The Secular Frontier

I'm taking my holiday break from Secular Frontier, but here is my holiday post on something essential! Jesus' exorcism of the Gerasene Demoniac, wiki BACKGROUND: Greek had several terms that could describe a person undergoing divine or de ... Read Article

I noted previously that in Romans Paul has a dualistic interpretation of sin dealt with by Christ’s cross. On the one hand, we have substitutionary atonement to pay the fine for man’s transgressions. This balances the books, but what if someone keeps ... Read Article

In the bible faith is not primarily a set of beliefs.  We are told Demons too believe but are not saved.  Rather, it is a special kind of trust.  Jesus says faith can move mountains, which highlighted The Absurd because would Jesus not then move a moun ... Read Article

Last time I talked about the twofold purpose of the New Testament and Christ's death (i) as payment for our sin fine/penalty, and (ii) seeing yourself in those guilty of God's beloved (agapetos) messenger Christ's wrongful death, which breaks the spell th ... Read Article

I talked previously about a two-fold understanding of salvation from sin in Paul's letter to the Romans, one of a substitutionary atonement paying a penalty for your transgressions to avert God's wrath, and by contrast a moral influence cross where seeing ... Read Article

The Quest for the Historical Paul (Part C) The modern quest for the historical Paul, determining who the apostle Paul was and what he said, is in an important way borne out of a real peculiarity in our New Testament sources.  On the One hand, we have ... Read Article

I remember being very impressed (as a disillusioned philosophy student, lol) in finding Nietzsche's "Human All Too Human" 399 very apt: "That maturity is reached is manifested in the fact that one no longer goes to where the rarest roses of knowledge g ... Read Article

Regarding the historicity (being in history) of Jesus, the convergence of multiple lines of evidence is very important in historical assessment and evaluation. I gave the example of multiple lines of evidence converging on the idea the Jewish elite were s ... Read Article

My thanks to the publisher for the review copy. In these posts, I've presented some ideas that have come to mind about the first part of Carrier's book. The methodological program is not radical at all, but very much in line with other disciplin ... Read Article

Hermeneutics is the idea that we can generate the meaning/sense of a text by considering individual elements as signs that point to or express a larger context, and the context is made manifest in the element.  So, Van Gogh’s peasant shoes might expres ... Read Article

Last time we looked at Carrier’s approach and found it to be a very appropriate one.  Judgements, whether educational judgements or historical ones or whatever, are made according to criteria that have a qualitative and quantitative dimension.  Making ... Read Article

There is a current push, in all disciplines really, to push toward reliability of conclusions, showing your reasoning is based on sound logic. For example, we want to be able to explain why a child received a B grade in Social Studies so that we don't si ... Read Article

I made some changes to the part 1 post so do check it out: (Part 1) Blogging Through Richard Carrier’s new book “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus (2025)”  In this chapter, one thing that caught my eye was Carrier rejecting the Q sou ... Read Article

This chapter is The Inadequacy of Critical Responses So Far. In this chapter Carrier responds to some of the responses to his work.  In general, he concludes: The most typical maneuvers are to (1) misstate an argument and rebut that, rather than any ... Read Article

Chapter 2 is called Updates, Developments, Trendline: What I’ve Published, New Developments, Has Any Background Knowledge Changed? Here are a couple things that stood out to me: 1. But it also includes a more direct comparison with the Helleni ... Read Article

POST UPDATED! The modern incarnation of the Christ Myth theory, the idea that Jesus was originally thought to be a celestial being who was later Euhermerized or put in stories on earth, is generally thought to be inaugurated by Earl Doherty’s “ ... Read Article

Previously, I looked at Plutarch’s Parallel lives and how the dead crucified Jesus on the cross converting the Roman soldier seems to be derived from the dead crucified Cleomenes III converting onlookers in Plutarch.  There is much such parallelism ... Read Article

Last time we looked at the Gospels viewing the destruction of the temple in 70CE as divine punishment for the Jews collaborating with the Romans to wrongfully kill Jesus. This was thought in the light of the two angels sent to Lot / Sodom and Gomorrah to ... Read Article

Helen Bond argues that Mark views Jesus’ death as the reason the temple was destroyed in 70 CE.  Bond notes in Mark, Mark thinks the temple was destroyed in 70CE because of sin and the Jewish leadership killing Jesus, like the first temple fell to the ... Read Article

It has long been suspected by New Testament scholars that there was a now lost Q source which contained sayings by Jesus found in Matthew and Luke that did not come from Mark, and may have been very early. The earliest layer of these sayings seems to be ... Read Article

Ehrman argues central to Jesus’s teaching was the need to repent in preparation for the coming Kingdom of God. Those who returned to God would be graciously forgiven for their transgressions, with no penalty or payment required. After Jesus’ death his ... Read Article

The Bible includes numerous references to eyes being opened, beyond the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:7 (where their eyes were opened to their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit). These instances often symbolize gaining physical sight, spir ... Read Article

Bart Ehrman recently hosted the 2025 NINT conference on the Historical Jesus made up of an elite team of New Testament specialists. The conference was aimed at an audience who are not themselves PhD New Testament specialists. I have provided brief summar ... Read Article

SUMMARY In this lecture Ehrman is inquiring into the literacy of Jesus.  Most people in that time couldn’t read unless they belonged to a wealthier class, and even fewer could write, as that was taught at a more elite level of education, and beyond ... Read Article

Last time in the Analysis section about Ehrman’s first talk we thought about the lens of the Absurd with the example of God making a covenant with Abraham to have a great line of descendants, and then telling him to kill his son Isaac.  Abraham was the ... Read Article