Reading Time: 8 minutes Jesus is many things to many people. To the early Christians, authors of the Gospels, he was certainly a construction of sorts. For example, for Matthew, Jesus was written in a way that emulated Moses in order that he appealed to Matthew’s Jewish audience. The use of this formula for a theological agenda strongly calls […]
Jesus
Posted inReligion
Critique of ‘The Star of Bethlehem’ video
Reading Time: 3 minutes A popular video lays out an interesting case for the star of Bethlehem being a series of real astronomical events, but it’s time for some tough love.
Posted inReligion
The Star of Bethlehem, a real event?
Reading Time: 4 minutes What was the Star of Bethlehem—a nova? A planet? A star? A comet? And can any of these explain, “the star … went ahead of [the magi] until it stopped over the place where the child was”?
Posted inMyth & Folklore
The first 1000 words written about Jesus
Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s remember what we’re not dealing with, and what we are dealing with, in a gospel writer. Goodbye journalist, biographer, historian. Hello mythologist and fabulist. Mythologists and fabulists have been the most successful storytellers in the history of writing. Their books have been on best seller lists for thousands of years. Some of their writings […]
Posted inReligion
Why believe Jesus when legends develop in our own time?
Reading Time: 6 minutes We’ve explored the idea that the gospel story is a legend. Let’s now look at some modern legends to see how easily they develop, even in our science-saturated age.
Posted inReligious News
Christian ‘prophets’ claim Jesus was wealthy: ‘He had five houses!’
Reading Time: 2 minutes Self-described Christian “prophet” Robin Bullock says that Jesus was a wealthy man who owned five houses. This isn’t mentioned in Scripture, but Bullock has never been a guy known for citing his sources. He made the comments on Saturday during the Fresh Fire Prophetic Conference 2022: … Now you can see it play out on […]
Posted inReligion
Why accept evidence that didn’t convince Jesus’s contemporaries?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Christian apologists want us to accept their weak evidence for the divinity of Jesus. But why should we when Paul, John the Baptist, and even the disciples didn’t accept far more compelling evidence?
Posted inReligious News
Survey: How authentic are Christian evangelicals? Not very
Reading Time: 2 minutes “American evangelicals, it turns out, have a Jesus problem.” This quote by self-described evangelical Christian Republican David French came in a September 23 post of his newsletter, “The Third Rail” in The Atlantic. Referencing a report released last week on a biannual survey by conservative Christian organizations LifeWay Research and Ligonier Ministries, French notes that the […]
Posted inPolitics
One man’s transformative journey from Republican to Democrat
Reading Time: 4 minutes My longtime best pal, Paul Sauser, a recent conservative-Republican-turned-Democrat and an evangelical Christian now uneasily reassessing his faith (without chucking it altogether), has, like many, Americans experienced somewhat of a religious and political transformation in the past few years. He and I have always been a bit of an odd couple, as it were—him long […]
Posted inReligion
Our biggest mistake: We did as we were told
Reading Time: 7 minutes OnlySky · Our biggest mistake: We did as we were told | Neil Carter Those of us who broke up with Jesus (he wouldn’t return our calls) are accustomed to having our motives and our sincerity questioned by those still happy with their faith. We get it all the time. We hear that we weren’t authentic enough, […]