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 Hellenistic Osiris cult as a proof-of-concept. We know from Plutarch that Osiris was also publicly preached as a historical earthly ‘king’ but privately preached to be a celestial whose incarnation, death, and resurrection ‘really’ occur in outer space just below the moon, at the hands of Egypt’s functional equivalent to Satan.

I remember reading about this in Carrier’s Jesus from Outer Space book and thought it a really good example of the process of myth becoming historical

2.

Instead, the ‘Archons of this Aeon’ Jesus was delivered to have to be supernatural entities, because Paul attributes to them not only motives but even a knowledge of the cosmos that no human could possess.57 Gaventa concurs. As does M. David Litwa (“these rulers are probably daimonic agents”)… Of course, like others, Litwa attempts to argue that although Paul does mean demons here, he is nevertheless referring to human agents, by a kind of metonymy, the Jews and Romans being the tools the demons used. But that is exactly what Paul does not say.59 Litwa’s theory requires a layer of ad hoc interpretive assumption; indeed, a rather convoluted one.60 If Paul understood such to be the case, he would have written this sentence quite differently. But as he actually wrote it, he seems only to know of demons having done the crucifying. At best we cannot claim to know he imagined anything else, and so this verse falls away as of no use to defending historicity…It lacks the very details such an employment of it would require. Once again Paul is too vague for historicists to get their surety. Which fact alone is evidence against them—they have to posit that Paul’s repeated vagueness about Jesus’s earthly life is just (strangely) a multiply repeated coincidence, whereas we only have to take him at what he actually says. On our theory, none of this is strange. It’s all exactly what Paul would say.

A 2-fold reading of Romans would be helpful here in that one model of salvation is from sin as transgression, where another model is sin as enslaved by Sin as a demonic entity and hence a spell that needs to be broken.  And we see this in the gospels of John and Matthew with Satan entering Judas.  For the former in Romans, which we also see in Mark, we need a substitutionary atonement cross that pays our fine for us.  But, to open our eyes and break the spell of the entity Sin’s possession of us we need to place ourselves in the world that wrongfully killed God’s chosen Davidic messiah where we see what the world has done and what we also would have done, and so this circumcises the fleshly from our hearts and reveals the Law written from it.  Consider if you were a Roman citizen 2000 years ago, you probably would have cheered along with the crowd at the Christians being fed to the lions, even though from the perspective of 2000 years we find the spectacle horrific. Similarly, one of the reasons we find people being gadflies as not deserving of capital punishment is we see the understandable at the time, but now seen as unjust, killing of Socrates. On the one hand, a sacrifice is needed to appease God’s judicial wrath, but on the other hand the Old Testament says God doesn’t want a sacrifice but a contrite heart.  There can be no true repentance if we can’t see our faults:

For you have no delight in sacrifice;

    if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

    a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:16-17)

For Paul, the cross is part of the salvific structure in response to sin, but is limited in effect.  You must in recognition of your now-realized impotence invite the risen Christ to possess you to help defy sin and walk a godly life.  Alcoholics Anonymous teaches something similar. Paul says “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).”  The cross breaks the spell, but actually living a sin diminished life requires angelic possession – Christ in you, the defender against temptation par excellence. And so, the conversion of the soldiers at the cross is not because he recognize substitutionary atonement, but the soldier in Mark sees Jesus as a paradigmatic soldier following orders unto death, and the soldier in Luke realizes Christ’s innocence.