About the Contributors to the Book, "Varieties of Jesus Mythicism"
Biographies A to Z:
Joseph Atwill is the author of "The Roman Origin of Christianity" and "Caesar's Messiah".
Bill Darlison M.A., B.A. (Hons.), holds degrees in literature and religion, and before his retirement in 2010 he was the senior minister of the Dublin Unitarian Church. He has studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Irish, Aramaic, French, and Italian. In the early seventies, he studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood in Rome, but left before ordination. He joined the Unitarians in 1988, becoming a minister in 1994. In 2013-14 he was President of the Unitarian General Assembly of Great Britain and Ireland. He is the author of several books, including The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus, which argues the Gospel of Mark is structured on the signs of the zodiac.
Derreck Bennett is an independent student of Christian origins and biblical criticism, having devoted fifteen years of study to the topic. His work has been published in The Journal of Higher Criticism, and he is the author of Addictus: A Nonbeliever's Path to Recovery, in which is his story of conquering addiction without belief in God or the supernatural.
Earl Doherty is the author of The Jesus Puzzle (1999), Challenging the Verdict (2001), and the magisterial book, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (2009). Doherty argues that Paul thought of Jesus as a spiritual being executed in a spiritual realm.
David Fitzgerald is an author, public speaker and historical researcher who has been actively investigating the Historical Jesus question for over twenty years. He has a degree in history and was an associate member of CSER (the former Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion). David’s book on Jesus Mythicism is the three volume set Jesus: Mything in Action (the follow-up book to his NAILED: Ten Christian Myths that Show Jesus Never Existed at All) and the newest addition to his ongoing series, The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion.
Neil Godfrey, B.A., B.Ed.St. (post grad), Grad Dip Library and Information Science, recently retired, is the owner of the Vridar blog that has attracted praise from academics for its scholarly posts (including detailed book reviews) in biblical and historical studies. Before retirement Neil was a librarian responsible for managing the digital preservation and open access of academic publications, research datasets and specialist cultural collections at university libraries in Australia and at the National Library of Singapore. He also has a background in modern and ancient history at the University of Queensland.
Michael Hoffman is the founder of egodeath.com, a site dedicated to research on the origin of religion in visionary and mystical experiences induced by entheogens, or hallucinogens. Hoffman is the leading proponent of John M. Allegro's understanding of "Jesus" as an ancient allegory for the Amanita Muscaria mushroom.
Stephan Huller is the author of The Real Messiah: The Throne of St. Mark and the True Origins of Christianity. It explodes the myth that Jesus was the long-prophesied Messiah of the Jewish nation. He argues that Jesus never claimed that role but thought of himself as herald to the true Messiah: Marcus Julius Agrippa, the last King of the Jews and Jesus’ contemporary. It was he who truly founded what became known as Christianity, and wanted to build a faith to which anyone could aspire. Though Marcus Agrippa was initially successful, with the passing of time those in charge of the new faith capitulated to the whims of successive Roman Emperors and centered their religion on Jesus instead.
John W. Loftus earned MA, MDiv, and ThM degrees in philosophy of religion and editor of several anthologies: The Christian Delusion, The End of Christianity, Christianity is Not Great, Christianity in the Light of Science, and The Case against Miracles.
Michael Lockwood was born in British India. He earned degrees from Oberlin College, B.A. (English), Boston University, M.A. (philosophy), and Madras University, Ph.D. (philosophy) and taught philosophy for thirty-two years (1966-1998), in South India at Madras Christian College, Tambaram. He has published the books, Buddhism’s Relation to Christianity (Madras 2010); Mythicism (Madras 2013); and The Unknown Buddha of Christianity (Tambaram 2019), and was an editor contributor for Indology.
Danila Oder is an independent scholar. She received a BA in history from the University of Chicago and studied at Spertus College of Judaica. She has studied playwriting and worked as an actor. In 2019, she published The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text, www.thetwogospelsofmark.com.
R. G. Price is the author of the book, Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed (2018), with a foreword written by Robert M. Price. For the book, he used his expertise in systematic data analysis to go through the Gospel called Mark line by line, searching for related passages in the Old Testament and Pauline letters using various translations, including the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures), something that could only be done recently thanks to computers and the internet. Price also wrote a chapter for The Case against Miracles, edited by John Loftus.
Robert M. Price is a member of the Jesus Seminar and author of several books including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? (2003), He’s also co-editor of The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (2005), The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind (2007), Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis of Biblical Authority (2009), and a few chapters in anthologies edited by John Loftus.
Barbara G. Walker is a researcher, lecturer, and author of 24 books and numerous articles on comparative religion, history, mythology. She has two essay collections: Man Made God and Belief and Unbelief. Her Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has been in print since 1983 and was named Book of the Year by the London Times. Its companion volume is The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. She received the Humanist Heroine of the Year award from the American Humanist Association, the Women Making Her story award from New Jersey NOW, and the Olympia Brown award from the Unitarian Universalist Association. She is listed in that prestigious 1200-page compendium of notable freethinkers, Who's Who in Hell?
Tim Widowfield currently helps maintain Vridar (https://vridar.org), a history-oriented biblioblog created by Neil Godfrey, where he has contributed a few hundred posts over the past eight years. Tim holds a bachelor of arts in history from the University of Maryland, as well as a master of science in logistics from the Air Force Institute of Technology. As an adult, he has spent most of his free time privately studying history, linguistics, and the Bible.
-------------Please support us at DC by commenting on and by sharing our posts, or subscribing, donating, or buying our books at Amazon.
0 comments:
Post a Comment