Top Five Posts

Here is my attempt to take up the challenge and find my top five posts, with some appended comments:

What Jesus really looked like (updated) (February 22)

This post was cathartic. I have seen so many misrepresentations of the project I was involved with back in 2001 that I finally decided, on seeing yet another of these, to try to set the record straight, at least as far as my own involvement was concerned, not that any of the articles concerned ever these days mention me in connection with this, perhaps a good thing.

My thoughts on The Passion of the Christ (concluded) (March 6)

This post was the most memorable of the year to me without any question. It came after I had spent months following The Passion controversy with interest and had finally got a chance to get to a preview screening. Looking back at this post, I see that my initial thoughts after this first viewing have not changed substantially after repeated viewings. I also see that my emotions were running pretty high after seeing the film, as indeed was the case with so many others. I subsequently revised this blog post for an article in Bible and Interpretation and was then revised again, much more thoroughly, as an article in the Passion of the Christ book edited by Robert Webb and Kathleen Corley.

Bruce Chilton sees the Passion and hates it (concluded) (March 18)

I choose this as a representative example of many such posts I feel I have written in the last few months, and which ultimately informed the article I referred to above. Chilton's reaction to the film was typical of the vast majority of scholars' reactions to the film, condescending, overstated and with some odd misreadings.

A Throttle to Knowledge? Response to AKMA on "Links Pages" (June 11)

This was a post I enjoyed writing because it gave me the chance to engage critically with a fellow blogger's interesting proposals for the future, or, perhaps more accurately, to criticise his diagnosis of the problems with the present. AKMA offered a lucid answer to this post, and it sat in my pending tray still not answered over six months later. And in that respect, this is also typical of what happens on this blog.

More on how to read a scholarly paper (December 17)

This was a recent post, reacting to responses to an earlier post I had made on the same topic, and was the result of some personal reflections on my own experiences of presenting papers. Like all the most enjoyable and rewarding blog posts -- to me at least -- this one was part of a dialogue with the other bibliobloggers. I look forward to many more of the same in 2005.