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Engaging Discussions about Early Christianity

Response to my Newsweek Article on Christmas

Earlier this week I posted my Newsweek article on Christmas from four years ago, and several people have asked me what kind of reaction I received.  I made two posts about that at the time.  Here’s the first.  I find this post rather humorous now, years later, since I was obviously being wildly defensive (halfway through the response) before denying I was defensive at all (at the end)!  What funny people we can be…. ******************************************************** My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response.  I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life.  A lot of these respondents think that anyone [...]

2020-04-03T02:48:19-04:00December 2nd, 2016|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|
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Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 2

Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012.  Here is Part 2! *************************************************************** Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched.   That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications.   Rarely do we have the same reaction to familiar stories known from childhood that are also spectacularly miraculous, and that probably sound just as bizarre to outsiders who hear them for the first time.  Are the stories about Jesus’ birth that are in the New Testament any less far-fetched? It depends whom you ask.   This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.  Before his ascent to the head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger was best known as a leading [...]

2020-12-17T16:30:13-05:00November 29th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|
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More Responses to My Newsweek Article

When the editor at Newsweek ask me if I would be willing to write an article on the birth of Jesus, I was hesitant and wrote him back asking if he was sure he really wanted me to do it. I told him that I seem to be incapable of writing anything that doesn’t stir up controversy. It must be in my blood. Still, he said that they knew about my work and were not afraid of controversy, and they did indeed want an article from me. What’s interesting to me is that I’ve been getting it from all sides. I don’t know why that should surprise me. It seems to be the story of my life. For years my agnostic and atheist readers were cheering me on from the sidelines as I talked about the problems posed by a critical study of the New Testament: there are discrepancies and contradictions, the Gospels are not written by eyewitnesses, and the stories they contain were modified over time, and many of them were invented, in the [...]

2020-04-03T19:08:44-04:00December 15th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|
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Responses to my Newsweek Article

My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response.  I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life.  A lot of these respondents think that anyone who thinks that the New Testament contains discrepancies is too smart for his or her own good and blind at the same time (not sure how it can go both ways, but there it is). I’ve also been getting a lot of email from incensed readers, including a sixteen-year old girl who tells me that she is a Pentecostal Christian who has read the Bible 160 times and is now starting her 161st; she was [...]

2018-01-01T01:26:12-05:00December 14th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Religion in the News|
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Cover Stories on Jesus

Apologies to all for being “off” the blog for a couple of days. I’ve been in D.C. getting ready and primed for a new course that I’ll be doing with the Great Courses; it will be an audio course (no video for this one) called “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christianity,” where I deal with some hot topics, including two that I’ve been hitting here on the blog lately (Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem? And Was Jesus’ Mother a Virgin?), and others I haven’t (Was Paul the Real Founder of Christianity? Did the Jews Kill Jesus? Did Constantine Decide Which Books Would Be in the New Testament? Etc.) – 24 lectures altogether. I’ll be taping in February. (Now that I’ve thought about it, I think every lecture could be given with one word: No!) And while I was in D.C. – just yesterday – I learned that a story I wrote for Newsweek on the birth of Jesus was made the cover story this week. It’s kind of a goofy cover, but hey, I had [...]

2020-04-03T19:09:05-04:00December 11th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Religion in the News|
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