Reading Time: 12 minutes The Empty Tomb has, for years, been a mainstay for Christian apologists, who claim Jesus rose from the dead in a glorious Resurrection. The Empty Tomb was used as one of the “minimal facts” to “prove” the resurrection of Jesus. So, what exactly is the Empty Tomb apologetic? According to all four gospels (attributed to […]
Paul
Posted inDeep Dive
Who invented Christianity?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Here’s the thing: No one knows for sure if the words of Jesus in the gospels are his actual words. We’re fairly certain that some of them definitely aren’t. There is even a not-very-good argument to be made that Jesus never existed. Most biblical scholars accept that Jesus probably did exist. They agree that at least […]
Posted inReligion
Guest article: The improbable vs. the impossible, or Will the real Jesus please rise up?
Reading Time: 12 minutes The empty tomb is a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and to many Christians, proof of Christian beliefs. Could the story of Jesus Christ be as empty as the tomb? The following is a look at the unacknowledged dual narratives contained in the gospels.
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 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 inUncategorized
Paul of Tarsus
Reading Time: 8 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
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 […]
Posted inHistory
Is the “Empty Tomb” Narrative Historical?
Reading Time: 6 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: Is […]
Posted inUncategorized
What Is the Evidence for Jesus?
Reading Time: 9 minutes I am presently grappling with Jesus mythicism. I am, at present, a historicist in terms of whether Jesus existed or not. My evaluation is somewhat intuitive, believing to the confidence of about two-thirds that a real Jesus existed under all the mythological overlay as opposed to one-third confidence in a completely mythological Jesus. Richard Carrier, on the other […]
Posted inHistory
Quote of the Day: Jesus, the Gospels, Paul and His Letters, and so on…
Reading Time: 7 minutes Here is a comment to get your teeth into from the other day. The article was about the minimal facts thesis concerning the Resurrection accounts of Jesus. They come from commenter BensNewLogin: The following may not be as linear as I would like. Please bear with me. There was a time when I was intensely […]