Luke – doctor or priest?
A recent translation of the Gospel of Luke has been published, together with some explanatory material, under the title of The Essential Jesus (Sydney, Matthias Media, 2008). The book is available in printed form, or may be downloaded in pdf format for individual reading (but not for printing or circulation) from the publisher’s website or from [...]
Christmas and chronology
The stories of Jesus’ birth and infancy in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are not integral parts of a continuous biographical narrative. They are tacked on at the beginning of accounts of Jesus’ ministry and crucifixion, and their purported historical details are not corroborated elsewhere in the Gospels or in other books of the New Testament. [...]
Text and interpretation
In his Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764), Voltaire has a section on ‘Contradictions’ in which he discusses, among other things, examples of contradictions (or apparent contradictions) in the biblical writings. He refers to Jean Meslier (1664-1729), who lived the life of a priest but meanwhile wrote a book, found after his death, in which he [...]