Who Created Christianity?

Who Created Christianity? PDF Author: Craig Evans
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
ISBN: 168307372X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Who Created Christianity? is a collection of essays by top international Christian scholars who desire to reinforce the relationship that Paul had with Jesus and Christianity. There is a general sense today among Christians in certain circles that Pauls teachings to the early Christian church are thought to be "rogue," even clashing at times with Jesus words. Yet these essays set out to prove that the tradition that Paul passes on is one received from Jesus, not separate from it. The essays in this volume come from a diverse and international group of scholars. They offer up-to-date studies of the teachings of Paul and how the specific teachings directly relate to the earlier teachings of Jesus. This volume explores with even greater focus than ever before the tradition from which Paul emerges and the specific teachings that are part of this tradition. This collection of essays proposes a complementary work to the work of David Wenham and his thesis that Paul was indeed not the founder of Christianity or the creator of Christian dogma; instead he was a faithful disciple and a conveyer of a prior Christian tradition. Key points and features: • Includes essays by well-known Christian scholars such as Craig Blomberg, Alister McGrath, N. T. Wright, Michael Bird, Greg Beale, and more. CONTRIBUTORS: 1. Paul and Jesus: Issues of Continuity and Discontinuity in Their Discussion by Stanley E. Porter 2. How and Why Paul Invented "Christian Theology" by N. T. Wright 3. The Origins of Pauls Gospel by Graham H. Twelftree 4. When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Continues to Be Lost in History Past and Present by Stanley E. Porter 5. Paul and the Jesus Tradition: An Old Question and Some New Answers by Rainer Riesner 6. Continuity and Development in the Ministries of Jesus and of Paul by Christoph W. Stenschke 7. Pauls Significant Other in the "We-Passages" by Joan E. Taylor 8. Whose Gospel Is It Anyway? The Glory of Christ in the Prophetic Ministry of Paul according to His "My Gospel" and "Our Gospel" by Aaron W. White 9. David Wenham, "The Little Apocalypse," Pauland Silas by Bruce Chilton 10. The Parallels between 1 and 2 Thessalonians against the Background of Ancient Parallel Letters and Speeches by Armin D. Baum 11. Metanoia: Jesus, Paul, and the Transformation of the Believing Mind by Alister McGrath 12. You Would Not Believe If You Were Told: Eschatological Unbelief in Early Christian Apologetics by Peter Turnill 13. Paul on Food and Jesus on What Really Defiles: Is There a Connection? by Craig A. Evans 14. Gospel Women Remembered by Sarah Harris 15. Women in the Pauline Epistles: Lessons from the Jesus Tradition by Erin Heim 16. Twelve Theses on Matthew and Paul: The Jewish Gospel and the Apostle to the Gentiles by Michael F. Bird 17. Paul and the Paternoster: Some Mainly Matthew Observations about a Pauline Prayer by Nathan Ridlehoover 18. The Rediscovery of David Wenhams Rediscovery: Reflections on a Pre-Markan Eschatological Discourse Thirty-Six Years on by Craig Blomberg 19. Portraits of Jesus and Paul through the Lukan Lens by Steve Walton 20. "Every Sin That a Person Commits Is Outside the Body" (1 Corinthians 6:18b): Pauls Likely Dependence on the Jesus Tradition by John Nolland 21. Jesus Is Lord: The Rhetorical Appropriation of the Teaching of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 5 by Peter Davids 22. The Temple and Anti-Temple at Colossae by Greg Beale 23. Filling up What Is Lacking in Christs Afflictions: Isaiahs Servant and Servants in Second Temple Judaism and Colossians 1:24 by Holly Beers

Creating Christ

Creating Christ PDF Author: James S. Valliant
Publisher: Crossroad Press
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century. The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever. Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors. I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code "A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization." -Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

Creating Christianity - A Weapon Of Ancient Rome

Creating Christianity - A Weapon Of Ancient Rome PDF Author: Henry Davis
Publisher: ‎ Independent Publishing Network
ISBN: 1789265584
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
A profound and controversial investigation of a complex theme - the war that led to the fall of Jerusalem and the creation of the Christian religion. The religious and political battle between the people of Judea and the Jewish and Roman aristocracies is presented in an unconventional narrative, which investigates ancient evidence, quotes from the work of respected authorities on the subject, and states controversial opinions openly. Its main conclusion is that the New Testament (the new law) was created by a powerful senatorial family called the Calpurnius Pisos, who had the full support of their relatives, the Herodian royal family (the family of ‘Herod the Great’), and the Flavian emperors, with the Piso family hiding their name within the Koine Greek scriptures. The result is a book that is both provocative and compelling. Using valuable feedback from Cambridge and Oxford University professors, Henry Davis explains why the supposed Jewish Historian, Flavius Josephus, never existed, how the Book of Revelation presents the name of the Piso family member who oversaw the creation of the Christian scripture, and the reason the number 666 was changed to 616. Davis also explains the facts behind the personal and political reasons that led to the Roman and Jewish royal families creating a new religion, and how the Piso family used the literary techniques of the aristocracy to insert their names into the scriptures. '... I found his selection of evidence to be both interesting and compelling...' Creating Christianity: A Weapon Of Ancient Rome is a thoughtful work of historical non-fiction by author Henry Davis. Anyone with a knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire knows that its conversion from a pagan belief system to widespread Christianity was a significant political and military move for the Empire as much as it was a religious decision, and this book focuses on the specific details and clues as to how that really came about. Davis searches for the real identity of the Christian Messiah and argues for a potentially Roman author of the modern NewTestament, one who had a view to creating a new religion for his own reasons as much as those of Rome. - Readers’ Favorite ★★★★★

Paul

Paul PDF Author:
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615923675
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description


Christ's Ventriloquists

Christ's Ventriloquists PDF Author: Eric Zuesse
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615573014
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS is a work of investigative history. It documents and describes Christianity's creation-event, in the year 49 or 50, in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey), 20 years after Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem for sedition against Roman rule. On this occasion, Paul broke away from the Jewish sect that Jesus had begun, and he took with him the majority of this sect's members; he convinced these people that Jesus had been a god, and that the way to win eternal salvation in heaven is to worship him as such. Paul here explicitly introduced, for the first time anywhere, the duality of the previously unitary Jewish God, a duality consisting of the Father and the Son; and he implicitly introduced also the third element of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost. This work also explains and documents the tortuous 14-year-long conflict Paul had had with this sect's leader, Jesus's brother James, a conflict which caused Paul, in about the year 50, to perpetrate his coup d'état against James, and to start his own new religion: Christianity. Then, this historical probe documents that the four canonical Gospel accounts of the words and actions of "Jesus" were written decades after Jesus, by followers of Paul, not by followers of Jesus; and that these writings placed into the mouth of "Jesus" the agenda of Paul. Paul thus effectively became, via his followers, Christ's ventriloquist. A work such as this can be documented and produced only now, after the development (during the past 70 years) of modern legal/forensic methodology. Previously, the only available methods, which scholars have used, simply assumed the honesty-of-intent of all classical documents, especially of canonical religious ones, such as Paul's epistles, and the Four Gospels. Only now is it finally possible to penetrate deeper than that, to reach the writer's intent, and not merely his assertions, and to identify when this intent is to deceive instead of to inform. Whereas scholars have been able to discuss only the truth or falsity of particular canonical statements, it is now possible to discuss also the honesty or deceptiveness of individual statements. This opens up an unprecedented new research tool for historians, and CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS is the first work to use these new methods to reconstruct, on this legal/forensic basis, not just how crimes took place, but how and why major historical events (criminal or not), such as the start of Christianity, actually occurred. The author explains: "What I am doing in this work is to reconstruct from the New Testament the crucial events that produced it, without assuming whether what the NT says in any given passage is necessarily true or even honest. Instead of treating the NT as a work that 'reports history,' the NT is treated as a work whose history is itself being investigated and reported. Its origin goes back to this coup d'état that Paul perpetrated in Antioch in the year 49 or 50 against Jesus's brother James in Jerusalem, whom Jesus in Jerusalem had appointed in the year 30 as his successor to lead the Jewish sect that Jesus had started. The Gospel accounts of 'Jesus' reflected Paul's coup d'état - not actually Jesus, who would be appalled at the Christian concept of 'Christ.' That concept was radically different from the Jewish concept of the messiah, and Paul knew this when he created it."

The Mythmaker

The Mythmaker PDF Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing
ISBN: 9780760707876
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The author presents new arguments which support the view that Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity. He argues that Jesus and also his immediate disciples James and Peter were life-long adherents of Pharisaic Judaism. Paul, however, was not, as he claimed, a native-born Jew of Pharisee upbringing, but came in fact from a Gentile background. He maintains that it was Paul alone who created a new religion by his vision of Jesus as a Divine Saviour who died to save humanity. This concept, which went far beyond the messianic claims of Jesus, was an amalgamation of ideas derived from Hellenistic religion, especially from Gnosticism and the mystery cults. Paul played a devious and adventurous political game with Jesus' followers of the so-called Jerusalem Church, who eventually disowned him. The conclusions of this historical and psychological study will come as a shock to many readers, but it is nevertheless a book which cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with the foundations of our culture and society. -- Book jacket.

Cold-Case Christianity

Cold-Case Christianity PDF Author: J. Warner Wallace
Publisher: David C Cook
ISBN: 1434705463
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.

Paul and Jesus

Paul and Jesus PDF Author: James D. Tabor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439123322
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Draws on St. Paul's letters and other early sources to reveal the apostles' sharply competing ideas about the significance of Jesus and his teachings while demonstrating how St. Paul independently shaped Christianity as it is known today.

Christianity in Ancient Rome

Christianity in Ancient Rome PDF Author: Bernard Green
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0567032507
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
of the Pope." --Book Jacket.

Christianity and Creation

Christianity and Creation PDF Author: James P. Mackey
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826419071
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
James Mackey has written a bold one-volume systematic theology in eight chapters on creation, fall, salvation, God, creed, code, cult and church constitution.