Author: George A. Wells
George A. Wells is emeritus professor of German at the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the origins of Christianity and on German intellectual history.
Albert Schweitzer and The Quest of the Historical Jesus—One Hundred Years On
Schweitzer’s very influential critical account of Jesus includes much of importance that more recent scholarship accepts, as well as elements that have undertsandably found little favor.
The Eucharist and the Origin of Magical Ideas
“. . . The power of gestures or words is due to their being understood by an intelligent (animal or human) respondent. But if this was not realized, it could be supposed that they themselves had an effective power.”
Facing the Facts
A review of Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, edited by C. M. Hays and C. B. Ansberry.
The Vices of Literary Criticism
Online-only bonus: Further evidence that contemporary literary criticism has stumbled into arbitrariness and fancy.
This article is available for free to all.The Holy Spirit—Christianity’s Two-edged Resource
Even in the religion’s infancy, Paul said that a man is not a Christian if he does not possess the spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9) and that “in the spirit” a man can “utter mysteries” (1 Cor. 14:2). How did the idea of “the spirit” develop? The Finnish New Testament scholar Heikki Räisänen explains in …
The Legacy of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, popes have become the focus of heightened religious emotion. Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge and a staunch Catholic, has said that the Polish Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, spent his final years of physical and mental decline “acting out a …
How the New Testament Came to be Written
Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, by Thomas L. Brodie (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012 ISBN978-1-907534-58-4) xv + 256 pp. Paperback, $29.95. Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery deserves attention because it is an honest and courageous statement of how the author has come, …
The Reformation Struggles in England
Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor, by Eamon Duffy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780300152166) 249 pp. Paperback, $29.17. Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity in the University of Cambridge, is another of his informative studies of the …
Ehrman on the Historicity of Jesus and Early Christian Thinking
Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, by Bart D. Ehrman (New York: HarperOne, 2012, ISBN 0062204602) 373 pp. Hardcover, $26.99. Bart Ehrman is a historian and Bible expert who, although an agnostic, has for years been teaching the New Testament at an American University in the so-called Bible Belt. In Did …
The Basis of Paul’s Ideas of Christ
In my previous Free Inquiry, article, “Jesus: What’s the Evidence?” (August/September 2011), I noted that the Jesus of the earliest extant Chri stian literature is fundamentally a supernatural personage. By “the earliest extant Christian literature,” I mean the early Epistles, including those most scholars accept as authentically Pauline (that is, written by Paul himself). In …
Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?
In this article, I shall focus on the contribution made to this oft-discussed question by the eminent New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, professor of rel igious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ehrman’s many books make him prominent among scholars in the field who, as Jacques Berlinerblau observes in The Secular …