Register now for my online course on the historicity of Jesus! It starts again next month: learn the best arguments pro and con (so not just my case against it, but also the best arguments and evidence for it), as well as the cultural and historical background of the origin of Christianity (invaluable knowledge no matter what you conclude about Jesus). How could Christianity begin without a Jesus? And how can that even be plausible? Find out!
This is the best chance to get a thorough look at the whole historicity debate of the last decade, and get to ask a Ph.D. expert in the field all the questions you ever had about it.
We’ll go through my book On the Historicity of Jesus chapter by chapter and discuss its contents, and look at some additional resources and challenges. By the end, you’ll be able to converse informedly about all the main issues in the debate: what the best evidence is for the historical Jesus, why it can be questioned and how, and how you can decide for yourself whether theories without a historical Jesus are better or not. You will also have the opportunity to ask me all the questions you want, challenge me with all the arguments you’ve run into, and otherwise pick my brain on all the related issues you think important.
And of course, what I don’t cover in this course, probably isn’t true or usable. So this is a chance to see what stands out as reliable, amidst all the bad arguments for Jesus being mythical that infest the internet. Want to be inoculated against the “fake news” in the mythicism debate, so you can only stand on good arguments and not bad ones, and aren’t fooled into believing what isn’t well founded? This is the course for you!
Sign up! Questioning or Defending the Historicity of Jesus begins April 1 (suitably April Fool’s Day!) and goes one month, covering four units, one per week. There are no timed events so you can do the readings or post questions or engage in the forum discussions whenever you want, any day and time that suits you. All the course materials, including the discussions, stay available for you to consult or download for an additional month after that.
The only course text you must acquire (if you don’t already have it) is my book On the Historicity of Jesus. Everything else will be provided. For a more complete course description, and how to register, visit the course announcement page. Special bonus: you can also get a discount on registration by entering the coupon code 2277437.
Do you know why in acts 8:2 the writer did not identify the devout men that buried Stephen.
Because the author didn’t know or didn’t consider it important. It hardly matters; good chance no such event ever happened anyway (see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 381-833).
If Christianity just started out as a small cult as some believe then how can you explain it becoming so widespread so early as to be known and be of concern (a threat) to Jews so early on. If we are to believe Paul, prior to becoming a Christian he was killing Christians that he encountered. In a day and age with no social media I would be surprised that Jews would even know that such a small cult exist, let alone be up to speed on and threatened by their beliefs. I’m surprised that Paul even happened to encounter many of them.
Christianity’s rate of growth was actually the same as all other religions. See Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 18, for data and scholarship.
This is in fact a strong argument against Christianity’s truth: there was nothing at all remarkable about it (see Ch. 2 in The End of Christianity for the Bayesian demonstration of that conclusion).
Paul never mentions killing Christians. He never says in what ways he persecuted Christians, nor even why.
Paul makes clear that Christians were always trying to convert other Jews to their sect. Acts portrays them even entering synagogues, everywhere, to do so. That’s how Jewish authorities discovered them. It would thus be how Paul did.
There is actually no evidence many Jews were even all that concerned with Christianity. Only a rare few ever bothered to actively oppose it in any way. Paul says many Christian churches resided in Judea, indeed even in Jerusalem, still even after twenty years of preaching and recruiting there; so the persecution obviously was fairly mild.