Possibly. I really don’t know at this time.

But if I do, all in-person appearances will be announced in advance here on my blog and all my social media (Twitter and Facebook).

And I’m far more likely to if appearances are funded. In other words, if some person or group (or several working together pooling resources) pays my travel expenses and modest appearance fee. So I encourage anyone interested to lobby or fundraise for this.

If you want to understand the actual politics of this, you have to understand the actual politics of Christianity and Judaism at the time. See my survey of that context in Ch. 5 of On the Historicity of Jesus.

And remember that Mark, Luke, and John are all Gentile-faction attacks on Jewish (Torah-observant) Christianity after thhe Jewish War endeed Jewish treaty arrangements and goodwill with Rome. Matthew is an attempt to respond by that faction, but even he has to come up with some way to answer their point that Jews are now enemies of the state (so why be Jewish?). Once you understand all that (and the context per above), everything in the Gospels makes sense.

Before the War, there were even more obvious reasons for Paul to want to unify the Gentile and Jewish groups and get away from Jewish tendencies toward political violence. This is all explained in OHJ. None of this requires ridiculous unevidenced conspiracy theories contrary to all logic and evidence. See my article on Atwill for more on that point.

If Atwill or Price think they have any actual argument, let them act the proper scholar and get it passed peer review in the field. I did it. So they have no excuse—but for their case simply not making the cake.

That’s not only tinfoil hat (it ignore alternative explanations of the evidence and is based on stretching the evidence implausibly), it’s also a non sequitur. Even if Mark intended that material parallel, it in no way supports Atwill’s thesis. For a sane and not lunatic use of such arguments, see the works by R.G. Price on the Gospel allegory of Mark thesis (e.g. Deciphering the Gospels). Meanwhile, see how Atwill’s methods are bogus and his grand theory not credible in Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus.

That’s a fallacy of retrofitting. It’s an undisciplined seeing of anything in anything else even remotely similar. This can be done between any two texts in the world of sufficient word count. It therefore signifies nothing.

You need to employ a disciplined method of discerning when parallels are actually causally related, and when they are just due to common ways to describe similar things.

Moreover, any theory of why some content exists, must be compared to alternative theories of that content. And we already have far more excellent and provable explanations for the invention of the triumphal entry and its every detail. None of which has anything to do with the ubiquitous but completely unrelated Roman ritual of triumphal procession, much less a specific one (there were literally hundreds of such processions over hundreds of years under Rome).

To see what that story is actually based on, see my discussion of it and related scholarship in the peer reviewed On the Historicity of Jesus. Don’t ignore that in favor of incompetent amateur cranks making shit up.

And Atwill is indeed an incompetent, tinfoil-hat-wearing crank. See Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus and Killing Crankery with Bayesian Reasoning: The Kooky & Illogical Postflaviana Review. Don’t be duped by his nonsense.

Note that the historicity theories that will most likely be discussed at this conference have nothing to do with Gospel mythology. No mainstream scholar believes Jesus was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. They all agree those are myths. The debate is whether behind the myths there is still some ordinary, mundane man, to whom those myths were later attached, or whether there never was even that.

Yes, GCRR says: “Each presentation will be recorded and given to all attendees free of charge. Those who do not purchase a ticket to the conference will be able to purchase a video subscription afterwards from GCRR so they can see the presentation recordings. However, only ticket-holders will be able to download the video files. The later subscribers will have to watch the presentations solely through the GCRR website.” Also, such archived video last time took a while in production (a month or two I think).