After nearly a year of research and writing on the resurrection of Jesus, I am making a fresh start. This is mainly because I have changed my mind about the “genuine” letters of Paul being written before the gospels. Therefore my historical analysis needs a new starting point: the gospel of Mark.
Over the weekend I posted some new pages, which is where I would like readers to begin. These pages are:
1a. Methods. After reading so many varied accounts of history based on ancient Christian writings, I decided it is important for those who write on these topics to be clear about the methods they are using. This page lays out my methods.
1b. Primary sources. This page describes the primary writings used for early Christian history, discusses my disagreements with the dating of the writings usually offered by historians and Biblical scholars, and explains textual problems that arise when using ancient documents as evidence.
1c. Galilee and Judea in the 1st century. I’ve updated an older page on this topic and added a couple of paragraphs about the Jewish-Roman wars of the late first century.
I will keep my pages about the resurrection up on the website, as I think there is still some interesting and worthwhile material in them, but probably will not finish writing up my notes on this topic. I have changed the page numbers on it to use an “X” instead of a number to indicate that they are old material.
–Alan
