a newspaper article  about some claim about Christ or the scripture and it might even be carried by the evening news.  Nowadays the claims are hyped in ways not unlike tabloid headlines:  "Brangelina to Have Baby in Namibia"...."Tom Cruise Refuses Catholic Baptism for Newborn"..."Jesus and Judas Best Friends." 

I just keep waiting to see the pictures of Peter, James and John lounging in the south of France.

To hear the tabloid media tell it all of these claims about Jesus and the Bible will do nothing short of rattling the faith right out of us.

Scholars do turn up interesting things all the time.  Most of what they turn up is given careful consideration over the span of years.  Rarely does anything turn up in the realm of Biblical studies that is as earth-shattering as today's tabloid journalism would have us believe.

I'm no scholar in the history of Christian origins.  However, I can tell the difference between hype and serious scholarship.

The church has always been "up against it" because the church is not above its Lord.   That's not new.  However, it does seem to me that the marketing and media machinery behind this latest basket of "findings" (and I use the term loosely) is new and something worth noting and watching.