A Platinum post for Platinum members from Platinum member Steve Clark: ****************************** It was a cold winter morning, the exciting music of the 1970’s was in my head. I was learning to play guitar and learning to be cool. Mostly failing at both but kept trying. What else was a young man to do in the 70’s? I was walking around Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta (my friends called it the concrete campus) and had a spring in my step as I stepped into Philosophy 101 class. In the days to come we were assigned materials to read and one of them was Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell.   Like many in the South grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist environment. And like many had never heard anyone criticize Jesus. Ever. Why would they and what would there be to criticize? The short portion of the lecture Russell pens (and pins) directly on Jesus is extremely mild. He appears borderline apologetic about it. For me though, fitting with the [...]

  ****************************** Was Jesus a simplistic person or an extraordinary one? Omar Abur-Robb omr-mhmd.yolasite.com   Suppose you were in a hill overseeing a large lake, and suddenly you noticed a wave propagating quickly outward. You will instinctively realize that this wave has originated from its center, and you can probably pinpoint this center with ease by looking at the wave. However, your eyes will open wildly in astonishment and your scientific mind will turn upside down when you see the wave reaching the shore then jumping to the next lake and start propagating there. This is going to be a very weird phenomenon. But this exact phenomenon needs to be included in our explanatory models for the expansion of Christianity: The point of propagation for Christianity was the point of establishment at 30AD, and in less than 20 years, the teaching of Jesus managed to propagate outside its local domain to many foreign domains. This is an extraordinary phenomenon. Notice that the Greek Christians were very serious in their faith to the point that many [...]

A post for Platinum members only from Rizwan Ahmed ****************************** “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matthew 24:34, Luke 21:32) A little over a century ago, Albert Schweitzer, through his famous book “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”, revolutionized and reshaped our understanding of the historical figure of Jesus. He convincingly argued that Jesus should be best understood as an apocalyptic Jewish prophet. That is, a prophet who heralded the coming end of the world, in which God would intervene in history and finally bring about absolute justice and righteousness to the world. A tremendous event in which all who ever lived would be raised from the dead and judged. The good would be rewarded with eternal life while the wicked would suffer eternal punishment. This was a popular concept within Jewish thought even prior to Jesus and continued to be so during his days. While the Synoptic Gospels make it clear that Jesus espoused such views, the question arises as to when this [...]

For Platinum members, from Platinum member Omar Abur-Robb: ****************************** Was Jesus literate or Illiterate omr-mhmd.yolasite.com   Scholars are in difference regarding whether Jesus was literate or not, and I would like to explore this subject. Most of the people who lives in Galilee at the time of Jesus were peasants, and most of the peasants were poor, and most of the poor peasants were illiterate. Therefore, we can conclude that Jesus was illiterate. But the above conclusion was based on a “null hypothesis”. “Null hypotheses” are statements of probability. So ... Let Sam be one of the people who lived in Galilee at that time. We know nothing about Sam except that he lived in Galilee. Therefore, the probability of Sam being a poor illiterate peasant is very high, and the probability otherwise is very low. Therefore, the “null hypothesis” (that is the “initial assumption”) about anyone living in Galilee is that they were poor illiterate peasants. However, there is no evidence that every single peasant in Galilee was poor illiterate. In the contrary, you [...]

  ****************************** Was Levi of Alphaeus the "the Beloved Disciple"? A Redaction Critical Approach   Since the discovery of the Gospel of Peter, scholars have speculated about the missing words after the mention of "Levi of Alphaeus" in the final sentence, which breaks off. The sentence reads, "But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew, having taken our nets, went off to the sea. And there was with us Levi of Alphaeus whom the Lord [blank]," (Tr. Raymond Brown). How should we fill in the blank? Could it be "whom the Lord [loved],"? Many scholars have wondered whether this mention of Levi of Alphaeus in the Gospel of Peter might solve the mystery of the identity of "the other disciple" in the Gospel of John, "the one whom Jesus loved".   I have discovered literary clues to support this suspicion. "Levi son of Alphaeus", a major character in Mark's gospel, becomes utterly obscure in Matthew's redaction of Mark's story. My hypothesis is that the identity of John's "other disciple" borrows from Matthew's peculiar literary penchant [...]