Join host Edouard Tahmizian for a fifty-minute interview with long-time biblical scholar and Jesus mythicist Robert M. Price on whether the concept of predestination or determinism can be found in the Book of Acts, whether open theism is plausible, and whether some of the more miraculous events depicted in the Qur'an are credible. Tahmizian proposes a number of questions about these topics to Price. For example, given that a word sometimes translated as "predetermined" crops up in a discussion of events to come, did the author of Acts believe that God causally determined/necessitated Jesus' murder, or that those who brought about his death had the freedom to have done other than what they did do? What do open theists think about the possibility that God doesn't know the future exactly, but just knows about what might happen? Is the open theist position on this question biblically plausible? Tahmizian also asks Price about the origin of the story of Muhammad splitting the Moon in the Qu'ran, whether or not there was a historical Muhammad, and how and when the texts of the Qu'ran came to be put together. Tune in for a wide-ranging discussion about these and other intriguing issues with a noted biblical scholar!

Join host Edouard Tahmizian for a nearly ninety-minute interview with Jesus mythicist and biblical scholar Robert M. Price on the Book of Revelation, the Gospel of Luke, and the Qur'an. Price fields a number of novel questions from Tahmizian, including whether Christian apologetic rebuttals to the idea that the book of Revelation falsely predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would occur within the lifetimes of Jesus' disciples have any credibility at all, such as the rebuttal that John's relevant Greek wording doesn't necessary translate to "soon" in duration, but can simply mean something more like "without delay," or perhaps "soon in God's time" even if far off on human timescales. The discussion then turns to whether Luke can be profitably read as a historian, and if so, how well or poorly Luke investigated the historical validity of early Christian claims. Finally, the discussion wraps up with a consideration of whether Papias had any knowledge of the teachings of a historical Jesus at all before turning to whether Muslim scholars have any legitimate claim to perfect textual transmission as seen through the absence of variations in translations of the Qur'an, far superior to that of the Old and New Testaments. Check out this wide-ranging interview shedding light on parallels between Christian and Islamic apologetics!

Check out Edouard Tahmizian's latest just over an hour interview with long-time biblical scholar Robert M. Price on Price's reasons for thinking that St. Paul was actually Simon Magnus and why Price does not believe that Paul wrote any of the thirteen letters attributed to him, among other things. After Price outlines his grounds for these conclusions, the interlocutors turn the discussion to how far back Price dates the Pre-Pauline Creed in 1 Corinthians 15, how he interprets 1 Kings 22's apparent reference to God working with evil spirits, why God allows demonic possession to occur at all if he wants to eliminate sin, which account provides the clearest example of New Testament mimesis, whether we should date 2 Peter to the 2nd century CE, whether it makes any sense to think that Jesus would've "abolished" the 650 laws of the Jewish Torah, and much more. Tune in for an in-depth discussion of Price's insights into what contemporary biblical scholarship tells us about these fascinating issues!

Tune in to Edouard Tahmizian's over half-an-hour interview with returning biblical scholar Robert M. Price about Christian and Islamic apologetics. In this interview the interlocutors canvass the Christian apologetic claim that St. Paul would have been dismissed by his contemporaries had he made up the existence of 500 witnesses to the resurrected Jesus, how Christian apologists square Gospel claims that Jesus wanted to be baptized by John the Baptist with Jesus' status as the sinless son of God, whether the alleged reference to John the Baptist by Josephus is genuine, why Jesus would curse a fig tree when it was not in season for bearing figs, whether the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Muhammad was a genuine historical event, and why the Hebrews in the first five books of the Old Testament referred to the Abrahamic God as Yahweh rather than Allah if Allah was the true name of God. Check out the rapid fire discussion in just over 30 minutes!

Check out Edouard Tahmizian's roughly hour-and-fifteen-minute interview with legendary biblical scholar Robert M. Price about Price's ongoing participation in Bishop Ray Taylor's Wise as a Serpent! podcast and his forthcoming The Heresy of Paraphrase and Houses of the Holy: A Higher-Critical Survey of World Religions before the interlocutors turn to Price's view on how much (or how little) we can know about what Old Testament books would have been considered part of the Old Testament canon to Jews living during the period in which Jesus would've lived, how the apocrypha were never intended to be understood as disavowed books, the non-Old-Testament origin of the exorcism tradition from contemporaneous faith healers and magicians, whether Jesus was asked to perform miracles (provide signs from God) on demand by nonbelievers to embarrass him in an instance of nonbelievers' confirmation bias, whether there was really a hypothesized oral tradition connecting the time of Jesus to the much later time when the Gospels were written, and more! Tune in for an enlightening discussion of the bewildering relationship between sacred texts and the "history" that is supposed to ground them!

Tune in for about an hour as host Edouard Tahmizian queries biblical scholar and Jesus mythicist Robert M. Price about topics ranging from how the Trinity doctrine's identification of Jesus and the Holy Spirit with God sits with the New Testament corpus, to whether or not Erasmus' Textus Receptus—or the 1611 King James Version of the Bible based on it—comes closest to the original biblical writings in light of subsequent historical discoveries. The discussion canvasses a number of different issues, such as Price's take on whether the story of Samson in the Book of Judges merely copies and recontextualizes the myth of Hercules for a Jewish audience, why the Gospel of Mark has four different endings (and whether any of these are faithful to the original Mark), the reasons for the contradictions in the different accounts of the death of Judas, why Matthew says that no one (apart from God) knows the day or hour of Jesus' second coming, and whether the author of Acts intentionally made a memetic parallel between a demon and the spirit of divination within the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. Check out this wide-ranging interview with an long-time synthesizer of biblical scholarship!

Tune in to this roughly hour-long discussion between host Edouard Tahmizian and biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss Robyn Faith Walsh's suggestion that the Gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, specialists who may not even have been Christians, in light of Richard Carrier's response that the Gospel authors were clearly concerned missionaries. The discussion then turns to why the Gospel authors would do mimesis (mythologizing Jesus) if a significant proportion of their non-literary audience would not pick up on what they were doing, whether Price finds it plausible that early Christians believed (as Carrier maintains) that Jesus was crucified by sky demons in other realms (or that Jesus was a celestial mythical being that was eventually historicized for polemical purposes, as perhaps suggested in the Book of Revelation), whether Church Father Irenaeus was correct that the Book of Revelation was written circa 90-100 CE, whether Papias' account can be trusted as a historically accurate account of the early Gospel authors, whether first-century Israelites would've needed permission from Roman authorities to kill a suspected false prophet (typically by stoning, not Roman crucifixion), and why Gospel miracle accounts would be done in private among people who knew Jesus rather than out in public for everyone to see. Check out this novel overview of some of these debates with a seasoned biblical scholar!

Tune in to this roughly one-hour discussion between host Edouard Tahmizian and esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss how biblical inerrantists try to deal with textual evidence of New Testament contradictions. The interlocutors canvas how inerrantists deal with an apparent misquote of Jeremiah by supposedly God-inspired Matthew in Matthew 27:7-10 (whose actual source seems to be Zacharias)—with Calvinists attributing it to copyist error, and others sometimes claiming that it refers to an unwritten prophecy by Jeremiah and so is not erroneous—solid evidence that the longer ending of Mark after Mark 16:1-8 was interpolated by someone other than Mark (someone who wanted to compile details from other Gospels about the risen Jesus to avoid an awkward ending to Mark's empty tomb narrative and give more "evidence" of the resurrected Christ via his resurrection appearances), and Price's take on whether Robyn Faith Walsh's reasons for thinking that Jesus mythicism is implausible stand up to scrutiny. Check out this novel interview with an indefatigable biblical scholar!

Pick up where you left off at the end of Part I and return to host Edouard Tahmizian in the second 20-minute part of his two-part follow-up interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price. The interlocutors go on to discuss whether the earliest Christians also believed in something like Calvinist predestination and which New Testament typologies (correspondences between Old Testament figures and New Testament one), if any, Price prefers. The discussion then turns to Price's forthcoming book The Gospels Behind the Gospels, his response to C. S. Lewis titled Merely Christianity, his When Gospels Collide on contradictions between the Gospel accounts, his Judaizing Jesus, his forthcoming Not Peace, But a Sword, his dabbling in writing fiction, and much more!

In this first half-hour of a two-part follow-up interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price, host Edouard Tahmizian queries Price about his recent anthology edited with John W. Loftus, Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist? They canvass the role of Jungian mythical archetypes as a kind of script for rituals/rites of passage, Price's take on the scholarship of Robyn Faith Walsh and the historical plausibility of her thesis that educated Hellenistic writers composed the New Testament, whether there were pre-Gospel narratives that were more consistent than the canonical Gospels and exploited by them (in themes like Jesus as the returned Elijah, Jesus as the new Moses, Jesus as a magician, and so on, and by portraying competitors to Jesus as servants of him), and the Gnostic understanding of salvation. Tune in to this animated conversation about fascinating ideas, and then be sure to tune in to Part II, too!

Join host Edouard Tahmizian in this hour-long interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss Price's early realization that the amount of effort needed to fill in the gaps between the ancient concerns of the biblical writers and the unaddressed modern concerns of today would not be expected of a straightforward revelation from God. Their discussion goes on to consider how the Haggadic midrash, a way to interpret the Old Testament used in the parables attributed to Jesus, undermines the historicity of any Gospel story (as virtually all of them just repurpose an Old Testament story), before finally turning to the ahistoricity of the New Testament characterization of Paul (even if the literary Paul had been inspired by the historical person Simon Magus), the case for Jesus mythicism and the absence of contemporaneous references to Jesus, the implausibility of the penal substitutionary model of atonement, and much more. Check out this fascinating interview with a biblical scholar who became a legend himself!