Added The Quest for the Historical Paul (Part B) (2025) by John MacDonald to the Historicity page under Christianity in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
In this second of four articles, John MacDonald explores how Paul and Jesus are unnecessary to the biblical narrative. With Paul we seem to have a generic idea of a type prophesied in the Old Testament who would bring God’s word to the pagans at the end of the age. Similarly, Jesus (Joshua) seems to be one of a type of then-ubiquitous messianic claimants that tried to relive Joshua’s legacy. As with Plato’s prisoner who escaped the cave, the true issue wasn’t whether a prisoner watching shadows on the wall existed, but the appropriation of the story’s message.
New in the Kiosk: Rethinking Jesus: The Morality, the Myth, and the Silence (2025) by David Falls
In this essay David Falls critically examines the moral teachings attributed to Jesus and explores the tension between inherited reverence and reasoned critique. The article challenges both believers and secular thinkers to reconsider the ethical foundations of these teachings in the context of modern secular ethics.
Recommended reading: Agape and the Four Loves with Nietzsche, Father, and Q: A Physiology of Reconciliation from the Greeks to Today (2013) by David Goicoechea
In Agape and the Four Loves with Nietzsche, Father, and Q David Goicoechea explains Nietzsche’s thesis that the agapeic love of Jesus is humankind’s highest affirmation, even for sinners like the author’s father, Joe Goicoechea, who lived it out existentially. Already before the Q scholars, Nietzsche saw this love as the essence of the Sermon on the Mount and based his philosophy upon it. Throughout the Catholic tradition agape fulfilled the affection of Empedocles, the eros of Plato, the friendship of Aristotle, and the agape of Plotinus.