Note: This is a post written by Chris H. (@unicornwiz) in response to a recently published piece by @GodlessEngineer entitled "Inanna's Descent Matches Jesus' Passion Narratives." Chris can be reached on Twitter or at his email address biblicalhistoryskeptic32ad@gmail.com. Well, today I’m going to do a basic treatment of Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld for one... Continue Reading →
So I decided to host my first livestream discussion and did so with Chris H., a brilliant guy who has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and its relationship to Ancient Near Eastern cultures. We talked about the Gospel of Mark, the Pentateuch, the Canaanite pantheon, textual criticism, the Sea Myth, and so... Continue Reading →
I was finally able to listen to part 2 of "Pete ruins Exodus" over at the podcast The Bible for Normal People. As usual, great material looking at the beginning stages of Moses' call to Egypt, including that bizarre scene in Exodus 4:24-26. The next installment of Koine Greek's reading of the Gospel of Mark... Continue Reading →
"The 'Amalgam Jesus' idea boils down to little more than hand waving. It is a vague and grudging admission that there may be some historical kernels in the story, but a rather muddle-headed attempt to keep this from becoming an acceptance that there was most likely a historical Jesus. As such, it is not so... Continue Reading →
"What would lead people to make all this stuff up – all of it – from scratch? Not just embroidering or adding to existing stories about an existing person, but inventing all of the above, including the bits that clearly work against their purposes? So far, I have not heard an adequate explanation for this.... Continue Reading →
"One would certainly not expect any literary reference to Christians or Christianity or Jesus himself in Roman authors of the first century. Christianity was simply a tiny (TINY) religious movement that no one had heard of. Most Romans would not even have heard the name Christian until probably the middle or end of the second... Continue Reading →
John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, Sacra Pagina, vol. 2 (The Liturgical Press, 2002), 193. If Mark reacts in any way to the Cynic tradition it is rather to distinguish Jesus and his disciples from that tradition and implicitly to reject it as a lifestyle for Christian missionaries. Jesus' disciples are... Continue Reading →
To see all posts in this series, please refer to its index. Last year I wrote a five-part series on Heather Schuldt's terrible attempt at taking on biblical scholar Bart Ehrman.1 Now pop-apologist SJ Thomason wants to have her moment in the sun as she responds to Bart Ehrman's fifteen year old book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who... Continue Reading →
It never ceases to amaze me the lengths to which the inerrancy crowd will go to in order to defend a position "the Bible" never even makes for itself. The worst offenders are by far pop-apologists; people like J Warner Wallace, Hugh Ross, Frank Turek, and SJ Thomason. Whether it's somehow thinking a "forensic" reading... Continue Reading →
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