The Pokey Finger of God

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 [...]

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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, [...]

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Marvin Vining, Jesus the Wicked Priest. (C) 2008. Published by Bear and Company, Rochester, VT. www.MarvinVining.com This work is a fascinating reading that combines sources from Dead Sea Scroll materials and Biblical exegesis to produce a surprisingly personal story of conflict between characters in the gospel stories. Vining brings to life a vital, aggressive Jesus, [...]

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I’m beginning to accumulate an unwieldy quantity of historical Jesuses. Less useful in that I’ve moved to a primary narrative that leaves Jesus out altogether. Even so, in the absence of an actual, historical Jesus, we may still create a number of literary Jesuses, each distinct and beloved, and required for generational continuity of the [...]

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The latest issue of BAR revisits the much hyped Gospel of Judas, and has some unkind words for National Geographic and their media-heavy release of the original material. The biggest complaint was that they picked the wrong scholars who didn’t understand Gnostic cultures and misinterpreted key passages of the text. Most significantly, NatlGeo published an [...]

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The Rodney Stark book had a set of maps that easily decomposed into a chart of data that I have proudly appropriated as the basis for a much larger database. Admittedly, it was in the search for much of this data that I discovered Stark’s book, so he saved me a lot of time. I [...]

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First, two biographies on the emperor Constantine. Constantine the Great: The Man and his Times, by Michael Grant, and the ingeniously named Constantine the Great, by John Holland Smith. These are followed by a review of Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome, by Rodney Stark [...]

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This whole Constantine series has been riddled with errors, and the more I re-read them, the more problems I find. In this first one, I totally trash the Roman Emperors portion of the quiz. 1. Big C was the last Tetrarch of the Roman Empire In a sense, he was never really an official Tetrarch, [...]

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Probably the most difficult aspect of studying the origins of Christianity is that there is so much history to plow through. If you pick just one place, you can spend lifetimes exploring the peoples and families that had just been there over the centuries. We know something about the peoples who lived in Mesopotamia in [...]

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