The Block Universe, Entropy, Science and “Miracles”

The major point I am going to make below is simple: what science tells us about the universe suggests that it is scientifically possible for events that look like miracles to happen, but in realty if we ever observed such an event (an alleged “miracle”), it is highly unlikely it would be a “miracle” in the accepted sense of the term. It would still be explicable in terms of science, and entirely non-supernatural.

I also make some assorted comments on the nature of the universe and time.

In order to make my point, I am afraid you have to read and at least understand these terribly difficult articles about modern physics:

Andrew Thomas, “Time and the Block Universe,” 2009.

Andrew Thomas, “The Arrow of Time.”

I also recommend watching this documentary below, part of the “Fabric of the Cosmos” series by Brian Greene.




In short, mainstream science tells us this:

(1) all things and events in the future and past have an existence as real as all things and events in the present. We live in a block universe in the sense that all that has happened, is happening now, and will happen in the future exists simultaneously in a huge block of 4-dimensional space-time.

(2) We have an illusion of a moving “present”: a forward, irreversible direction of time. Why we experience this is unclear. It seems to be an unresolved question in science, perhaps one of the most important, profound problems! As Andrew Thomas (author of the articles above) says:

“The reason why we don’t see causality happening in the backward direction is purely because of a bias in our psychological systems: something about the complexity of our psychological system (our brains!) causes our thought processes to work only in the forward direction of time.”

It seems to have something to do with human consciousness.

If, for example, the future already exists and your own future in all states already exists, then why can’t you remember events from the future in the same way that you remember events from the past? I have never seen an adequate explanation of this, and it must be regarded as an unsolved problem, if the block universe view of mainstream science is correct.

(3) as the author of the articles above says, what is extremely interesting is that the arrow of time is “something of a mystery to physicists because, at the microscopic level, all fundamental physical processes appear to be time-reversible.”

What seems to explain the forward flow of time is entropy (or disorder). Entropy can be seen as an emergent property of relations and interactions between a group of particles, molecules, or aggregates of atoms or molecules. The big bang created the universe with a very low entropy state. The initial conditions of our universe are crucial for understanding its current state (from our perspective). The low entropy state at the big bang meant that disorder has increased since that time.

Any closed system moving forward in time and subject to randomness will see its state become more disordered over time. This is the second law of thermodynamics.

However, the process is to be understood from a probabilistic perspective: in any set of possible states a system could have, the number of possible disordered states is vastly greater than the possible ordered states. Our belief that the state of affairs we see in the universe is necessarily caused by the universal second law of thermodynamics is somewhat misleading:

“the second ‘law’ of thermodynamics is not really a ‘law’ at all, certainly not an unbreakable law on the same basis as other physical laws - it is a statistical principle. In fact, it might be possible for a room full of randomly-distributed particles to re-order itself quite by chance so that all the particles end up in one corner of the room - it would just be incredibly unlikely!”

In theory, then, there is no reason why a thing cannot move from a state of disorder to order. That is to say, an event that might look like a reversal of time such as a broken glass reassembling itself is not impossible, just mindbogglingly, highly improbable. It would require some way for energy to be imparted to the broken glass shards and move them in the right directions to converge, and then chemical bonds between atoms and molecules to be reassembled. An event like this would give the illusion of being a miracle, but it would not be: it would have some material, scientific explanation with matter and energy, but involve a set of events that is incredibly, extremely improbable.

With this in mind, it is not impossible for a human being who has been (correctly) pronounced clinically dead to come back to life. A sufficiently advanced human technology could do it, if you could repair all the damage to cells, molecules, and the brain, and restart all the chemical and other physical properties of a living organism. If you had a good record of the brain state of the person before he or she died, you could even restore memories and the mind, even if there was bad damage to the brain.

But I would contend that it is also not absolutely impossible that a dead man might come back to life by some some sheer accidental natural processes, just mindbogglingly, highly improbable. Of course, it is almost certainly true that such a thing has never happened, and never will, but the issue is simply that it is not absolutely impossible in theory.

How does this relate to miracles? I think it is obvious: think of the claims made by Christians about Jesus’s resurrection.

Of course, I do not for a second think that any of the evidence for Jesus’s bodily resurrection is remotely convincing, for reasons described here.

For one thing, the earliest conception of Jesus’s resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.35–53 written by St Paul seems to show that Paul and the early Christians did not think of a bodily resurrection (of flesh and blood) for Jesus at all: they thought of Jesus being resurrected as a new spiritual being with a pneumatic body (soma pneumatikos in Koine Greek) without flesh or blood. This body was then exalted to heaven at the moment of the resurrection, and was only seen subsequently by human beings in visions or dreams. Paul even says that “what you sow is not the body that is to be” (1 Corinthians 15.37), which suggests that what is buried (a body of flesh and blood) is completely different from the “pneumatic body.” Paul says flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of god (1 Corinthians 15.50) - the “pneumatic body” will not be one of flesh and blood (but of some heavenly substance, like the bodies of angels). And 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 does not in any way require an empty tomb story, which was most probably the invention of the author of the gospel of Mark some 40 years after Jesus’s death for literary and theological purposes. The bodily resurrection is an invention of still later Christian writers like the author of the gospel of Luke.

It is even possible that Paul thought that Jesus’s dead body stayed in the grave and rotted, since (in his view) Jesus was re-created as a new spiritual being with a non-material body, possibly already part of the unseen heavenly realm.

But my main point is this: even if we saw a human being who was dead somehow come back to mortal life in 2013, and this was verified by science, it would still be theoretically explicable in terms of modern science; it would still most probably have some material explanation in terms of mater and energy, even if that explanation was not entirely clear at first. Such an event would not necessarily give us any proof of the supernatural or supernatural beings like gods. It would just be a mindbogglingly, extremely improbable event.

Even if you (for the sake of argument) make massive concessions to Christians in debate and concede that there is some convincing evidence that Jesus died and came back to life (although I do not think there is any such evidence), this does not necessarily prove this event was supernatural. It does not necessarily prove the existence of god. It does not necessarily prove the truth of Christian supernatural dogmas, and it certainly does not necessarily prove that Jesus ever did other alleged miracles or was anything but a mortal man after he came back to life.

The event would in theory be explicable in terms of, and consistent with, modern science, just an extremely mindbogglingly improbable event. Perhaps it is so improbable that it might only happen once in the whole 100 trillion year history of the entire universe. Or maybe twice or half a dozen times.

But such things would not necessarily prove the supernatural at all!

William Lane Craig versus Richard Carrier on the Resurrection of Jesus

This is a video of a debate between William Lane Craig and Richard Carrier, held at Northwest Missouri State University (March 18, 2009), on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Needless to say, I find the position of Craig utterly unconvincing. What is most strange is the lazy assumption that Craig takes from the beginning that the Judeo-Christian god exists! If this does not give his ridiculous apologetic game away, then nothing will.





I provide my own critique of Craig here:

(1) Craig’s first “fact” is the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. This is not a “fact” at all: it is merely assertion in the gospel of Mark, and there is no necessary reason why it must be true. The Christians might have invented this to give Jesus an “honourable,” rather than a shameful, burial. Furthermore, Craig commits a gross non sequitur: even if it were true that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus in a tomb, it simply does not follow that the location of the tomb was known by his disciples. One astonishing datum is that there was no known veneration of Jesus’s tomb in early Christianity: it is most probable that they had no idea where he was buried.

There is good reason to think that the gospel of Mark (the earliest gospel) is already filled with legends and fictions, and that the empty tomb story is one fiction of Mark (Collins 1989; Collins 1993; Lüdemann 1994). Moreover, it is quite likely that the author of Mark composed his empty tomb story as part of his literary mimesis or midrashic rewriting of certain Old Testament texts like Daniel 6:6–23 (Goulder 1976; Helms 1988: 135–136).

Despite Craig, even Jesus’s alleged rising on the third day in 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 is said to be in accordance with the scriptures, not with any eyewitness accounts, which suggests that the belief that Jesus rose on the third day could have come from nothing more than exegesis of an Old Testament passage in Hosea 6.2 (as Gerd Lüdemann 1994: 47 argues).

(2) Craig’s attempt to claim that Matthew and John are independent attestations of the empty tomb story is unconvincing. They are no such thing, but secondary and redactional stories from Mark. Nor does Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 require an empty tomb story at all. There is no direct evidence for any empty tomb in Paul. There are no multiple, independent sources for the empty tomb story: it is all dependent on Mark, and there is a good case he invented it (Collins 1989).

Contrary to Craig, the presence of women in the gospel of Mark as eyewitnesses to the empty tomb makes perfect sense if this was an invention of the author of that gospel. For the earliest tradition suggests that the male disciples had fled Jerusalem and returned to Galilee (so the women were plausible people to use in the empty tomb fiction), and the ending of the gospel of Mark tells us that the women told nobody of their discovery (Mark 16.8), which is exactly in accord with the more misogynist attitudes to women in the ancient world.

Moreover, it is a bad error to assert that women were never trusted as witnesses in the ancient Greek and Roman world. The gospel of Mark was clearly a work of Pauline Christianity and had its natural home in Gentile Greek and Roman Christian communities. While it was considered disreputable for high status women to appear in public in roles usually reserved for men in Greece and Rome, Richard Carrier has shown that women were perfectly able to give testimony in court: Cicero used women as witnesses against the corrupt Roman governor Verres (Cicero, Against Verres 2.1.94; 4.99), and an Oxyrhynchus Papyrus (P.Oxy. 1.37) preserves the testimony of a woman in court from Roman Egypt.

When early Christians heard the ending of the gospel of Mark, with the empty tomb, they will have asked: “Why have I never heard this before?” Michael Goulder has explained how some misogynist Christian men would have understood Mark 16.8:

“You know what women are like, brethren: they were seized with panic and hysteria, and kept the whole thing quiet. That is why people have not heard all this before.” (Goulder 1996: 58).

Thus it is not that the testimony of women would have been rejected per se, but their reliability in transmitting what they had seen and heard. Despite Craig and apologists like Craig, that is a very convincing explanation of why Mark used women.

(3) Despite Craig, the earliest tradition in Mark and taken over by Matthew is that the earliest resurrection “appearances”/hallucinations of Jesus were in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. This may well be true, and it suggests that the disciples fled back to Galilee after the death of Jesus. That is precisely why Mark has women go to an empty tomb in his ending, because in the tradition Mark received the disciples had fled. The stories of resurrection “appearances” at Jerusalem in Luke and John are therefore fictions. If these gospel writers could write fiction (such as the absurd fantasies one reads in the gospel of Matthew 28:1-3), then why not Mark in the empty tomb story?

(4) Craig asserts that there was no belief in a dying and rising Messiah in first century Judaism. That may well be true, but provides no serious evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. As Robert M. Price has argued, when Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), a Jewish rabbi who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah in the 17th century, apostatized, his movement did not collapse and there were Jewish believers in Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah for at least two centuries following his apostasy! Even Nathan of Gaza, his leading disciple, continued to think Sabbatai was the Messiah.

Anyway, it is clear that Christianity - before it became a Gentile religion as developed by the apostle Paul - remained a minority sect within Judaism.

Is that not precisely what one would expect if early Christian ideas about a crucified Messiah were peculiar and an innovation?


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 1989. The Beginning of the Gospel: Probings of Mark in Context, Fortress Press, Minneapolis.

Collins, Adela. 1993. “The Empty Tomb in the Gospel According to Mark,” in Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint (eds.), Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, In. 107–140.

Collins, Adela Yarbro. 2009. “Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark,” in T. K. Seim and J. Okland (eds.), Metamorphoses. Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. 41–58.

Goulder, Michael. 1976. “The Empty Tomb,” Theology 79: 206–214.

Goulder, Michael. 1996. “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Resurrection Reconsidered, Oneworld, Oxford. 48–61.

Helms, Randel. 1988. Gospel Fictions. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y.

Lüdemann, G. 1994. The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (trans. John Bowden), SCM Press, London.

How Did Jesus Become “Son of God”?

In the Bible and ancient Jewish writings, the title “son of god” has a number of senses (see Fossum 1995), as follows:

(1) angels are sometimes called “sons of god” (Job 38.7);

(2) the people of Israel are sometimes metaphorically called son of god (Hos. 11:1), and

(3) the Israelite king is spoken of as god’s son (2 Sam. 7:14; see Cooke 1961 and Mettinger 1976: 259-275). Psalm 2 was an important example of this, in which the king of Israel is son of god at his enthronement:

“I will tell of the decree of the Lord: he said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten you”. (Psalm 2.7).

This was part of Israelite royal ideology: the king became god’s son at his coronation (Goulder 1995: 147). It is also possible that the fragmentary Qumran document 4Q246 is a Messianic text calling the Messiah (which means “anointed/chosen one”) the “son of god,” in the Israelite royal sense, an expected future king of Israel who will be son of god in this way (Collins 1993; cf. Fitzmyer 1993).

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, there appears to be a pre-Pauline Christology where this idea is also attested:

εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ, ὃ προεπηγγείλατο διὰ τῶν προφητῶν αὐτοῦ ἐν γραφαῖς ἁγίαις, περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα, τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ θεοῦ ἐν δυνάμει κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν, Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν …

“[the] gospel of god, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy writings, concerning his son Jesus Christ our Lord, born/come from the seed of David according to the flesh, and designated son of god in power according to the spirit of holiness, by resurrection from the dead …” (Romans 1.1–4).

Paul probably inherited the Christology of Romans 1.1–4 from earlier Jewish Christians, and we can deduce that their Christology was like this:

(1) Jesus was the Messiah, the long awaited king, and at some point the earliest Christians came to believe that Jesus must have been a descendent of king David, because the Messiah was thought to be of his dynasty (Goulder 1995: 99-100). This the Messiah could be called “son of David” in a figurative sense as his descendant (as in Mark 10:47). But at this stage the early Christians had probably not invented a Davidic genealogy for Jesus, as in the gospel of Matthew 1:6–16.

(2) in believing that Jesus was the Messiah, or king of Israel, the earliest Jewish Christians took over the Israelite royal ideology that held that the king, at his coronation, was “god’s son”: what is fascinating is that in this pre-Pauline Christology Jesus appears to have been made god’s son at his resurrection, which suggests that Jesus’s messiahship formally began at his resurrection as well. In fact, this is not that strange, as many scholars have concluded that the proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah by his disciples happened after his death: this was the theory of William Wrede in his ground-breaking study The Messianic Secret (Wrede 1971; see also Wells 1996: 122; Tuckett 1983 and Räisänen 1990). This idea is also attested in Luke 24:44–45, Acts 13:33, Acts 2:32 and 2:36.

Thus there is considerable doubt whether the historical Jesus ever claimed to be the Messiah during his lifetime. One might speculate that, at the end of his ministry, during the Passover events in Jerusalem many of Jesus’s followers and ordinary people in Jerusalem might have started to think he was Messiah, but whether Jesus explicitly denied this or, alternatively, “tacitly” accepted it is not known.

(3) The phrase used by Paul τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα (“come/born from the seed of David according to the flesh”) strongly suggests that at this stage the Jewish Christians thought Jesus was a real descendant of David in the natural human sense of descent through his father. The word γενομένου (which should be understood in the sense of born/conceived) implies Jesus was fathered by a normal human father, because by the contemporary Jewish conception of birth it was the father who created the child through his seed/sperm, not the mother (Goulder 1995: 102). The ancients were ignorant of DNA and genetics: they did not understand women contributed genetic material to the child. In their view, it was the father who made his child, who grew out of the male seed. Therefore the earliest Jewish Christian belief (deduced from the proclamation of Jesus as risen Messiah) was that he really had been born from his father naturally as a descendant of king David, and this is still reflected in 2 Tim. 2.8 and Ignatius, Ephes. 18. At this stage, the virgin birth story had yet to be invented.

The title “son of god,” then, was held to be a title of Jesus by his Jewish disciples only after his death and imagined resurrection, and it reflects Israelite royal ideology, not the belief that he was divine.

After Paul took over this earlier, primitive Jewish Christology, he appears to have developed it further, by inventing the notion of the pre-existence of Jesus, which is attested in Philippians (written in the mid-50s or early 60s AD):

… Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων
οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ,
ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών,
ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος•
καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος
ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου,
θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ.

“…. Christ Jesus
who, being in the form of God,
did not deem the being equal with God a prize,
but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave
born/becoming in the form of men,
and having appeared (or having been found) in shape as a man
he humbled himself, becoming obedient until death,
and death on a cross.” (Phil. 2.6–8).

Of course, there is already a huge literature on the interpretation of Philippians 2:5–11 (see Marshall 1968. Martin and Dodd 1998; Wright 1986; Burk 2004). Many think that this “Christ hymn” was a pre-Pauline creed, but the arguments adduced are not very convincing: there is no reason why Paul could not have composed this in a language and style different from the prosaic style of his letters (for a review of arguments see Martin 2005). I would contend that this is Paul’s own composition, reflecting his Christological innovations.

According to Paul, after his resurrection God bestowed on Jesus the name that is above every other name: the title “Lord,” or kurios in Greek (Phil. 2.8–11), which is the regular title of god in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

For Paul, Jesus has now become an eternal, first-born semi-divine being, even though Paul may possibly shrink from saying that Jesus wanted to be an absolute equal of god (see Philippians 2:6: “[sc. Jesus] did not deem the being equal with God a prize,” which of course does presuppose some kind of equality). At this point, the title “son of god” has become a semi-divine title for Paul and Pauline Christians referring to Jesus as the first born “son of god” before creation (Goulder 1995: 102) and a type of cosmic king, not simply a reflection of Israelite/Messianic royal ideology. Already the Pauline gospel of Mark written c. 70 AD uses the “son of god” as a semi-divine title, reflecting Paul’s Christology: Mark has already transcended the primitive use of “son of god” in the royal ideological sense.

In other Jewish Christian communities, a different doctrine was developed: the virgin birth, which is never stated by Paul and was probably unknown to him.

The author of the gospel of Matthew was from a liberal Jewish Christian community, possibly in Antioch in Syria, which believed that Jesus was Messiah and “son of god” in the royal sense at his resurrection. Matthew wrote his gospel after 70 AD (possibly in the late 70s AD), and certainly after the gospel of Mark (which he uses as a source). In time, these communities were unsatisfied with the idea that Jesus was Messiah only after his death and the messiahship was retrojected back onto Jesus’s life and ministry. The term “son of god” was also given a new interpretation. Many Christians poured over the Old Testament looking for passages that they imagined prophesied Jesus. When they read such passages many will have believed that the holy spirit entered into them, and that they read these passages with divine inspiration, so that prophecies about Jesus were revealed to them by revelation. Once they had found some text they thought was a prophesy, it was a natural step to write some story about Jesus they thought must have happened to fulfil the prophecy (because their thinking will have been something like this: “if the holy spirit has revealed some passage with a prophecy about Jesus, surely it must have happened”). Thus many stories about Jesus in the gospels have been created in this way (perhaps not as conscious fraud, but as the deluded midrash of early Christians), and it follows, of course, that many such stories never really happened. The virgin birth is one of these.

It is likely that some Jewish Christian (possibly the author of Matthew himself) read Isaiah 7:14 in the Greek Septuagint (or LXX = Septuaginta) in this way and imagined he had found a prophecy of Jesus’s birth:

διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον• ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ …

“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign:
behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb, and will bring forth a son,
and you will call his name Emmanuel ...” (Isaiah 7:14; the Greek text follows Rahlfs 1971 [1935]).

This passage in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew text of the Old Testament) was originally meant to be nothing more than a prophecy of the Israelite king Hezekiah, son of Ahaz. Even a Catholic scholar like Raymond Brown admits that Isaiah 7:14 originally referred to a sign that was just a normal birth: “The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably Davidic, but naturally conceived, who would illustrate God’s providential care for his people” (Brown 1999: 148).

The idea of a “virgin” giving birth is not really even in the original Hebrew text. In the Hebrew, the crucial word is almah, meaning either (1) a young unmarried woman (possibly a virgin) or (2) a recently married young woman (but not a virgin):

לכן יתן אדני הוא לכם אות הנה העלמה הרה וילדת בן וקראת שמו עמנו אל
[note this is the Hebrew text without diacriticals].

לָכֵן יִתֵּן אֲדֹנָי הוּא לָכֶם אוֹת: הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן וְקָרָאת שְׁמוֹ עִמָּנוּ אֵל
[note this is the Hebrew text with diacriticals; to read Hebrew one starts at the end of the first line and reads backwards, then goes to the end of the second line and reads backwards].

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.
See! the young woman [almah in Hebrew] is with child
and the one bearing a son
will call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14).

The Greek Septuagint translated almah (העלמה) with the word parthenos (παρθένος), which is easier to understand in the sense of “virgin.” The Greek word parthenos could mean:

(1) a maiden or girl, often with the sense of virgin, e.g., ἡ Παρθένος (“the Virgin”) was the title of the goddess Athena at Athens; the sacred παρθένοι was used to describe the Vestal virgins at Rome.

(2) unmarried women who are not virgins.
(Liddell and Scott 1996, s.v. parthenos, p. 1339).

The Jewish Christian (as I noted, possibly the author of Matthew himself) read this text in the Greek and understood parthenos as “virgin” and thought it was a prophecy of Jesus’s birth (Goulder 1995: 103; for more on this, see the discussion here by Richard Carrier). How, then, was Jesus conceived? As the passage was turned over in his mind, he thought that Jesus must have been “conceived” in a miracle by god: hence the origin of the virgin birth story in Matthew and the idea of Jesus being “god’s son” in a more literal sense than merely the metaphorical sense of “son of god” as king of Israel at his resurrection, which had been the earlier view (Goulder 1995: 149).


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Raymond Edward. 1999. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (updated edn.), Doubleday, New York, N.Y.

Burk, D. “On the Articular Infinitive in Philippians 2:6: A Grammatical Note with Christological Implications,” Tyndale Bulletin 55.2: 253-274.

Carrier, Richard. 2003. “The Problem of the Virgin Birth Prophecy,” The Secular Web
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html

Collins, J. J. 1993. “The Son of God Text from Qumran,” in M. C. De Boer (ed.), From Jesus to John: Essays on Jesus and New Testament Christology in Honour of Marinus de Jonge, JSOT Press, Sheffield. 65–82.

Cooke, Gerald A. 1961. “The Israelite King as Son of God,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 73: 202-225.

Fitzmyer, J. 1993. “4Q246. The ‘Son of God’ Document from Qumran,” Biblica 74: 153–174.

Fossum. Jarl. 1995. “Son of God,” in Karel van der Toom, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, EJ Brill, Leiden. 1485–1497.

Goulder, M. D. 1995. St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions, Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY.

Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon (9th edn.; rev. and augm. by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie, with rev. supplement), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Marshall, I. Howard. 1968. “The Christ-Hymn in Philippians,” Tyndale Bulletin 19: 104–127.

Martin, James D. 2005. Carmen Christi: Philippians ii. 5-11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Martin, Ralph P. and Brian J. Dodd (eds). 1998. Where Christology Began: Essays on Philippians 2, Westminster John Knox, Louisville, KY.

Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. 1976. King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite Kings, LiberLaromedel/Gleerup, Lund.

Rahlfs, A. (ed.). 1971 [1935]. Septuaginta: Id est Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX interpretes (9th edn.), Württembergische Bibelanstalt Stuttgart, Stuttgart.

Räisänen, Heikki. 1990. The “Messianic Secret” in Mark (trans. Christopher Tuckett), T & T Clark, Edinburgh.

Tuckett, Christopher (ed.). 1983. The Messianic Secret, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, Pa. and London.

Wells, G. A. 1996. The Jesus Legend, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Ill.

Wrede, William. 1971. The Messianic Secret (trans. J. C. G. Greig), Attic Press, Greenwood, S.C.

Wright, N. T. 1986. “άρπαγμός and the Meaning of Philippians 2:5–11,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 n.s.: 321–352.

Robert M. Price on Jesus: Legend or Son of God?, Part 2

Part 2 of a great debate between Robert M. Price and Gregory Boyd at UCLA 2003.

Robert M. Price on Jesus: Legend or Son of God?, Part 1

Part 1 of a great debate between Robert M. Price and Gregory Boyd at UCLA 2003.

Price throws light on early Christianity as a Messianic movement by invoking the 16th century Messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi. For good books on Sabbatai Zevi, see
Scholem (1973) and Halperin (2007).













BIBLIOGRAPHY

Halperin, David J. 2007. Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, Oxford.

Scholem, Gershom. 1973. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, Princeton University Press, Princeton.