Free Republic

....Two weeks ago, on April 10, in a manner reminiscent of King’s carefully controlled original unveiling of the fragment, the Harvard Divinity School issued a press release declaring that a “wide range of scientific testing indicates that a papyrus fragment containing the words ‘Jesus said to them my wife’ is an ancient document” and that “its contents may have been composed as early as the second to fourth centuries.” Harvard had given an advance viewing of the test results and an interview with King to reporters for just three newspapers—the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Harvard student...

--- Beyond Belief: A Book About Elaine Pagels --- by Elaine Pagels Reviewer:benjamin m. guyer (gainesville, fl. USA) In this book, Elaine Pagels once again attempts to debunk traditional Christianity by selectively using Gnostic texts - in this case the Gospel of Thomas (hereafter, "GThom")- as her ammunition. Rather than presenting a new, scholarly engagement of the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas, Pagels scatters heavy doses of her own personal beliefs between her rehashing of previously developed theses. Simply put, she has nothing new to say on a scholarly level, but plenty to say autobiographically. Dr. Pagels...