Painting Fakes

Lately it seems that a lot of conversations I have come around to the subject of miracles, and in particular Jesus' miracles, so I thought I'd write a short series of posts on the subject. For a lot of my Christian friends, Jesus' miracles are one of the most important pieces of evidence of his divinity.  His miracles are seen as showing the power of God expressed through him, and vindicate his claim to divinity as well as the reality of God.  For them, without the miracles there is no Christianity. Paradoxically, these same miracles are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many of my atheist friends.  One of the reasons they reject religion in general and Christianity in particular is that they find the idea of miracles impossible to believe.  As Crossan and Reed say, impossibility battles with uniqueness.  Both parties accept that miracles are highly improbable and that it would take something extraordinarily special to make one hap...

So apparently the Queensland Government's budget is in crisis, and without drastic action we will all be ruined.  It must be so because Peter Costello says so. Soon after its election the new Queensland Government appointed Costello, long-serving treasurer in the Howard government, to head a commission of audit into the Queensland budget.  Its interim report suggests that the government needs to save 25 to 30 billion dollars over a five year period to regain its AAA credit rating from Standard and Poors. Should we believe them?  Well, I'm no economist but I have my doubts.  For a start, why did the government appoint a veteran Liberal politician, and one notorious for his fiscal conservatism and love of surpluses, instead of, say, a distinguished economist?  Why does new Queensland Treasurer Tim Nicholls look so much like Costello's little brother at the press conference to launch the report? Secondly, the report includes a set of forward estimates fr...

For my 50th birthday my in-laws gave me a copy of The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries , edited by Ian Pindar.  I've been reading it in bits and pieces over the past few months.  Like most anthologies it mixes the brilliant with the pedestrian.  Predictably there were articles about whether the Turin Shroud was real, whether Shakespeare really wrote his own plays, the identity of Jack the Ripper and the "real" story behind the murder of JFK.  Along with this were some surprises.  Who would have thought there was an actual historical event behind the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, or that the characters in The Three Musketeers were based on real people?  And I had certainly never heard of the fabulous Voynich Manuscript , a beautiful, elaborate book probably dating from the later 15th century written in a completely incomprehensible "language". Amidst all these gems and rocks are two little tales about the fall of imperial Russia.  The fir...

Twice in every 100-odd years, Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun.  For a few hours, if there are no clouds, earth-bound mortals can see her shadow as it crosses the face of the sun and then disappears.  It happened today amidst much fanfare and astronomical excitement. This means it's a good day for a post on Shirley Hazzard's wonderful novel, The Transit of Venus .  Expatriate Aussie novelist Hazzard is not prolific by any means but what her work lacks in quantity it makes up in quality and The Transit of Venus is her masterwork. Published in 1980, it follows the lives and loves of Australian sisters Caroline and Grace Bell from their arrival in the UK after World War 2.  It is a lyrical, elliptical novel, moments of sly humour mingled with an all-pervading sense of tragedy.  Her characterisation is beautifully nuanced, you feel passionate love or scorn for each of her creations. Venus remains hidden for long, dreary years, reveals h...

I know I promised to review some more recent Lives of Jesus and I've been doing that, but late last year I picked up a copy of Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the Word in a second hand shop.  Since Bultmann has made a couple of cameos in these reviews, I thought I'd tell you a little more about what he says. Jesus and the Word was first published in German in 1926, and translated into English in 1934.  Bultmann had yet to embark on the project of "demythologising" Christianity which was to make him famous or notorious throughout the Christian world, depending on your viewpoint.  Here in this book we can see the beginnings of that theology and understand both its strength and its weakness. One thing this book shows is how little the study of the Gospels has changed over the past century.  Bultmann has a lot in common with the present day fellows of the Jesus Seminar .  Like them, he sees the Gospels as layered texts, some parts recording the actual wo...