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 […]
Raymond Brown
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Paul Justifies Lying
Reading Time: 2 minutes In writing my forthcoming book on the Resurrection of Jesus, it has been important to look at Jesus’ earliest source, Paul. Paul is famous for not actually telling us much at all about Jesus at all. There are some genuinely quite problematic Pauline verses that should raise some eyebrows concerning his agenda and methodology for […]
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Luke 1 & 2 Infancy Narratives as a Later Interpolation
Reading Time: 13 minutes Luke 3:1 opens with an elaborate chronological statement: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was … the word of the Lord came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness”. This surely reads as if it was originally written as the opening section of a book. The impression […]
Posted inHistory
“Historical” Bookends to a Historically Vacuous Life
Reading Time: 4 minutes This is an early draft section for one of the first chapters in my new book-in-the-writing, The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story: The birth and death of Jesus are historical bookends to the life of Jesus, obviously, even if the theology continues in Acts and the Epistles of Paul, as problematic as […]
Posted inHistory, Religion
Challenging the Theological Truth of the Nativity
Reading Time: 6 minutes As many will know, I have written a book that sets out to particularly debunk the historical narrative of the birth accounts of Jesus – The Nativity: A Critical Examination. It simply didn’t happen like that. The full gamut of posts on the subject appears at the bottom of this article. What I would like to […]
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Easter Doubt: On the Skepticism of the Resurrection (part 3)
Reading Time: 10 minutes As mentioned in my two previous posts, it is that time of year again where the Resurrection of Jesus requires a thorough going over. Here is continues. There are three aspects to the debunking of the Resurrection: 1) The Gospels are not reliable sources of information; they are poor quality evidence 2) The claims of the Resurrection […]
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On the Skepticism of the Resurrection (part 3)
Reading Time: 10 minutes As mentioned in my two previous posts, it is that time of year again where the Resurrection of Jesus requires a thorough going over. Here is continues. There are three aspects to the debunking of the Resurrection: 1) The Gospels are not reliable sources of information; they are poor quality evidence 2) The claims of the Resurrection […]
Posted inThe Secular
On the Skepticism of the Resurrection (part 3)
Reading Time: 10 minutes Having looked at points 1) and 2) it is time to see if there is a more plausible explanation for the data from a naturalistic perspective than the Christian claims. Before setting out the positive case, I want to spend a little time going over some of the data from the Gospels and how they are problematic. Really, this belongs in the first post under point 1), but it sort of required its own post for reasons of length.
Posted inBooks
The Pope’s New Book on Jesus’ Birth. Now He’s in Trouble!
Reading Time: 4 minutes There has been a fair bit of press about the newest publication from the current head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger, better known now as Pope Benedict XVI (don’t you just hate sequels?). There was even a humorous take on some of the aspects of the new book from the colossus of comedy Stephen Colbert.
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Conflicting Genealogies of Jesus and JohnM’s Thesis of a Matrilineal Bloodline Refuted
Reading Time: 12 minutes In one of my recent posts about the Nativity, JohnM has been defending a particular harmonisation of a biblical difference. I would like to set it out here in order to show that his epistemological approach is somewhat dodgy and that the issues remain. In fact, it annoyed me so much that he refused to […]