the first place, they tend to fail utterly at any accuracy. And evangelicals can’t help but make endless specific predictions. Today, I want to show you a whole bunch of evangelical prophecies–and then, let’s see how they actually turned out.
Christians love callings that represent a complete reversal of expectations. They enjoy stories about unexpected, inverted expectations. However, these stories must end the correct way.
In Christianese, a calling represents Jesus’ orders for what his followers are meant to be doing with their lives. But in reality, finding one’s calling works in a very prosaic–and earthly–way. Even then, it doesn’t work at all the way that Christians think it does.
Many Christians have this idea that their faith imbues them with a sort of glowing-but-invisible aura that both attracts and repels non-Christians. It’s their Jesus Aura.
Today, let’s talk about the prehistory of the Christian notion of Hell.
Hi and welcome back! Now, we come to the last 1st-Century Friday post for a while. After this, we may revisit my master list as time goes on, but I think we’ve finally hit the wall on writers who were even vaguely contemporaneous with Jesus. However, I’m taking us out Read more
When Christians write parables or allegories, they never worry about their characters not acting like people at all. That’s not the point of the story. The story is meant only as a framework to use to defeat strawmen.
make informed decisions about their own fates. Not even his extra-imaginary imaginary god can make that happen for him.
When we checked out Josephus recently, a contemporary of his emerged from the shadows: Justus of Tiberias. We don’t know much about him, which is strange considering what he could have had to say about the earliest Christians. So today, let’s check out Justus of Tiberias — and marvel at the mystery surrounding his absence from the record.
Needless to say, Tacitus is not even vaguely contemporary with Jesus. He wasn’t even born until 20+ years after Jesus supposedly died. By his adulthood, pretty much everyone contemporaneous with Jesus would have died already. Under that thinking, I, a Gen-Xer, could be considered contemporaneous with F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940).