This is the final guest post by Kyle Smith, based on his recently published book about martyrs and the cult of the saints in Christianity. There is a special bonus for this post! A significant discount offer to buy the book. Go for it! And whether or not you do buy the book, feel free to ask him questions or make comments on this post, on a widely misunderstood but important topic. Kyle is the author or coauthor of five books about Christian saints and martyrs, including Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). As a special bonus for readers of the blog, you can buy Cult of the Dead today at 40% off the cover price! Click here to order directly from the University of California Press, then select “UC Press” under the “Buying Options” drop down menu and enter coupon code CULT40 at checkout. Offer valid until March 31, 2023. ****************************** The Christian passion for martyrdom began with the cross, but it is often forgotten that this [...]

Last week in my class on "Jesus in Scholarship and Film" we were discussing the intriguing little fact that when Jesus is baptized, the voice of God that comes from heaven to call him his Son says different things in each of the three Synoptic Gospels (there is no voice in the Gospel of John).  How does one explain that?  It made me think of the Gospel of the Ebionites, and I started wondering if I ever talked about it on the blog. It turns out the answer is yes.  Here is a post devoted to it, from years ago -- which begins with a general discussion of it along with two other "Jewish-Christian Gospels," and ends with a description of its rather clever way of reconciling the three accounts of the voice from heaven. ****************************** Yesterday in my graduate seminar we spent three hours analyzing the three so-called “Jewish-Christian Gospels.” These are very tricky texts to deal with. We don’t have any manuscripts of them – even small fragments. They come to us, instead, [...]

In my previous posts I discussed a class I once taught at Rutgers University on how the various biblical authors deal with the problem of suffering – the problem of how there can be such horrible suffering in a world that is said to be controlled by an all-loving and all-powerful God (who therefore wants the best for people and is able to provide it).  Many of my students, as I pointed out, think that there’s an easy answer:  we suffer because of “free will.”  If we weren’t free to love and hate, to do good and do harm, we would just be robots or computers, not humans.  If God wanted to create humans, as opposed to machines, necessarily we have to be free to hurt others.  And many people do so, often in horrendous ways. Does that solve the problem?  Naturally we dealt with that issue in my class.  Here is how I discussed those conversations in my book on suffering, God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – [...]

In my previous post I began to talk about how thinkers in the Jewish and Christian traditions have wrestled with the problem of suffering.  I indicated that the technical term for this “problem” is “theodicy,” and it is often said to involve the status of three assertions which all are typically thought to be true by those in these two religions, but if true appear to contradict one another.  The assertions are these: God is all-powerful. God is all-loving. There is suffering. How can all three be true at once?  If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants (and can therefore remove suffering).  If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people (and therefore does not want them to suffer).  And yet people suffer.  How can that be explained?   As I pointed out some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions: either God is not actually all powerful, or he is not all loving, or there is no suffering. But [...]