No matter the time of year, either Easter or Christmas or some other Holy Day is coming! Learn how to critically examine the Book that these celebrations almost loosely aren’t based on. The best fake news ever. Master how to debate and understand the Christian Bible skeptically and skillfully. Spread the word to everyone you know who might want to learn about this from a real expert!
That’s right. You can now take my video course: Introduction to Biblical Scholarship on the New Testament online at MythVision Courses. See a five-minute video explaining its content and how to register. This is your chance to learn a lot of knowledge and skills you can use to debate on the internet and combat Christian apologetics and propaganda, and even just understand its history. And students who take this course also get to ask a published expert any questions they want on the course’s topics, simply by commenting on any blog post on the same subject here (use the categories dropdown menu to the right to find one), and mentioning you’re a student of this course!
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This class is for anyone who wants to be better equipped to debate or understand the Bible or the religions based on it. You will learn a lot of useful and surprising facts and skills. More than almost any Christian you meet. You’ll even learn how to understand a lot about the New Testament in the original Greek, without having to learn Greek! Ever want to know how to test the merits of an English translation? Well this is the course for you!
The only required course text is my anthology Hitler Homer Bible Christ (available in print or kindle), which students should purchase as soon as possible, and read along with the videos (the course webpage includes a syllabus for every lecture). You will use its contents as springboards for learning and discussing all manner of issues related to textual, historical, and literary analysis in New Testament studies. Some other course materials (articles and/or video lectures) will be provided through online links, including research papers by various scholars, and excerpts from critical scholarly editions of the Bible in the original Greek (no prior knowledge of Greek will be required), public online tools, and other readings and resources.
You can register now. Or anytime. You get lifetime access to the course videos and materials. And spread the word to anyone else you know who might be interested in taking this course!
What This Course Will Teach You
Your instructor will be Richard Carrier, Ph.D., who has years of training from Columbia University in paleography, papyrology, and ancient Greek. He will teach you the basics of how to investigate, criticize, and study the New Testament from the perspective of how its text is constructed from manuscripts, as well as how to work from the original Greek without learning anything more than the Greek alphabet and the international terminology of grammar, and how to investigate and make the best use of academic and peer reviewed biblical scholarship.
Students will learn how to: locate words in the Greek text of the Bible, and find their definitions using online resources, and to use that skill to critically examine English translations; check if the manuscripts disagree on what the text says at that point, and what to make of that if they do; talk and reason about disagreements in the manuscripts, as well as the differing valences of words between modern translations and ancient originals; discern what kinds of errors and deliberate alterations are common in the biblical manuscripts; and how to use scholarship on the New Testament critically and informedly.
This course will also be a basic introduction to the contents of the New Testament and its composition, textual history, and assembly. After a month you will have a much better understanding and skill-set for studying, discussing, and arguing over, the content and history of the Christian Bible, as well as learn fascinating and interesting things about ancient history and how we know what we know about it from the perspective of how all ancient writing has been preserved yet distorted in transmission.
As a video course series, you learn at your own pace and on your own time, and put in as much or as little work into it as you want.
