The year is coming to an end, so here is a Biblioblog Top 50.
As in the last report, the method here uses Alexa rankings whenever they are available. For some sites (i.e., Patheos and Livejournal), where Alexa doesn’t have separate data on each blog, the position has been reckoned by hand.
Notice anything different? Hint: look at the new top five.
School is out and summer is in session, so it’s time to find out where the blog rankings stand in mid-2014.
As in the last report (and like the one before it and the one before that), the method here uses Alexa rankings very strictly whenever they are available. For some sites (i.e., Patheos and Livejournal), where Alexa doesn’t have separate data on each blog, the position has been reckoned by hand.
Check out the full list of biblioblogs, in order by rank, below. And why not keep tabs on some of the interesting blogs about the Bible while you are at it?
In the past, on this blog, I have defended the right of the public to weigh in on topics related to the history of early Christianity. It’s a topic with wide interest, and it would be a shame to limit input to those who have pursued a credential in history or in theology. Besides the fact that people with different academic specialties have real value to bring to the table, there is something unbalancing about allowing only the voices of those who have gone through a long and expensive credentialing process, usually with the hope of gaining employment either as faculty or in ministry.
That being said, I am proposing a new rule: If you haven’t got a degree in history or religion, make everything that you want other people to respond to you about available for free online. Otherwise, don’t expect anything but obscurity. You have only yourself to blame for the level of interaction with your published work.
People who grow up with no religion have a low “retention rate,” but, apparently, it’s getting better.
In what can be described as a turnabout-is-fair-play move, given the general decline in religious belief in America, several have noted recent studies showing that those who report being brought up without a religion in America usually don’t end up with no religion. There’s a graphic from the Pew Forum showing that only 46% of those saying that they were brought up with no particular religious affiliation still claim no religious affiliation.
It is, for reasons not really clear, even less predictive of atheism for one to say they were “raised atheist.” The 2008 Pew Forum survey had 162 survey responses (weighted at 430 statistically) in the continental U.S. saying that they were “raised atheist.” These survey responses have spawned several articles mentioning the statistics (albeit with little real discussion): most notably from Mark Gray in 2012, most recently from Jesus Creed and Exploring Our Matrix.
Let’s explore that a little.
In 1999, not a single biblioblog existed. Even Paleojudaica and NT Blog, two of the first, were yet to emerge. A lot of discussion still happened on Usenet, an ancient internet protocol that most reasonable people have abandoned. Yahoo! would soon acquire a popular service for managing e-mail lists, with lists such as Crosstalk being hot stuff at the time. Web-based forums were also gaining ground at this time.
By 2004, the Bible blogs had started gaining serious steam. These steadily peeled off the most active participants from the mailing lists as they established their own blogs and worked on building them up. Companies such as WordPress and Blogger facilitated this revolution. The bandwidth on e-mail lists was still brisk, but it was soon to be on the decline. Facebook was born.
In 2014, nearly all of the e-mail lists have died off or slowed to a crawl. The “Web 2.0” revolution is now the old guard, and people are most comfortable with using the web protocol for everything. Yahoo! Groups has gone the way of Pluto: still there but not what it used to be. If Facebook is now the size of Jupiter, the blogosphere is Saturn with its rings, and Reddit is the red planet Mars. Several large web forums exist, but the Bible is only a sideshow for the big ones. A plucky little operation called the Biblical Criticism & History Forum has split off one of them, hoping to survive on its own.
Here are the top 50 discussion groups where you can talk about the Bible online… Continue reading »
During the month of May, there is a little event going on at the Early Writings forum.
For each and every post to the forum in the month of May, 2 cents will go to charity.
So, if you’d like to make your two cents count, head on over to the forum and get posting! 🙂
And if you’d like to influence which charities receive the donations, there’s a poll underway for that.
In other news, I turned 33 years old today. Birthday cake and time with family are in my near future. 🙂
[Disclaimer Added: It’s a modern forgery.]
Karen King has finally gotten research on the fragment known as the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” published in the Harvard Theological Review (thank goodness too, as there were some concerns over whether the research would get space in a proper venue like this). As indicated, they’d just been waiting for the results to come back from the physical tests of the papyrus fragment. These physical tests include a comparison of the ink with other inks from antiquity and a carbon dating test performed on the papyrus itself.
These tests don’t vindicate those who had been beating the drums for “forgery” from the beginning. On the other hand, they don’t take all the ambiguity out of the matter either, and there will continue to be those who support a hypothesis of modern forgery. The good news is that a healthy debate can occur, taking into consideration all of the most salient data, now that the physical evidence has been examined.
You can check out the links below or join the discussion on the Early Writings forum. And now, the reaction from the blogosphere… Continue reading »
It’s that time again! April is just around the corner, so let’s see where biblioblog rankings stand.
As in the last report (and like the one before it), the method here uses Alexa rankings very strictly whenever they are available. For some sites (i.e., Patheos and Livejournal), where Alexa doesn’t have separate data on each blog, the position has been reckoned by hand.
As expected, Jim West continues to maintain a solid lead, but there’s plenty of action in the top 50 and beyond. Check out the full list, in order by rank, below.
And why not keep tabs on some of the interesting ones while you are at it?
Over the last week, I’ve been able to update the Early Christian Writings site with the rest of the Nag Hammadi Library, which consists primarily of Gnostic texts. There are now 226 entries on the site.
Just recently the More Early Christian Writings update added some four dozen entries to the site, primarily church fathers and apocrypha, in an effort to bring the timeline down to 325 AD. I have a few other fragments (and archaeological data) to post. And I still need to fix the “At a Glance” boxes with good data.
Have any suggestions for improvements you’d like to see?
The list of new additions to the website follows below. Continue reading »
Previously I had posted the Top 50 Biblioblogs by Traffic, which used Alexa rankings and which could not rank sites hosted on some platforms (such as Patheos or LiveJournal). Soon after I followed up with the Top 225 Biblioblogs by Linkage, which sought to be more inclusive (both in the number of blogs listed and by using a method that could rank them all), but this post used a metric (number of domains linking in) that does not correlate well with the amount of traffic received recently.
So I’ve blended the methods: Alexa is used for rankings, and sites that can’t be ranked that way are interpolated into the list using discretion and a peek at various other stats. Below is the Winter 2013 quarterly report on the top biblioblogs. Think about adding any that interest you to your regular reading. Continue reading »