Western support for Israel, I have heard, is in large measure rooted in an identification with a state that represents our Judeo-Christian heritage, our values. But on to another topic…. From https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-24/truth-yoorrook/105090138 ELIZABETH BALDERSTONE: There’s many historians who’ve written a lot on this and researched in depth the story of what happened here. There were ..read more

Coming in at #7 — others have been urging me to do more about publicity, and I keep meaning to, but here we are…. https://bloggers.feedspot.com/atheist_blogs/ . Not really happy about seeing Vridar in the same list as History for Atheists, though. ?  Maybe I should take that as reason enough to do more about what ..read more

A possible objection Traditional attempts to explain Christian origins have had to rely on hypotheses about oral traditions (and more recently memory theory), on hypothetical constructions of long lost Christian-like communities. The letters of Paul have been read by and large at face value, ignoring the scholarship that should warn us that such a reading ..read more

How and when did Christianity begin? By “independent evidence” I mean sources that refer to the letters other than the letters themselves, such as the Church Fathers Irenaeus and Tertullian of the late second century. If we rely on the letters themselves we might choose to date them by their reference to a ruler of ..read more

This post is a sequel to Not Finding the First Jesus, Look for the Last. What follows assumes one has read that post. It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the ..read more

Seeking, but not finding I think I have been searching in the wrong places for the origin of the Jesus figure in our New Testament writings. Of course it would be easiest to assume that there is some truth to the gospel narratives and that there was a historical preacher by that name who was ..read more

For readers who may not have had opportunities to have been made aware of the historical context of today’s conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories, I began posting in July 2010 a history of the Zionist movement as documented by the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha. His sources were primarily the official archives (e.g. the ..read more

Two books, surely of interest to some of us, are currently open source — free to download — until 24th/27th February 2025: Rescorla, Michael. Bayesian Models of the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108955973. Abstract: Bayesian decision theory is a mathematical framework that models reasoning and decision-making under uncertain conditions. The Bayesian paradigm originated as ..read more

What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look. A friend of mine, the philosopher and magician David Abram, used to be the house magician at Alice’ s Restaurant in Massachusetts (made famous by the Arlo Guthrie song). Every night he passed around the tables ..read more

This post is the final in my series discussing Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Nina Livesey (NL) sees the letters of Paul being composed and published in a philosophical school setting in Rome in the second century CE. There were many schools of this type in ..read more