“With All Fear”: Christianity and Slavery (Part 4)
Christianity and slavery: why does it matter? As I made clear early on in this series, I contend that the institution of slavery in the Greco-Roman world was more terrible than we can imagine. In...
View ArticleJesus Evolved From an Angel?
Some passages in the Old Testament throw up bizarre riddles for those of us who have always thought its various authors were strict monotheists in the same sense as we expect modern Jewish rabbis to be...
View ArticleJewish Foundations of Christianity — Significance of God’s Name
There is something unusual about the way the name of God is treated in the Old Testament books. The name itself sometimes appears to have an existence of its own apart from God himself. It’s natural...
View ArticleJewish Foundations: The Divine Name & Heavenly Beings Become Human
Continuing from Jewish Foundations of Christianity — Significance of God’s Name . . . . . We have seen how pre-Christian ideas within something we might loosely call “Judaism” could conceive of a...
View ArticleTheologians as historians
Alvar Ellegård (November 12, 1919 – February 8, 2008) was a Swedish scholar and linguist. He was professor of English at the University of Gothenburg, and a member of the academic board of the Swedish...
View ArticleTen Elements of Christian Origin
Richard Carrier addresses the question of the historicity of Jesus in On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt in the following order: First, he defines the points that will...
View ArticleThe Influence of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Before Christianity
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 The Suffering Servant 13 Behold, my servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. 14 As many were astonished at him— his appearance was so marred,...
View ArticleThe Rank-Raglan Hero-Type (and Jesus)
His mother is a virgin and he’s reputed to be the son of a god; he loses favor and is driven from his kingdom to a sorrowful death—sound familiar? In The Hero, Lord Raglan contends that the heroic...
View ArticleWas Christianity Born from a “Pentecostal” Movement?
I have just completed reading one scholar’s work that does argue that Paul spread Christianity throughout the Greek world by means of such a movement and have begun another that argues the same with...
View ArticleEvidence for a Pre-Christian “Christianity”?
Professor Stevan Davies has re-published his book Jesus the Healer under a new and probably more appropriate title, Spirit Possession and the Origins of Christianity, a new introduction on the...
View ArticleHighlights of the David Fitzgerald-Daniel Gullotta Discussion on Miami Valley...
For anyone who was too lazy or too busy or too technically challenged to listen to the discussion between David Fitzgerald and Daniel Gullotta on the historicity of Jesus here are my notes. Of course...
View ArticleThe Other Side of Early Christianity
So Christianity and paganism were not at all necessarily incompatible in the Roman empire. Our focus on biblical texts, the writings we have inherited from selected “church fathers” and sporadic...
View ArticleBruno Bauer’s “Christ and the Caesars” Review
On The Mythicism Files blog Quixie has posted a review of Bruno Bauer’s Christ and the Caesars: ANTECEDENTS OF NT MINIMALISM: BAUER’S ‘CHRIST AND THE CAESARS’ It begins deliciously: Bruno Bauer was...
View ArticleHow Do People Respond to the Killing of Their Messiah?
We know the story of how Christianity started. The scholarly explanation is essentially a paraphrase of the narratives we read in the Gospels and Acts. The disciples had been fully expecting Jesus to...
View ArticleA Case for the “Easter” Appearances of Jesus BEFORE the Crucifixion
There is an inconsistency in a fundamental argument, or assumption, rather, among critical scholars of Christian origins that has long been bugging me. The principle was set down by David Friedrich...
View ArticleMotivations of a “Mythicist”
From the Preface to The Evolution of Christianity by L. Gordon Rylands, 1927 (with my highlighting in bold): The purpose of this book is to state as clearly and as concisely as possible, and to...
View ArticleEarliest Christianity Did Not Look Like a Religion
I have long been intrigued by the second century “church father” Justin Martyr identifying himself as a philosopher, not a “priest” or elder or bishop or other ecclesiastical type of title. He left it...
View ArticleEarly Christianity Looked Like a Philosophical School
Continuing from the previous post on Stanley K. Stowers’ chapter, “Does Pauline Christianity Resemble a Hellenistic Philosophy?” . . . To pre-empt predictable objections Stowers begins with three...
View ArticleThe Gnostic Interpretation of the Exodus and the Beginnings of the...
Hermann Detering has a new essay (70 pages in PDF format) that will be of interest to many Vridar readers — at least for those of you who can read German. In English the title is The Gnostic...
View ArticleGnostic Interpretation of Exodus and Beginnings of the Joshua/Jesus Cult
Recall that Hermann Detering was a work out about the gnostic interpretation of the Exodus and the beginnings of the Joshua/Jesus cult. See my earlier posts: The gnostic interpretation and beginnings...
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