The Secular Frontier

Appendix: Response to Richard Carrier’s Review (2024) In the few years since I wrote this essay there have been developments in what scholars call ‘the quest for the historical Jesus.’ One of the main contentions is that if we do not get more rigorous in uncovering the Jesus of history, the idea that Jesus never existed or that we can say nothing about him reliably will become the default position. Justin Meggitt, who has been a target of mythicists, writes: First, even if denial of the historicity of Jesus is rarely found among scholars within the field, the increasing popularity of this position in wider culture is unavoidable. While I won’t rehearse arguments I have made elsewhere about this phenomenon, unless those working in New Testament and Christian origins continue to think critically and publicly about what can be said about Jesus, it is likely that the denial of the historicity of Jesus will very soon become the de facto position in wider popular and academic discourse. Th ... Read Article

A couple of years ago I published a critique of the Christ Myth Theory, which Richard Carrier responded to. Well, hit the refresh button because I've updated the essay with an Appendix that responds to Carrier. Check it out HERE! ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In a series of posts about the Hallucination Theory (the view that Jesus' disciples had experiences of the risen Jesus because they had hallucinations of Jesus), one key point that I argued for is that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. This point is also of general relevance to the question: Did God raise Jesus from the dead? That is because the evidence for the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead comes mainly from the Gospels, and the historical reliability of the Gospels is usually supported by the claim that the Gospels contain, or are based upon, eyewitness testimony. So, if eyewitness testimony is unreliable, then this common argument for the historical reliability of the Gospels FAILS. SUMMARIES OF THE RELEVANT POSTS In some of my posts about the Hallucination Theory, I have provided empirical evidence in support of two important factual claims: Human memory is unreliable. Humans are dishonest. In Part 13 of this series, I provided evidence showing tha ... Read Article

Over the last few days, these two debates on the historicity of Jesus have popped up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ick9jHp846Y&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7XLQN67Pto&t I just watched Richard Carrier's friend Godless Engineer interview Jacob Berman on the Christ Myth theory.  I liked it very much and Berman said he thought some of the best evidence for the historical Jesus is 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 where Paul says: 14 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone 16 by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last. Clearly if Paul thought the Jews killed Jesus then Paul thought Jesus was a hi ... Read Article

In my initial post on the word "miracle", I analyzed eight different definitions of the word “miracle” into seven different elements: IMPACT  GENUS  SPECIES  AGENT/CAUSE  EXCEPTION  BASELINE  PURPOSE  In Part 1 of this series of posts, I argued that the element of IMPACT should be eliminated from definitions of “miracle”. I also suggested that the requirements in the GENUS and SPECIES elements of the definition by Habermas were the best, and that the requirement in the SPECIES element of the definition by Evans was also very good and should be a requirement added to the requirement in the SPECIES element of the definition by Habermas. In Part 2, I argued that the AGENT/CAUSE element should be very broad in terms of a definition that captures the ordinary meaning of the word “miracle” (i.e. the very broad requirement in the definition by Habermas), but that in the context of miracles being put forward as evide ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In my initial post on miracles, I analyzed eight different definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements: IMPACT – the emotional or psychological effect of a miracle GENUS – the most general category to which a miracle belongs SPECIES – the sub-category (of the most general category) to which a miracle belongs AGENT/CAUSE – the person(s) or kind of being(s) or kind of thing(s) that brings about a miracle EXCEPTION – the way in which a miracle departs from ordinary or normal circumstances BASELINE – the ordinary or normal circumstances from which a miracle departs PURPOSE – the goal or intention behind the making of a miracle In Part 1 of this series of posts, I argued that the element of IMPACT should be eliminated from definitions of "miracle". I also suggested that the GENUS and SPECIES elements of the definition by Habermas were the best, and that the SPECIES element in the definition by Evans was a ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE I have previously analyzed eight different definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements: In Part 1, I examined the elements of Impact, Genus, and Species. In Part 2, I examined the elements of Cause/Agent, Exception, and Baseline. In Part 3, I argued that we should eliminate the Exception and Baseline elements from the definition of the word "miracle" in order to avoid importing questionable or controversial philosophical assumptions into the definition. THE ELEMENT OF PURPOSE In this current post, I will examine Purpose, the seventh element of definitions of "miracle": PURPOSE – the goal or intention behind the making of a miracle Habermas indicates that miracles must have some sort of purpose, they are "effected for a purpose". This seems only to imply that miracles are events that are produced intentionally by some person or agent. If the definition already requires that God be the cause of the event, then this very general requirement is red ... Read Article

BASELINE AND EXCEPTION ELEMENTS I have analyzed eight different definitions of the word "miracle" into seven elements: Two elements found in most definitions are what I call the "Baseline" and "Exception" elements: BASELINE – the ordinary or normal circumstances from which a miracle departs EXCEPTION – the way in which a miracle departs from ordinary or normal circumstances Only the definition by the Christian philosopher C. Stephen Evans lacks these two elements: An event brought about by a special act of God. (Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion, Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2002, p.76.) I find the clarity and simplicity of Evans' definition appealing, but before I toss aside these two elements (baseline and exception), I will try to determine the REASON why Aquinas and Hume include these two elements in their definitions of "miracle". AQUINAS AND HUME ON MIRACLES AND NATURE Much philosophical discussion about miracle ... Read Article

(2) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Reception History by Halvor Moxnes (3) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Beyond The Jewish Jesus Debate by Adele Reinhartz (4) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Biography by Helen K. Bond (5) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Beyond What is Behind by Chris Keith (6) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Missing Pieces by Mark Goodacre (7) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: RELIGION, VISIONS, AND ALTERNATIVE HISTORICITY by Deane Galbraith (8) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Myth and Mythmaking by Stephen Young (9) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: The Late Latin Quest by Paula Fredriksen (10) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Chartism and the Forgotten Quests by James Crossley (11) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Fame and Aura by Matthew G. Whitlock (12) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Networks by John Kloppenborg (13) The Next Quest For The His ... Read Article

As is clear from the genealogies of Jesus, both of which belong to Joseph, Jesus is adopted into Joseph's bloodline (since he isn't Jesus' biological father), just as the new believer is adopted into the family of God through Jesus who Paul calls the first born of many brethren. Jesus' death is a literary pair with John the Baptist in Mark, though more painful and humiliating, as Jesus' death is a pair with forgiving Stephen's in Luke-Acts. We have characters wondering whether Jesus is John the Baptist raised from the dead, which is just a way of saying Jesus is the new and greater John like Matthew's Jesus is the new and greater Moses. Shedd comments: In our earliest portrayal of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark, the somatic violence of the beheading of John the Baptist and the crucifixion of Jesus are keyed together. Both John and Jesus, for instance, are “handed over” (e.g., 1:14; 15:1, 10, 15), “grasped” (e.g., 6:17; 14:44, 46), and “bound” (e.g., 6:17; 15:1). At Mark 9:11–13, the design ... Read Article

APOCALYPTICISM AND MILLENARIANISM reflect the idea that the end of the age is at hand and would be followed by a judgment. This was the type of thing Jesus and John the Baptist were preaching. The world in which Jesus grew up that gave birth to this worldview was a time of anxiety and instability. Crossley writes: In this essay, I look at more precise comparisons that keep the emphasis on premodern, peasant apocalypticism and millenarianism as a vehicle for expressing discontent with the world.... Put crudely, a minority of urban elites dominated access to power and controlled resources produced by the overwhelmingly rural population from whom surplus was extracted. In the Levant, the town-countryside relationship helps explain class-based conflict, which included urban projects that introduced changes in traditional patterns of households, production, and demands on labor. In Galilee as Jesus was growing up, this involved the rebuilding of Sepphoris and the building of Tiberias, while in Judea this i ... Read Article

As I note in my essay A Critique of the Penal Substitution Interpretation of the Cross of Christ , an extremely important aspect of the resurrection is that Christ as a spirit, Christ in you, could now possess the believer in a positive way as booster, the resister of Satan par excellence and greatly aid the believer in their walk of spiritual warfare. Bazzana argues: A means through which New Testament criticism has been able to avoid dealing with the “spirit world” as a continuum has been to restrict artificially the concept of “possession” only to the influence of evil pneumata or to an illness that must be redressed by eliminating possession itself. Ethnographic study conducted by scholars like Michael Lambek, Janice Boddy, Frederick Smith, and Brent Crosson demonstrates instead that, in almost all cases, possession has a “positive” side as well, one that benefits both mediums and their social groups in various ways. It would be strange if that were not the case also for the early Christ ... Read Article

In previous posts I noted how in Mark we have the satire of how the crafty Jewish leaders were manipulating scripture and tradition to invent a case against Jesus. Matthew shows something similar in one of Satan's temptations of Jesus misusing scripture. In a later addition to the gospel of John, we see this same pattern repeated of Jews trying to trip up Jesus with their knowledge of scripture. Levine writes: According to John 8:2–11, a text absent from the earliest manuscripts of John and sometimes appearing in Luke 21, scribes and Pharisees bring to Jesus in the temple a woman caught in adultery, cite the “law” (the appeal is to Lev 20:10) regarding stoning adulterers, and ask Jesus for his view. Were he to say “stone her,” he would be violating Roman law (adultery was not a capital offense; in John 18:31 Caiaphas tells Pilate that “we” [Jews] are not allowed to execute); it also runs against the direction of rabbinic literature, which attempts to make capital punishment all but impos ... Read Article

I'm a little out of order today, Barber's essay being near the end of the book, but there were some things that are worth addressing now so here we go! Jesus predicting his passion and resurrection is multiply attested to throughout scripture.  However, as Ehrman points out these run contrary to the fact that Mark, despite his Pauline bias promoting the passion and resurrection, contrarily also has Jesus preach ways to salvation different from his death.  To begin his ministry, Jesus preaches the Kingdom, not himself.  He tells of the rich young man who is saved by following the law and giving his money to the poor.  This echoes the image of the sheep and goats in Matthew.  It seems then since Mark is going against his bias to portray the cross and resurrection as the salvific element, Mark has included some ideas about Jesus that go behind Paul and Mark’s use of him.  On Mark’s use of Paul see HERE .  In terms of Jesus’ death, I’d like to look at the Lord’s ... Read Article

Did Jerusalem reflect the final destination for Jesus’ ministry.  Ferda marshals a number of points in the affirmative: the so-called triumphal entry of Jesus to Jerusalem on a donkey, which all the evangelists imply or explicitly state aimed to evoke Zech 9’s prophecy about “the king” coming to Jerusalem; the troublesome “temple saying” about its destruction and rebuilding in three days (Mark 14:57–58; Matt 26:61; John 2:18–22; Acts 6:14; Gos. Thom. 71), which the evangelists handle in very different ways, with some trying to distance Jesus from it; the symbolic action in the temple that, despite its myriad interpretations, likely anticipates a new eschatological temple; the Q saying (13:34–35) in which Jesus expresses his earnest desire to “gather” Jerusalem, and laments that it was thwarted; the parable of the wicked tenants in which Jesus is sent to the vineyard and its keepers—read, the temple and its leadership—understood within the larger sweep of Israe ... Read Article