CADRE Comments

Really? There weren't any actual new goofy theories to trot out this year for disparaging Easter, so they had to settle for this? "They", this year, are Hal Taussig (a Visiting Professor at the Union Theological Seminary and a founding member of the now defunct Jesus Seminar) and a group of liberal/sceptical scholars and "religious leaders" (some of them nominally Christian, others vaguely or just outright not, many of whom are JSem alumni), who have decided that the only way to cash in on controversy this year is to propose and release A New New Testament . Never let it be said that I haven't done my part to market them now! I fraternally anticipate questions. Let the FAQ commence.

It's pretty normal nowadays for revisionist historians and commentators, when promoting the "lost texts" of early Christianity, to lambaste Imperial Rome for imposing a canon-from-above, and for outright destroying competitive texts, in a bid to force compliance with Imperial ideas of orthodoxy. This is almost hilarious as a claim throughout most of the 4th century (300s CE), since the ruling elite during most of that time were one or another kind of Arian, not of the "Orthodox" party. (Arians believed either that Christ was a lesser created deity taking human form, or more popularly that Jesus was a totally human hero promoted up by God the Father to deity status. Not unlike typical claims for previously pagan Emperors, by the way.) Still, the fact of the matter is that there were indeed document purges in the Roman Empire during the Christian history (including the trinitarian Christian history) of the Western and Eastern Empire. So it isn't unreasonable, ...