Never Doing Anything Bravely

"even a general in battle loves that soldier who returns after fleeing and presses the enemy bravely, more than the one who never turned his back, but never did anything bravely." (Gregory the Great, cited by Bede, in Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis, translators and editors, Bede: Commentary On The Gospel Of Luke [Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2023], 466)

Jacques Vallee On UFOs And "Satan's Toys"

He was recently interviewed by Ross Coulthart, and the subject of the demonic explanation of UFOs came up. Coulthart asked about the widespread reports that Christians (apparently primarily or exclusively Evangelicals) in the United States government have tried to shut down UFO research on the basis that UFOs are demonic and that we shouldn't do further research into them. Coulthart and Vallee both dismiss that sort of reasoning, comparing it to refusing to investigate a crime because it involves evil. I agree with them that even if the demonic hypothesis were true, the government and other people should still research UFOs and, in fact, should research them a lot. For more on the subject, see here. What I want to do in this post is focus on some other comments Coulthart and Vallee made while addressing the issue of demonic activity.

Boy Jesus

Joan Taylor recently published a book about Jesus' childhood, Boy Jesus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2025). Taylor is a scholar who's specialized in the study of Judaism and Christianity in the ancient world. She isn't a conservative, but her book argues for conservative views on some significant issues related to Jesus' childhood (e.g., Jesus' Davidic ancestry, the credibility of his genealogies, his Bethlehem birthplace). So, the book is a good illustration of the fact that conservative conclusions are often supported by non-conservative scholarship.

But Taylor takes some positions I disagree with, and I want to link several of my posts addressing those issues. She cites Yigal Levin's work against the idea that Jesus could have been considered a son of Joseph by adoption. She doesn't interact with Caleb Friedeman's response to Levin, discussed in the second hyphenated section of my post here. See here for my argument against the notion that Luke's infancy narrative wasn't finalized into its canonical form until the time of Marcion. On objections to the historicity of Luke's census account, I've written many posts, such as here and here. (To Taylor's credit, though, she's more reasonable than many other critics of the census account, such as by acknowledging that the census wasn't ancestral and that Joseph had more than an ancestral relationship with Bethlehem. On the evidence for such conclusions, see here.) She thinks Jesus' family was more supportive of him than they likely were. On the unbelief of his family (faith mixed with unbelief in the cases of Joseph and Mary), see Eric Svendsen's Who Is My Mother? (Amityville, New York: Calvary Press, 2001). Taylor probably thinks the family's unbelief would be too problematic for the historicity of other parts of the New Testament (and whatever extrabiblical sources), but they're not too difficult to reconcile. See the section of the post here discussing Matthew 13:54-55, for example. I've also discussed the subject elsewhere, like here on the gospel of Mark in general. Since Taylor mentions some early sources who rejected the virgin birth and sometimes cites Andrew Lincoln's book against the virgin birth, go here and here for my discussion of how widely the virgin birth was accepted early on, in response to Lincoln, and here for my overall assessment of Lincoln's book. On the issues Taylor is right about, she often leaves out a lot of the evidence that could be mentioned. There's far too much of that to discuss all of it here, but see, for example, this post on Jesus' relatives for further evidence supporting Jesus' Davidic ancestry and the genealogies (e.g., Luke's use of James as a source, James' comments on Davidic ancestry in Acts 15). Or see here on the Bethlehem birthplace. Or here on how much Matthew and Luke agree about Jesus' childhood.

The book goes into a lot of depth about what we know of the context of Jesus' childhood from extrabiblical sources, like Josephus and archeology. A lot of ground is covered: the physical characteristics of Bethlehem and Nazareth, what Joseph and Jesus would have done in their work as builders, connections between Jesus' childhood and his public ministry (e.g., his parables and illustrations), etc. You'll probably disagree with much of the book, but also learn some significant things from it.