Recently I was honored and pleased to be asked to fill in for Bart Ehrman’s popular Podcast on YouTube and other outlets hosted by the fabulous Megan Lewis. I offered a wide-ranging overview of the four “layers” of Paul in terms of historical sources, and we can we then say…
Here is a short interview in which I lay out an interpretation of the famed “Christ Hymn” in Paul’s letter to the Philippians that so many interpreters–from mythicists to evangelical Christian believers consider to support the idea of Jesus as a pre-existent divine Being. I posted this yesterday and it…
One of the enduring questions historians of early Christianity struggle with is the issue of when we can properly speak of the “new religion” of Christianity, as contrasted with a variety of forms of Judaism in the decades following the death of Jesus the Jew. The title of Paula Fredriksen’s book, When…
Please visit my Youtube Channel and Subscribe, for much more to come. I regularly teach a course called “The End of the World as We Know It,” with thanks to REM and Leonard Cohen’s, “The Future.” I did this thirty-minute overview with Derek Lambert, the dynamic host of MythVision Podcasts–which…
Yesterday I did a two hour interview (originally scheduled for September 1st) with Night Light Radio radio host Barbara DeLong on my two books on Paul, namely: Paul and Jesus (2012) and my latest, Paul’s Ascent to Paradise (2020). It was a wide-ranging time covering everything from the possibility that Paul was born…
Yesterday I did a a two-hour interview with David LeBlanc, who hosts a Youtube channel that covers all sorts of Biblically related topics. Yep, you read that right TWO HOURS. We mainly talked about my 2012 book Paul and Jesus which continues to draw a strong readership after nearly a decade. My goal…
One of the most controversial chapters in my book Paul and Jesus is the idea I present in chapter 9, “The Battle of the Apostles,” that despite the early attempts of Paul and the Jerusalem apostles to reconcile their differences in the end they broke with one another over sharp differences. I…
Most of my readers know that the anonymous author of the writing we refer to as the “Gospel of Luke,” in fact, wrote a second volume to his work–known to us today as the “Acts of the Apostles.” The author refers to himself in the first person in the opening…
Last summer I revised my published University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation that was titled Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise, long out of print and selling for $250-$750 used on Amazon! I had had so many requests for it over the years, so, since used booksellers were ripping people off like…
Note to the reader: During the “Covid Summer of 2020” I spent about a month digging through old files from my University of Chicago days–back when I was writing my dissertation at the University of Chicago under Jonathan Z. Smith. I found so many treasures, including these handwritten notes I…