Reading Time: 8 minutes This is a guest post by Lex Lata (prompted by Jonathan MS Pearce’s video, Biblical Contradictions: Demons and Gadara vs Gerasa). In the matter of proper names, the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority. The transaction about the swine, which were driven down a steep place by […]
Gospel of Matthew
Posted inReligion
Christian apologetics and defending Matthew’s guards
Reading Time: 17 minutes There’s something meta going on when a Christian apologist takes aim at a biblical account of mine with some typical apologetics, claiming I am making stuff up out of whole cloth when I myself accused the Gospel writers (or apologists) of making stuff up out of whole cloth to defend themselves against Jewish accusations 2,000 […]
Posted inReligion
Why Matthew’s guards at Jesus’ tomb are so important
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve written before on why the guards at the tomb of Jesus, included only in the Gospel of Matthew, are almost certainly invented by the author of that Gospel. Today I will tell you how they fit into a larger narrative construction of the Jesus story, and that their invention tells us an awful lot […]
Posted inGeneral
Matthew’s Guards at the Tomb
Reading Time: < 1 minute Matthew is the only Gospel to include the story of the guards at the tomb – supposedly the only actual eyewitnesses of the Resurrection – in the Resurrection narrative. For a number of reasons discussed below, this piece of the narrative is clearly ahistorical, acting (I argue) as a counter-counter-argument to the Jewish claims of […]
Posted inUncategorized
Jesus as the New Moses and Theology Historicised
Reading Time: 12 minutes Oddly, you might think, I will start this piece off with something commenter Cath Olic said in reply (that was in no reply at all) to a post about an interview dissecting the origins of religion in Israel and the genesis of Judaism: Today I heard part of an interview with Dr. Holly Ordway who […]
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Matthew’s Bloopers
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the closing stages of writing my latest book, The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story [UK] (please grab yourself a copy!), I had a few test readers. One was David Austin, down in Australia, who has provided a few guest articles for your delectation. Here is another one – thanks muchly to him (as […]
Posted inHistory
Is the Betrayal of Jesus by Judas Historical?
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the closing stages of writing my latest book, The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story [UK] (please grab yourself a copy!), I had a few test readers. One was David Austin, down in Australia, who has provided a few guest articles for your delectation. Here is another one – thanks muchly to him (as […]
Posted inUncategorized
Exodus Sidebar: Jesus As the New Moses, Myth upon Myth
Reading Time: 3 minutes In writing the first couple of chapters for my new book project on the Exodus, I was doing some reading of Raymond Brown again, the masterful Catholic exegete who wrote the superb The Birth of the Messiah. I was reminded of the over the belief theological manipulation that we see evident in the Gospel of Matthew in […]
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Anointing of Jesus: Fact or Fiction?
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the closing stages of writing my latest book, The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story [UK], I had a few test readers. One was David Austin, down in Australia, who has provided a few guest articles for your delectation. Here is another one – thanks muchly to him: The Anointing of Jesus – Fact […]
Posted inUncategorized
Goodacre on Markan Priority and the Gospel Datings
Reading Time: < 1 minute I listened to some Mark Goodacre some years ago and have referred to him in my own texts, and it was great to watch him here. I loved this talk. I got a lot out of this especially the talk of the destruction of the Temple and the so-called prophecies, and the discussion of Q […]