Author: Robert M. Price
Robert M. Price is the author of Beyond Born Again: The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, The Case Against ‘The Case for Christ,’ and other books. He is also the host of the podcasts The Bible Geek and The Human Bible.
Saint Peterasty
The Roman Catholic Church reached the point of crisis some years ago. The ever-expanding scandal of priestly sexual abuse and, just as bad, the intricate and systematic cover-up by the highest authorities has deepened the shadows in which lay Catholics have painfully struggled. What should they do? Leave the Church for Eastern Orthodoxy or Episcopalianism? …
Why Jesus Mythicists Should Abandon Secular Humanism
A leading Mythicist rebuts an earlier critique.
The Christian Fallacy: The Real Truth about Jesus and the Early History of Christianity
The Christian Fallacy cherry-picks intriguing but highly dubious hypotheses … and cobbles together from them a chain of weak links.
Bait and Switch
Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower: Finding Answers in Jesus for Those Who Don’t Believe, by Tom Krattenmaker (New York: Convergent, 2016, ISBN 978-1-101-90642-2) 245 pp. Hardcover, $25.00. Despite the title, Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower, this book is classified by the publisher on the dust jacket as “Religion-Spiritual,” and it is. One wonders …
Trojan Horde
Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints was not clairvoyant, but in 2015 it sure seems prophetic.
An Important Book
A review of An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself, by Earl M. Wunderli.
Why I Am Not a Liberal, and You Shouldn’t Be Either
Sometimes I am asked how I can combine utter skepticism on religious topics with a conservative political stance, as if the two were somehow inconsistent. Here is an answer.
A Conversation That’s Fodder for More
God or Godless: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions, by John W. Loftus and Randal Rauser (Ada, MI: Baker Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8010-1528-1) 203 pp. Paperback, $13.99. Baker deserves a lot of credit for publishing God or Godless: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions. It represents a departure from the traditional evangelical Christian …
Does the Bible Vilify Israel?
No, I’m not asking the old (but good) question of whether the New Testament gives Jews a bum rap. I want to make the argument that the process of unfairly condemning Jews, or Israelites, already begins in the Old Testament. We still read in Jewish as well as Christian writers, even ecumenically sensitive ones, about …
Old Religion for a New World
The Messiah Game: A Comedy of Terrors, Book I, by Tom Flynn (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-937276-04-1) 245 pp. Paperback, $11.95. Who but Tom Flynn could have written such a book? Anyone familiar with his keenly insightful and humorous essays will discover in these pages that his skills as a teller of tales …
Analyzing Jesus’s Words
What Jesus Didn’t Say, by Gerd Lüdemann (Salem, Oregon: Polebridge Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-59815-030-8). IV + 133 pp. Paper, $18.00. When the members of the Jesus Seminar finished sifting through the sayings and stories of the Gospels, their goal was to construct a database from which one might reconstruct the career and teaching of the historical …
The Problem of the Parables
Readers may know that I have argued that exactly none of the Gospel sayings “of Jesus” stem from a historical Jesus of Nazareth, and not for the simple reason that there was no historical Jesus. No, my reasoning on that score is inductive, not deductive. My initial working hypothesis was to assume there had been …
Joseph Smith: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?
I have been convinced for some time that Joseph Smith’s claims about the discovery of the Golden Plates were a hoax, that Smith himself wr ote the Book of Mormon, that he forged the “Reformed Egyptian” writing he showed to Professor Charles Anthon, and that the whole imposture grew out of Smith’s earlier career as …
The Prosecutor’s Case Against Christanity
Divinity of Doubt: The God Question, by Vincent Bugliosi (New York: Vanguard Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59315-629-9) 352 pp. Cloth, $26.99. Vincent Bugliosi has been a personal hero of mine since I saw the CBS television movie Helter Skelter in 1976. He successfully prosecuted the self-styled Antichrist Charles Manson in the face of police incompetence and …
A Failure to Deliver
An Enlightened Philosophy: Can an Atheist Believe Anything?, by Geoff Crocker (Hampshire, U.K.: O Books, 2011, ISBN 978-1-8-84694-424-6) 132 pp. Paper $13.95. Author Geoff Crocker is, like this reviewer, an atheist and former evangelical Christian. Perhaps as a result of religious nostalgia, Crocker wants to supplement reductionistic materialism with a depth derived from biblical mythology …
Jesus in Smallville
The Myths of Jesus’ Childhood No Account In Nazareth The earliest known Gospel, Mark, has no tale to tell of Jesus before his baptism as an adult. There is nothing about a miraculous conception or birth, no angelic annunciation, no child prodigy stories such as we find in the other New Testament Gospels. Considered as …