Okay, so:
Some of you guys know that I've been hot on the trail trying to chase down historical head scratchers in The Chosen.
And I think I have found the craziest one yet.
In the season finale of Season 4, King David is shown anointing the feet of the Passover Lamb six days before passover, which corresponds to Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus.
This came into the show because of their consult Jalein Abania, who has some kind of consulting role on the show after her Bible facts/skits tiktoks blew up. She says in one of her videos that

Here is all the dumb stuff I've done to fact check the "anoint the Passover lamb's feet six days before Passover, which is why Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus" from The Chosen.
The aftershow of The Chosen said it was a certain crew member's idea. She then made an instagram post saying it was in Exodus 12. It's not. I checked the JTS commentary on Exodus, no references.
I then checked the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds and the Mishnah on the Passover. Never found anything. Did a word search through Philo and Josephus. Nothing.

Okay:
Have you guys heard the idea that Jesus gave the "gates of hell shall not prevail against it" speech at Caesarea Philippi (modern Banias) because that's what the pagans thought Caesarea was?
I have heard this preached and having done some light Googling I think this story proliferates on Christian tools to Israel because you can see the remains of Pan's Grotto in Banias today.
Have you guys ever heard this?

Well, our regularly scheduled programming has been replaced by The Chosen.
So there's an interesting contradiction at the heart of The Chosen. One is that it's unusual among Jesus films in that it plays a lot in the margins of the Gospels and feels free to make a lot of things up. There's limits to this. Except for when one Gospel disagrees with another Gospel, The Chosen does not contradict the text of Gospel stories -- they just cheerfully add to them as much as they want. It's a lot of pluses, not minuses -- for example, the show doesn't

“Men need safe spaces.”
Yep! But seminaries aren’t support groups. They’re places for learning.
If you can’t get through 45 minutes of Greek class without bursting into tears about how hard it is to not google “boobs” on your smart phone you aren’t prepared for polite society.

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1803483308627525831

Maybe this is actually worth saying:
Seminary is not Bible study. A tremendous amount of time in seminary is for content knowledge. You're not there to talk about your personal issues or get pastoral advice. That happens, but that's not why you are there.

I don’t believe anyone actually thinks the reason they don’t return their cart to the corral is because it puts their kids at risk.
I just don’t believe it.
This is just another version of the person who wants to be selfish but can’t admit it to themselves so they need everyone around them to pretend to believe a dumb lie they’re telling themselves.
It’s the lady who wants to bring her terrible dog to the nail salon because she’s selfish but also wants us to all pretend we believe it’s a service dog.

It bears repeating that one of the functions of the sex trafficking panic- however unintentional - is the creation of foils to favorably compare with other abusers - “our child abusers aren’t as bad as their child abusers.”
When we have this cultural boogeyman of a guy who

https://twitter.com/wartwatch/status/1801608034348613685

kidnaps and sells babies for rape and (depending on how fanciful the story) cannibalism and frame that as “real abuse” it makes it easier to see a poor pastor who just stumbled into sex with a twelve year old he had access to as “not really abuse.”

There’s always been a fundamental disconnect in American discourse about sex that we think it’s both true men are supposed to get sex and women are supposed to prevent it. But I think the former claim has at least been explicitly relegated to the realm of married men in Christian circles… until single men stopped reliably having access to sex.
I am honestly astonished how often I see charts that would have had my church dancing in the aisles in 2004 (young people aren’t having sex, having babies, and going

This is furthering my theory that wild stuff happening with kids in public is a hyper-localized phenomenon.
My pet theory after my last move is that hypervigilante/hyperpermissive parenting is a boomerang burnout phenomenon that manifests itself in median/upper median income

https://twitter.com/Camel_Crushin/status/1797285134984491278

neighborhoods where there is a cultural expectation of extreme supervision of children, but it's non-sustainable and so vigilance cyclically peters out when parents get completely exhausted and detach.

Does anyone else just feel way too proud when they complete a bunch of dreaded administrative tasks?
Today I updated my car's registration, and my driver's license, AND I got a new library card.
Crown the queen, bitches. husband when I'm coming in the front door: "Oh hey you're back! Say what are you thinking for-"
Me: Where the hell is my red carpet

I do not know what to think about these posts of men who are in their 40s and are like "I have tall, and much hair, buy house, why no date?"
First, if you're asking why your life feels unfair and you'd like to complain to the manager, in a simper era we called that "prayer," but more to the point -
1) I don't know why some people struggle to find partners so much. A lot of the women I know who feel this way are absolute catches.
It doesn't really matter if you feel like you can point to a data set that proves beyond reasonable doubt that you

I can’t really square people’s enthusiasm for raising the birth rate for the mountains of evidence that only a small number of humans are considered necessary or valuable by our society.
It actually seems like everywhere you look ostensibly traditional powers are trying to warehouse and kill large numbers of humans because our economic system just doesn’t need that many. Every time I look up there’s massive layoffs, people getting dramatically underpaid, and people appealing to AI and automation for why most individual human’s work is

Okay, we need to talk about how much discourse on women and Christian life is running two completely contradictory scripts that cannot be reconciled.
The first is the "natural calling" discourse - that women are naturally and inherently fit to be at home taking care of men and children and find that once they marry and have kids that this is much better than anything else they were doing; the reason why God commands women to submit to their husbands and be domestic is because God is a loving God and this is best for them.

So, here’s the thing.
The idea that in the end women will come to regard anything they do besides marrying and having kids as skubalon is a really comforting cultural myth.
But there’s really no more reason to think it’s true of women than it is for men.
I’m not opposed to pushing back on uncritical careerism or the devaluing of relationships, but there’s a few reasons why that commencement speech was just wrong headed.
1) the idea that pursuing money instead of relationships is something you need a vagina to regret is really patent nonsense.

So, here's some unlike things that I think are all getting collapsed into one thing, per Matt Chandler.
I think Matt Chandler thinks deconversion happens because people think that Christians should have easy lives and then when it doesn't happen they're surprised.
I find this

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1789426363952185401

incredibly hard to believe. Unless your church is hard in the paint for prosperity gospel theology, "life is hard, trust in God" is one of the most cliched sermon subjects there is, and encouraging people to commit harder won't solve this problem.

Did the Jews Kill Jesus: Part 2:
The Sanhedrin and the High Priest
The high priesthood was the highest state office held by a Judean during the time of Jesus’s execution. Rome had already tossed out the local ethnarch and was ruling directly through the governorship, and Rome appointed the high priests themselves. This tells us a lot about what kinds of people were getting this position: people who could work well with Rome and defend Rome’s interests through local channels. This was usually how Rome worked with local populations

Did "The Jews" kill Jesus? Part One (and prelude to a blog).
The extent to which historical sources play up or play down the involvement of Jewish groups with Jesus’s death is incredibly knotty, and there are a lot of motivations besides historical accuracy in play here. For instance, playing down Jewish involvement does happen in patristic sources – there’s an apologetic motivation here, answering the pretty reasonable question “if Jesus was the messiah of Israel, why didn’t he get more of a hearing?” But on the other hand, playing down Roman

Okay apparently we need to talk about this.
Jews in the first century don’t have a right to execute people. Also, crucifixion is a Roman method of execution. You can suspend a corpse in Torah. You can’t crucify someone.

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1785808161330339915

The Gospels aren’t always super clear about this, so I get the confusion, but unpopularity within Jerusalem alone with authorities does not get you on a cross.

Using the language of "terrorism" to describe something other than "committing acts of violence against fungible targets for ideological ends" is asinine.
I know we do have a developing (deeply stupid) discourse in the US of "adding groups to the terrorism watch list" despite the fact that they don't meet that definition, usually because people appeal to some idea like "their speech is so scary it might as well be terrorism" or "my feelings were terrorized. And to this I can really only say that while some private spaces may have restrictive speech

I don’t know if this is always a good faith criticism but I think people forget that people protest things they can change, not the only things they’re upset about.
Hamas doesn’t worry about its popularity rating with Americans. Everyone I know was horrified about Oct 7 but we didn’t organize a protest, Hamas doesn’t care what we think.
Our own government putting pressure on an administration of a government WE ARE ALLIED WITH, in solidarity with the people in that country who feel the same- that actually is purposeful.

Okay, so last thoughts on this.
I am all about amateur scholars trying to learn more about the Bible. The trick is doing it well.
If you are interesting in the Bible- I think in the US we are really conditioned to think that there’s some big secret about what the Bible “really says” and that makes people want to go after the esoteric stuff like trying to come up with wild translations or speculate about lost books.
Here’s the thing.
The place where people misunderstand the Bible the most isn’t that way. It’s taking your modern assumptions to a text.