I’ve been running a series reviewing my three recommendations lists, and today I’m switching again to Origins of Christianity.

And check this out, because if I can bring Amazon over three grand in sales in a month I get a bonus (alas, yes, Amazon; but only they pay commissions enough to meaningfully earn, so rake off of the corpos we shall):

As always, I get a commission on anything you buy on Amazon after clicking any link on my website, here or elsewhere. Heck, I get a commission on everything in your cart when you check out within 24 hours after following a link from my site, even if you don’t buy the item you clicked on but instead wander around Amazon and buy, say, an illuminated world globe or real chainmail armor instead (those links might not convert outside the US; but follow a link that does—books usually do—and then find whatever products yourself in Amazon, and my commission on it all applies when you check out).

The books I’ll be discussing today are a grab bag of old things that are new again.

Because my recommendation of The Bible Unearthed for Old Testament Studies is now obsolete in many ways, I have replaced it with something more up to date: Lester Grabbe’s Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (Revised Edition; T&T Clark 2017). By contrast, lately Christian apologetics has been regressing to prior dumber times and we’re getting a lot of gullible 101 arguments online and in shows now that we refuted a billion times before, and I realized my old book Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (Lulu 2009) still holds up quite well for that purpose. And in between both points is Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford University Press 2012), which I am now recommending instead of its popmarket summary Forged.

I’ll explain more about all three decisions below.

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Why Forgery and Counterforgery?

I’ll start with forgery. I used to recommend Ehrman’s pop-market summary of this, Forged. And that’s a decent book for the purpose, and affordable, and maybe if that suits you you can get it. But based on recent experiences online I’ve decided that’s kind of a waste of time now. Anyone interested in that subject really needs to read the official academic version. You’ll need it if ever you are going to argue this with Christians, because the pop summary doesn’t cut it for that function. And you’ll need it if ever you want to explore your own questions about the assumptions in the field about what counts as a forgery. The pop summary will only evoke a hundred questions from you that are answered in the academic study. So, I know it’s expensive, but I think this is one of those cases where it is unprofitable to skimp.

I know I find Ehrman screwing up a lot in popular contexts. But Ehrman’s actual peer reviewed studies tend to be excellent, indeed required reading on their respective subjects. And this is no exception. Forgery and Counterforgery is the ultimate reference book for its topic. In fact it is essentially an encyclopedia of ancient Christian forgery and could be honestly marketed as such, justifying it’s price. Although IMO that’s still unjustly high, which is a problem with corpo for-profit academic publishing now that I’ve had harsh words for before, it’s almost forgivable when what you are getting is indeed an encyclopedia. This will give you everything you need to know about the history of each text and the reasons academics find each to be a forgery, with extensive bibliography and footnotes. You can deep dive every example here.

Forgery and Counterforgery also starts with an invaluable Part 1 that covers the concept of forgery itself and everything you need to know about what ancient people of the time actually thought about it, destroying almost all apologetic defenses of the practice you’ll encounter today. Forgery was intentional lying. And everyone knew it. And no one respected it. Which is why these things were lobbied hard as authentic. The realization or admission that they weren’t would destroy the entire purpose of it. This section is a whole monograph of its own on just the topic of ancient forgery, and valuable by itself. But it also sets the context for the rest. Part 2 goes entry by entry for every ancient Christian forgery, in the New Testament and out, with entries organized by purpose. But you can use the index to locate any specific book you are interested in getting to the bottom of. As often, even when Ehrman is wrong about something (like Docetism), he correctly gives you the common sentiments and enough of a breadcrumb to check things yourself.

Consequently, Forgery and Counterforgery is the ultimate go-to reference for everything forged. And I think any counter-apologetics enthusiast should have it on their shelf.

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Why Not the Impossible Faith?

I composed this book on hire almost twenty years ago to counter its namesake volume The Impossible Faith by J.P. Holding. I titled it so anyone who searched for his book on Amazon would always find my rebuttal popping up right beside it. And mine has since, I believe, outsold his, and often shows up on searches there before his book now. As my readers might expect, Not the Impossible Faith doesn’t just debunk Holding’s book, argument by argument, chapter by chapter (though it does, and humorously—which makes Not the Impossible Faith fun to read). I also used this as a platform to teach things about the ancient world and early Christianity. So each chapter is an educational survey of some subject anyone needs to be grounded in to understand why apologetics is so naive and uninformed, and why it really is important to understand the historical context before listening to their nonsense about it, which tends to be wholly divorced from that context, or even boldly asserted in contradiction to it.

This is actually a leading problem with Christian apologetics generally: apologists pose as experts and make strong and confident assertions to browbeat you into assuming they are telling you factual things about the ancient world and early Christianity; and if no one thinks to check, but just gullibly believes them (“But why would they lie?” “But didn’t they responsibly check?” “But aren’t they experts?”), they get to manipulate and grift you, filling your head with false assumptions and beliefs that can often be hard to knock back out again. This is why we need inoculations like Not the Impossible Faith (or even now, really, my whole blog, which, somewhere or other, debunks pretty much every Christian argument there is).

But “debunking J.P. Holding” is not the reason I’m recommending it today (I think he’s pretty much faded into irrelevance). Rather, what keeps NIF relevant now is that it serves a similar encyclopedic function to Ehrman’s Forgery, with each chapter covering a different subject you need to be “up” on to effectively counter Christian apologetics (and understand the ancient world). And I have noticed lately that all the progress in sophistication that some Christian apologists used to be making (in the 90s and early 2000s) has slid into a sinkhole, leaving the same 101 nonsense we started with (I discuss this general phenomenon in Addressing the New Christian Apologetics and, e.g., Ross Douthat’s Worst Argument for God). Hence online everywhere now again we are seeing the same arguments J.P. Holding contrived being “reinvented” and pushed everywhere, without any influence from him or awareness he was debunked.

So Not the Impossible Faith is relevant again. And it holds up pretty well even after all these years. Obviously I have evolved many of my ideas and findings since then. For example, NIF is written from the assumption that Jesus existed (contrary to many an ignoramus, including Bart Ehrman, assuming it is a mythicist book). And erroneously, it mentions some questionable evidence for Nazareth that should be replaced with more recent conclusions. And there might be other things in there I have updated in more recent studies—indeed, even when it’s not wrong. For example, a ton of studies on the dying and rising god mytheme have come out since, thoroughly establishing nearly everything I argued in NIF. I now cover that development on Obsolete Paradigm. But these occasional defects don’t seem to matter for the function.

So, don’t treat it as gospel, or current. But with caution you won’t be led astray: NIF grounds you in primary evidence and scholarship on questions like whether ancient people were critical thinkers or investigators and what limitations even critical thinkers or investigators faced then, how fast Christianity actually grew, did people avoid worshiping murdered or humiliated or working-class gods, did pagans all laugh off tales of resurrection or was resurrection a live hope already among them, why did people gravitate toward morally demanding religions, even toward persecuted cults, did no one accept “new” religious movements without evidence, how did ancient groupthink and pious deception work, did no one trust testimony from women, and several other subjects.

Not the Impossible Faith will arm you with facts and context and scholarship to combat a whole slew of assumptions underlying most Christian apologetics about Jesus or antiquity. And it’s needed now more than even when I published it. Understanding the origins of Christianity requires understanding what this book covers. And I had often been taking that for granted.

Plus it’s fun to read.

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Why Grabbe’s Ancient Israel?

Finally, Lester Grabbe’s Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? is the best current study, accessible to any reader, of where the field actually is now, on what is or isn’t true in the Old Testament. Some of the pet theories added to Bible Unearthed, for example, have since been abandoned or revised, while the general picture it painted of the mainstream consensus has become even more firmly reinforced. I only add one recommendation on Old Testament history in my Recommendations list for the Origins of Christianity because the latter can’t be understood without at least a mainstream perspective on the former, and right now the best one-stop-shop for getting up to speed on that is this.

Ancient Israel is an academic work, not a pop-market book, but it is easy to read, and thus gets the best of both worlds: lay readers can follow it and benefit from it, while anyone who wants the serious detail and citation breadcrumbs will also have that. It is just a summary, and so is not quite like Forgery, but this work is a better one-stop shop than Unearthed for a similar reason: it provides more starting points to address all the questions and whatabouts a Christian apologist might throw at you if you try citing Unearthed at them. So if you want to be ready with the next layer of argument and evidence, Grabbe supplies it, as well as breadcrumbs to further dive any specific subject in it.

And the evidence in this is more thorough and up-to-date, too. But the position it establishes as now mainstream is the same: that the Israelites were Canaanites, not slave invaders from Egypt, and were only monotheists much later in their history than the Bible pretends, and not without substantial resistance within. Hence, likewise, Moses and the Patriarchs are mythical. The kingdom history of Israel is exaggerated beyond almost all plausibility. And so on. He finds the earliest real record of what happened starts in the 9th century B.C. and not before. And very little of even after that survives examination as true—though some does, and perhaps more than is sometimes still claimed.

There are recent serious arguments pushing even further than that consensus minimalism, to argue that monotheism and the books of the Bible are far later developments still. See Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century? for that story, which is about the NT being forged in the second century A.D. but opens with the studies arguing the OT is a second century B.C. development. By contrast, Grabbe is describing where most scholars are now (who aren’t fundamentalists or propagandists). That could change in a decade or two. But you need to know the state of things. And this is the place to get up to speed on that.

I’ll just give two examples of what I mean.

First, Grabbe leans a lot on “the Bible is near contemporary to what it gets right” when it matches the Babylonian Chronicles; but that suffers a problem he sidesteps, which is: that might be because its authors were using the Babylonian Chronicles. In other words, someone faking up those books in the 3rd century B.C. could well be simply cribbing from the BC (and other materials available then that we don’t have now). Grabbe remains rooted in the mainstream assumption that they weren’t. And you do need to know that.

But you would also be right to be more skeptical than Grabbe—when you consider all the ways the same evidence could exist now. Grabbe himself rejects bootstrapping (like “the author of Kings got some public political details right, therefore Elijah was a historical wizard”). So he’s not an apologist. But he is trying to “preserve the phenomena” a bit too much. It’s just that you can always tell this, because he is careful in explaining why he thinks you should believe any given thing. He doesn’t lie or obfuscate or chest pump. Obviously I’m more skeptical than Grabbe on many things (though not as skeptical as those arguing the whole Bible was forged), but he’s describing the center of the field, not the edges. And that’s the value of his book.

Also, perhaps unfortunately, Grabbe only brings the question up to the end of “Biblical” history, just like Unearthed had done, even though that conclusion is largely fake. For example, Daniel was actually a 2nd century B.C. text yet depicts itself as centuries earlier (as Grabbe knows, hence he barely references it); and all of the older texts were edited over time and only came into their current form around the same time, give or take a century; and there was no canon then, so what was actually considered scripture (what we would describe as “in the Bible”) was a much larger body of texts than are now in “our” Bibles.

There as yet remains no good one-stop-shop covering this part of the story, which consists of Israelite history from the exile to the Roman occupation, the period in which the Bible came into the form we now have it, and which actually set the stage and context for Christianity. Such a history is much needed. I realize lots of books talk about this period, but I am not aware yet of any academic monograph on a par with Grabbe’s that systematically covers it the way Grabbe covers pre-exilic history. If anyone finds such a thing, let me know. I’d like to add it to my Recommendations for the same reason. [See comment for possibles.]

But for “Biblical” history, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? is now the best place to start getting acquainted.