In this short online book, Vito Lear presents a primer that outlines questions, issues, and evidence illustrating that Christianity has failed to meet its burden to prove its extraordinary claim to have the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Lear’s concise inquiry focuses on three core issues: Are the fundamental claims of Christianity consistent with reason and morality? Is Christianity’s sacred text, the Bible, historically reliable? And since its advent, has Christianity overall made the world a better place, or a worse one? Lear argues that these questions should be widely asked, but are rarely considered by the general population in the predominately Christian culture of the United States.

In Part C of a three-part critical review of Robyn Faith Walsh's The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, John MacDonald provides a literary application and defense of Walsh's hypothesis that the New Testament is not, as is usually thought, the product of literate spokespersons conveying the oral tradition of their community, but rather is birthed out of networks of elite Greco-Roman-Jewish writers in dialogue with one another, not out of downtrodden illiterate peasants. MacDonald aims to show that Walsh's approach makes good sense of the evidence, such as pervasive intertextual haggadic midrash (Jewish) and mimesis (Greek) going on in writing the Gospels, which seems less likely on the "oral tradition of the community" hypothesis. Walsh's critique of the community oral tradition model is important because that model is what bridges the gap from the opaque period of Jesus' life and death in the 30s through Paul (who is silent on the details of Jesus' life) to the destruction of the Temple in the 70s, when Mark's gospel appears. A few bare details aside, without this chain of sources, reconstruction of the events of Jesus' life is essentially impossible. In this third article, MacDonald takes up the question of Paul and shows how Paul thinks of Jesus as the law incarnate/embodied/personified, and how this is rooted in ancient philosophy as well as Jewish thought.

In Part B of a three-part critical review of Robyn Faith Walsh's The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, John MacDonald provides a literary application and defense of Walsh's hypothesis that the Gospels are not, as is usually thought, the product of literate spokespersons conveying the oral tradition of their community, but rather are birthed out of networks of elite Greco-Roman-Jewish writers in dialogue with one another, not downtrodden illiterate peasants. MacDonald aims to show that Walsh's approach makes good sense of the evidence, such as pervasive intertextual haggadic midrash (Jewish) and mimesis (Greek) going on in writing the Gospels, which seems less likely on the "oral tradition of the community" hypothesis. Walsh's critique of the community oral tradition model is important because that model is what bridges the gap from the opaque period of Jesus' life and death in the 30s through Paul (who is silent on the details of Jesus' life) to the destruction of the Temple in the 70s, when Mark's gospel appears. A few bare details aside, without this chain of sources, reconstruction of the events of Jesus' life is essentially impossible. In this second article, MacDonald shows how the narrative of the arrest and death of Jesus serves a theological agenda, not a historical one. Moreover, MacDonald addresses the problematic nature of the hypothetical lost Q source (the material common to Matthew and Luke that did not come from Mark), such as how McGrath's attempt to derive the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus from Q is flawed.