Category: Original Christianity
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Why Was Jesus Murdered?
Theories about how Jesus’ death dealt with our separation from God have come and gone throughout church history. The favored, traditional Christian doctrine is that Jesus was sacrificed on the cross to “forgive our sins”. This is believed to be crucial since those sins were holding us apart from God’s “justification” and, it is believed, our resultant ticket to God’s heaven when we die. More cynical observers say that this is simply the “Get out of Hell free” version of Jesus’s death. Just as there are sound, biblically founded reasons to accept this theory, there are equally valid reasons to…
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Jesus’s Nature
Christian tradition has long affirmed that Jesus is divine—one “person” of a triune Godhead. This framework interprets His authority, miracles, and exaltation as evidence of inherent deity. Yet the New Testament also presents Jesus as a fully human figure who lived, acted, and suffered within the constraints of human biology. A second model has garnered some support and that is the idea that God manifested Himself as the human Jesus, so-called Modalism[i]. In this model, God presents an image that is indistinguishable from a biological human, and expresses God’s character and power. A coherent alternative to divinity arises when we…
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The Singular God and the Divine Christ: A Case for Modalism
Only some people believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, the same thing as God. Almost none of those believe that God is a singularity. They would say that He is “three in One”. Does the assertion of Jesus’s divinity by itself create a dichotomy between these two ideas, as many claim? The purpose of this piece is to demonstrate that a single Divinity does not represent a dichotomy but rather a transcendent truth that goes by the label “Modalism”. We will look at some of the voluminous textual evidence that supports this case and find that, far from being…
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Jesus in Light of Paul in Light of Jesus
There has been a long-running tradition in scholarship of complaining that Paul tried to establish his own religion apart from the teachings of Jesus. I claim this is a position of ignorance, and perhaps academic agenda, not because Jesus’ and Paul’s words aren’t different – they are. But, rather, because they simply haven’t understood how the two messages interoperate within the context of the larger plan of God. In this larger context, of God’s redemption of Israel and the world to Himself, their messages were a duality, with one integrally supporting the other.
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Forgiven, or Transformed to Righteousness?
For centuries, the traditional, Christian interpretation of Jesus’ death has been that it was an atonement for the sins of those who would choose to “believe” and follow Him. This scenario portrayed a kind of cosmic cleansing for those who believed, though no one told us what that meant. A common assumption is that having one’s sins atoned for/forgiven is having them excused. For the record, not everyone completely bought the cosmic cleansing story, citing texts (e.g. Luke) that didn’t completely embrace the sacrificial atonement theme.
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The Fraudulence of “Biblical Historians”
Just a quick note. Over the past many years in reading the work of “Biblical Historians” I have been struck by what, perhaps, should have been self-evident to me from the beginning. These “scholars” are not trying to understand why, for example, Jesus’ disciples all chose (with the exception of John who was exiled to an island to live out his life) to be martyred rather than renounce their faith — at least according to the accepted tradition.
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Learning the Real Paul (and Unlearning What You’ve Been Taught)
Scholars and expositors have been mangling Paul’s message in his epistles (particularly Romans) for centuries. If we are to see Paul’s true message, we’re going to have to dig much more deeply into the text, and then unlearn nearly everything we thought we knew. No small undertaking. But in so doing, we will also see revealed the true Gospel message of not only the entire New Testament, but the Hebrew Bible as well, as one grand story. And once you’ve seen this story accurately, it is doctrine- and theology-upending to the point that you will never again read your Bible…
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The Letters of James and Paul — Different?
There is an undercurrent of opinion amongst scholars of the early Church and Bible students that James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul the Apostle proclaimed two different gospels – that the book of James contains an authentic look into 1st century Jewish Christianity and what his brother, Jesus, taught, while Paul’s epistles lay out a completely different “religion”. Some of these also believe that, since Paul wrote first, that aspects of his letters were borrowed by the Gospel writers, thus propagating the Paul version of Christianity throughout nearly the entire New Testament. Is this viewpoint correct?
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Paul’s Real Gospel
When you hear a respected biblical scholar reinforcing with conviction what you’ve been learning – and teaching – for the last ten or twenty years, it’s a big deal, not to mention quite the affirmation. Such was my case in coming across a lecture by Dr. Jason Staples (one of my favorite New Testament scholars) in 2024 entitled “Salvation by Moral Transformation: What Paul Really Meant by Grace”. Not to be too dramatic but Staples’ insights into Paul’s real message will be at least as explosive within the traditionalist community as was “The New Perspective on Paul”[i] of Messrs. NT…