David Wolcott, Christian Apologist

I see Christians ask fairly often for specialized help in their spiritual walk, ranging from special counseling to help with questions about their faith or advice about parenting. These requests are usually sincere, but often they seem unnecessary. Let me explain via a comparison.  When dealing with a health issue, people could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and countless hours seeing doctors and specialists, trainers and dieticians, and doing who knows what. Often these are necessary, but these experts will first check on the patient's habits.  Are they struggling with weight but eat a gallon of ice cream every night after a full three meals? Do they binge whole bottles of alcohol every weekend? Have they not left their bed for months save for going to the bathroom?  These are the first things that any good specialist will advise changing. Drop some of the sugar and alcohol, increase the vegetables, or at least start taking vitamins, and start exercising, even if...

The below is something I cobbled together as a pre-made Facebook comment when dealing with Jesus mythicists, though it works pretty well against most New Atheists in general. I’ve decided to post it as a blog post and will hopefully update it over time with more relevant quotes and better citation quality (page numbers, for example). Let's consider what a variety of non-Christian or anti-Christian scholars have to say about the existence of Jesus on the points of the crucifixion, burial, and later appearances of Jesus. The below list includes Gerd Ludemann, Bart Ehrman, Jodi Magness, Geza Vermes, Reginald H. Fuller, John Dominic Crossan, Michael Grant, Richard Burridge, Graham Gould, and E. P. Sanders, along with summary by amateur scholars Tim O'Neill and The Dutch Maverick. General opinion of the records: “As we will see in a moment, the oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus—despite what Leigh Teabing intimates—are the four Gospels of the New Tes...