PREVIOUSLY: Merry Christmas! Jesus’s Bloodline in Matthew NOW: There’s another interesting feature of Matthew’s genealogy. There are women in it who are associated with sexual immorality in the Old Testament, who Spong labeled the Shady Ladies: The incest of Tamar, the prostitution of Rahab, the seduction of Ruth and the adultery of Bathsheba were the … (2/2) Merry Christmas! Jesus’s Bloodline in Matthew

Want to know a fun fact? In Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (really of Joseph) we see Joseph adopted Jesus into a family with a Davidic royal bloodline. This fits in with the idea that Jesus was to restore the Davidic throne. God, after all, had promised the Davidic throne would be reestablished. Yet in Jesus’s … Merry Christmas! Jesus’s Bloodline in Matthew

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 … (2/2) Response To Richard Carrier And The Christ Myth Theory

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! Your name Your email Subject Your message (optional)

Over the last few days, these two debates on the historicity of Jesus have popped up: 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 … Recent Online Debates on The Christ Myth Theory

(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 … Complete Index Blogging The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus Anthology Of Essays

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 … (24) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Violence and Trauma by Nathan Shedd

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. … (23) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: APOCALYPTICISM AND MILLENARIANISM by James Crossley

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 … (22) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Spirit World by Giovanni B. Bazzana

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 … (21) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Sexuality by Amy-Jill Levine