Jesus :: The Tentative Apologist

Post tagged with Jesus

The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 9)

September 05th, 201112:35 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

After a couple weeks hiatus I find myself picking up my review of The End of Christianity once again. Although I have published about fifteen posts in critique of The End of Christianity over the last couple months, I have not received a single response from the essayists. Well okay, there was one response: John W. Loftus summarily dismissed e...
Could Jesus have given the wrong theological answer?

July 08th, 201111:53 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

Many Christians are happy (or at least willing) to recognize that Jesus had ignorance of certain matters. For example, he couldn't have told you that London will host the 2012 Olympics or that Transformers 3 would clean up at the box office. But that willingness to embrace Jesus being ignorant suddenly seems to exaporate when it comes to theologica...
The Indistinguishable Bible

September 05th, 201010:27 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

Two issues need to be dealt with before I, finally, hopefully, I wish, I hope, can get back to reviewing The Christian Delusion: the epistemic status of testimony (of which there is no end of confusion) and the "divine detection" objection to the Bible. I'll deal with the latter here (although I've already addressed it, I'll happily do it again. On...
Jesus was right-wing, wasn't he?

March 14th, 201011:43 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

The comment in the thread to the last discussion hit me like a thunderbolt! "RDs comebacks are typical left-wing thinking." Kaboom! Am I really (gulp) left wing? Let me try to convey the shock to you. Compare: "Careful! He's evincing signs that he's been bitten by a zombie! He could become a frothing soldier in the army of the walking dead any...
How to Make Sure You’re Never Proven Wrong Again: Part 1

March 05th, 201011:51 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

Nobody likes being proven wrong. So I am always thankful to my readers whenever they point out new ways to protect yourself from ever having to eat a slice of humble pie. With that in mind I will say a few words about two criteria recently demonstrated by two of my readers. I'll focus in this post on the first criterion with the second yet to come....
Did fallible human testimony ensure that Jesus would have false beliefs?

January 07th, 201009:54 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

Another reason to think Jesus had false beliefs The debate on whether Jesus had false beliefs usually centers on evidence from scripture. (Hence, my previous token post on the topic.) Here I'm going to shift the ground and offer another reason to think that Jesus probably had some false beliefs. My argument builds on the amply demonstrated fact th...
Did Jesus have any false beliefs? A look at the Gospel of Mark

January 07th, 201009:38 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

A brief recap In this post we return to our exploration of the omniscience of the incarnate Son of God. To recap all too briefly, we saw that a blastocyst cannot be omniscient, and therefore at the point where Jesus was a blastocyst (or fetus, or neonate) he could not be omniscient. Further, our intuitions on deity leave us to conclude that omnisc...
Why does Jesus always get picked on?

November 26th, 200907:49 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

How many Shakespeare scholars do you suppose believe Christopher Marlow wrote the great Bard's plays? Less than one in a hundred, I'm sure. Are Shakespeare scholars fools? That seems a little bit presumptuous I would think. Of course laypeople can always offer their own speculations on how and why they believe Christopher Marlow, or Ben Jonson...
Does the resurrection of Jesus stand up to historical enquiry?

November 23rd, 200911:33 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

In an earlier post, "Were New Testament Christians reliable witnesses, or were they ignorant fools?", I offered a critique of the facile, if common, assumption that the testimony of ancient people is excessively credulous and untrustworthy. On the contrary, we need to test the credentials of ancient witnesses no less than contemporar...
Was Jesus Christ free to sin?

June 11th, 200909:07 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

In one of my recent posts I argued that Jesus could not have sinned. Moreover, I argued that he did not struggle psychologically with sin -- he did not find it enticing. And this, rather than the common view that he was attracted to sin but managed to refrain from it, provides us with a goal for our own sanctification. One of my readers, Bujo, dis...

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An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).