Good Friday and Easter Sunday bookend the three holiest days on the Christian calendar. Millions of Christians travel to Jerusalem to see the sites where Jesus' crucifixion, burial, and resurrection supposedly took place. This explores the ten verses in Mark that discuss the specific period between Jesus' death and burial (Mark 15:37-46). The text describes how, in a little over three hours, a Joseph of Arimathea obtained custody of Jesus' body, removed it from the cross, prepared it for burial, and then placed it in a tomb before sunset. Based on modern scholarship and a granular reading of Mark, the essay examines the question: was there enough time for Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus before sunset?
The Jewish Tanakh (or Christian Old Testament) includes a creation myth in Genesis Chapters 2 and 3. The story describes Adam and Eve's famous sojourn in the Garden of Eden, which ended abruptly after they disobeyed God. Though only a handful of verses, Christians consider this narrative an essential truth of the faith and call it the Fall of Man story. In "Truth, the Fall, and Hominins," G. P. Denken questions whether there can be any historical truth to the Fall in light of human evolution. He focuses on the Catholic Church's current accommodationist approach to the subject, seeing the Fall story as symbolic and allowing scholarly speculation on how evolution fits into the narrative. He concludes that the Church has failed to extract the Fall’s historical truth from our hominin history, and its speculations on evolution raise more problems for its complicated theology than they resolve. Once the Church recognizes that it can accept either human evolution or the Fall story, but not both, Denken predicts that it will abandon evolution and return to an irrational, literalist reading of the Fall.
In "Courtroom Apologetics: You Call Them Eyewitnesses?" G. P. Denken critiques a genre of popular evangelical apologetics that he labels "courtroom" apologetics. Courtroom apologists are recognizable by the way that they season their arguments with courtroom jargon and analogies. Denken highlights three apologists who make their cases by relying heavily on the four "eyewitness" accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Though the apologetic authors seek verdicts from their jury of readers in favor of Christianity, Denken offers a rebuttal case in their imaginary trial. He discusses how these apologists have not only misidentified the Gospel authors, but ignored how their proposed authors could not have been eyewitnesses to many famous scenes in the canonical Gospels.
