Robert P. George, a Princeton professor and vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, has offered to be beaten on behalf of Saudi Arabian activist Raif Badawi. George is joined by six other professors and religious liberty advocates in offering to take 100 lashes each.

Raif Badawi has been accused of insulting Islam. His sentence is 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes of which he has received fifty.

In a letter to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the group wrote, “If your government will not remit the punishment of Raif Badawi, we respectfully ask that you permit each of us to take 100 of the lashes that would be given to him. We would rather share in his victimization than stand by and watch him being cruelly tortured.”

George told PRI that it was “hypocritical” for Saudi leaders “to march in solidarity with the victims of terrorism and persecution for speaking their minds in Europe and then to practice that same abuse on people for speaking their minds … in their own country.”

While it’s unthinkable the Saudis would accept this offer, George said they didn’t make it half-heartedly.

Bart Ehrman, author of How Jesus Became God and Misquoting Jesus, talks with World’s Warren Cole Smith about his new book arguing Jesus did not claim to be God. He says, “It has long been recognized by scholars that if Jesus actually had called himself God, and it was known that he called Himself God, that it’s virtually beyond belief that the early Gospel writers didn’t mention this.”

The publisher of Ehrman’s book thought it would sell books to publish a companion book arguing that Jesus is God, so they approached five authors to write it. Ehrman says in the interview that he doesn’t believe those authors believe Jesus taught the doctrine of the Trinity during his lifetime. “Scholars,” he says, believe John’s Gospel put words in Jesus’ mouth, so he did not actually say, “I and the Father are one,” or other claims to divinity. I suppose any evidence to support this belief is in his book.

Apparently the demonstrations of divine authority in Matthew 8-9 do not argue for Jesus’ deity, but merely his agency of divine power. He was a prophet, nothing more:

• “When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.'”
• “And the men marveled, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?'”
• “‘But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—he then said to the paralytic—’Rise, pick up your bed and go home.'”
• “And when the demon had been cast out, the mute man spoke. And the crowds marveled, saying, ‘Never was anything like this seen in Israel.'”

Apparenly Jesus claiming the title “Son of Man” for himself is no clue that he is the one in Daniel 7 who “all peoples, nations, and languages” would serve forever:

And to him was given dominion

and glory and a kingdom,

that all peoples, nations, and languages

should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

which shall not pass away,

and his kingdom one

that shall not be destroyed.

Ehrman gets hung up on the doctrine of the Trinity in the interview, pressing Smith on whether the five evangelical authors actually believe Jesus taught the Trinity. Continue reading A Glimpse Into the Mind of a Sceptic →

Greg Thornbury writes about his upbringing and how his Christian liberal arts education almost took his faith away.

For me, this dose of higher criticism was nearly lethal. Any sense that the Bible was divinely inspired and trustworthy, or that the creeds had metaphysical gravitas, started to seem implausible. The best I could muster was that, somehow mystically, perhaps Jesus was the Christ, existentially speaking. I was approaching something close to New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman’s own story of losing faith.

By God’s profound grace, the writings of one man turned him around.