The Pokey Finger of God

Following are the assertions I currently use regarding the origin of Christianity. These will likely each be expanded upon over time.
1. Evidence: There is no physical evidence for the existence of a single, rapidly developed mystery cult whose theology or structure singularly informed the post 4th-century Christian church. There is no art, architecture, ritual gear, [...]

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I’m getting that sand-through-the-fingers feeling again. Just when I thought I had pegged the origins of “Christianity” via Constantine, I got all caught up on the question of pre-existing material. How can we know what it was he actually defined himself, and what was pre-existing? Of the pre-existing materials, why were some things chosen and [...]

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I’m starting to become overwhelmed (again) with revising my understanding of 1st-4th Centuries CE. On one hand, I can still clearly point to the council of Nicea in 325AD and say that this was the place at which Constantine (re-)created Christianity. On the other, I’m completely befuddled regarding which characters were real and which were [...]

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Since discovery of PRF Brown’s site[1], I have burned a good many hours both reading and thinking. It’s clear that the “Eusebian Fiction Postulate”[2] has forced me to re-examine what I thought I understood about early church history. I have been relatively pleased, so far, to find that it seems to make more sense, given [...]

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I just got pointed to P.R.F. Brown’s amazing site. He has posted quite a bit of research to his site — including a few projects I had started myself and am right glad I don’t have to finish them, now, like the list of all known writers in the ancient Western world, categorized and dated. [...]

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Philip occupies a rather unusual corner of the canon. On the one hand, he’s one of the first people Jesus recruits[1] and he’s shown recruiting other apostles[2] as well as bringing the early Church to Samaria[3]. On the other hand, he’s very much a bit part: he does not appear as a significant actor in [...]

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After I posted my review of Marvin Vining’s Jesus the Wicked Priest, he contacted me to thank me for the review and asked me to send him questions. Heh, heh, heh. So I did. My questions:

You claim that Essenes were the dominant culture and that their leader, the “Teacher of Righteousness,” was also the [...]

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Two of my current research questions concern the origins of the Christian cult. The first is related to some earlier work I had to attempting to map the development of Christianity. I would like to be able to establish, as much as possible, the course of development. To this end, I am collecting as many [...]

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I was looking to see what content wiki had on early Christianity, when I found a link to a digital version of papers written by Martin Luther King, Jr, when he was in divinity school. Most immediately, I’ve enjoyed his study of Mithraism and his paper on Mystery Religions in Christianity.
It is at this point [...]

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April D. DeConick, The Thirteenth Apostle. (c) 2007, Continuum. London, New York.
This scholarly translation of the recently discovered Gospel of Judas attempts to address some inaccuracies and misrepresentations made in the original translation. DeConick’s translation work began the day the plates from the National Geographic scholars had been released. Reading from the original Coptic, it [...]

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