The Secular Frontier

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 ... Read Article

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 ge ... 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

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 ... Read Article

In 2011 I was searching for scholarship engaging Christ Myth Theorist Earl Doherty, who argued Jesus never existed, and I found Prof James McGrath’s blog where he was critically blogging through Doherty’s book.  For example: Chapter 1 ... 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 firs ... 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 wor ... 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, th ... 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. ... 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.  Ho ... 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 ... Read Article

One of the key points in Walsh’s chapter is the presence of wonder (thaumazein) and how that connects Mark’s book to earlier literary models.  For example, she writes: Thus, in the Gospel of Mark we see an even more pronounced engagement with ... Read Article

In Matthew we read: 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air ... Read Article

Jesus lived in a time and place where a few central urban centers were beginning to incorporate the surrounding rural centers, and Myles begins to ask the Marxist question of how such conditions and dynamics were ripe circumstances to birth the Jesus move ... Read Article

Zeichmann makes the point in Jesus’ time soldiers were not functioning as what we would understand as occupying forces: First is the counterintuitive insight that there was no monolithic “Roman army.” Rather, there were a variety of military for ... Read Article

This essay is a general overview of synagogue life shaping the Jesus story. Runesson writes: These Jewish institutions, which were ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world and, importantly, can be reconstructed based on sources both beyond and w ... Read Article

Rollens’ essay builds on the last one I talked about from Kloppenborg that examines the notion of the scribe in constructing the Jesus tradition.  She notes this argument only really pertains to the Q document, as the Gospels and Acts reflect a mor ... Read Article

John Kloppenborg is one of the foremost experts on the "Q" source, the material common to Matthew and Luke that does not come from Mark. In this essay he tries to get beyond the notion of Jesus as the great genius to the idea that the gospel writings eme ... Read Article

The passage I would like to highlight in Whitlock's essay is: Historical Jesus scholarship must value multiple pieces without synthesis. We are not obligated to provide a complete, unified picture of Jesus. Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim in Toward Decen ... Read Article

This chapter was an occasion for me to reflect on Chartism and unjust death. Crossley notes for the Chartist interpretation of Jesus: Jesus’s death was regularly understood as an example of the unjust end that always awaits the benevolent reformer, ... Read Article

A couple of passages stood out to me in this essay. Firstly, characterizing Augustine's thoughts on time: In that latter masterwork, time emerged as the great divide between humans—intrinsically time-bound and, thus, caught up in confounding proble ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleNU4mAJqg&t ... Read Article

Religious dispositions are not so much viewed as one’s subjective set of beliefs for the faithful but rather the way they experience the world, like how the world might appear/present itself to a schizophrenic in a conspiracy saturated way.  The re ... Read Article

One of the great underreported sins of New Testament scholarship is the problem that, unless we're told by the writers, there is no way to tell whether specific interpretive units like the lord's supper or the empty tomb have their origins as historical m ... Read Article

Some things mythicists point to is the lack of detail about Jesus in Paul, and Mark as allegorical literature. This, though, needs to be qualified in a way that favors historicity, not mythicism. Paul says he resolved to know nothing among you but Chris ... Read Article