The story of Paul is one of irony, the New Testament depicting him at the martyrdom of Stephen holding the assassins' cloaks. Then this same Paul is transformed into the biblical archetype for someone suffering for their faith. He becomes so entrenched, it would appear that he had walked with the Christians all his life, that he was the one who defined the faith, eventually being called the "second founder of Christianity." But much of what we think we "know" about Paul comes from Sunday school stories we heard as children. The stories were didactic tales meant to keep us reverent and obedient. As adults reading the New Testament, we catch glimpses of a very different kind of disciple--a wild ascetic whom Tertullian dubbed "the second apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics." What does scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New Testament? The epistles give evidence of having been written at the end of the first century or early in the second--too late to have been Paul's actual writings. So who wrote (and rewrote) them? F. C. Baur, a nineteenth-century theologian, pointed persuasively to Simon Magus as the secret identity of "Paul." Robert M. Price, in this exciting journey of discovery, gives readers the background for a story we thought we knew.

A Prolegomenon to the Study of Paul examines foundational assumptions that ground all interpretations of the apostle Paul. This examination touches on several topics, invoking issues pertaining to truth, hermeneutics, canonicity, historiography, pseudonymity, literary genres, and authority.

Last year (2019), I published the 6th edition of my book "The Origin of Christianity" with the subtitle "An Epic Tale of the People of the Covenant," paying attention to the fact that Christianity was born from the "church movement" that had occurred in the process of the people of the Covenant scattered all over the world after they had migrated from the Fertile Crescent at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Promised Land Canaan. However, later, it became clear that the Ephraim and Manasseh, only who possess the genetic characteristics of Paleo-Mongoloid among the twelve tribes of Israel, played an important role not only in the conquest of Canaan but also in the eastern transmission of Christianity. Thus, this time, I deliver this 7th edition with the main title of "An Epic Tale of the People of the Covenant." In creating the augmented part of the 7th edition, I got many hints from the blog of Protestant Bible commentator Mr. Arimasa Kubo (久保有政), who was the first pastor of the Ikebukuro-Nishi Church, and used them as the reference. December 2020 Atsushi Murakami

Despite having enjoyed almost universal assent by scholars up till now, Chris Hansen swims into practically uncharted waters to show that one of the most overlooked and inconspicuous New Testament writings may, in fact, be a forgery. In the first English language book to ever cover the subject of Philemon’s authenticity, Hansen provides a detailed historiographical overview of the problem, and raises challenging questions regarding the literary contents, themes, style, and intertextual relationships in Philemon. Hansen’s research and surprising conclusions will certainly be of interest to those unfamiliar with Philemon’s questionable history.

This book provides the basis for revising early Roman church history. The second-century confrontations that structured the church were symbolized by Peter, representing the church’s initial Judean legacies, and by Paul signifying the Hellenistic theology. Paul is a key actor whose role cannot be correctly understood without separating the first-century man from his second-century legend. Historical Paul brought to Gentiles a new salvation promise in the name of Jesus, Son of Israel’s Creator God. Legendary Paul belonged to a Christianity that radically departed from the original matrix. Paul posthumously became an apostle to the second-century Hellenistic “heretics” under Marcion’s guidance who rejected the Messiah’s Judean legacy. The “centrist” Christian group, challenged by Marcion, used Peter’s primacy to defend their cause. Winning an important political battle, centrists created a wide anti-heretical front and established the church’s primary Judean orthodoxy. Paul losing the keys to Peter but finally occupying a third of the New Testament resumes the agitated history of the early Roman Church. It comprises an initial layer of Judean-influenced orthodoxy Paul rejected as the least of the apostles, completed by a second layer of Hellenistic-inspired orthodoxy, Paul rehabilitated. The continuing confrontations between Peter and Paul produced important texts, influenced the Gospels, made the church evolve, and falsified church history by introducing traditions that still confuse Christians. Understanding the political battles involved in establishing the Roman Church will help in reading all the texts that went into the Christian Bible with their conflicting ideals.

Was Jesus a mainstream or sectarian Jew, as the scholarly consensus tells us? This view—that we must automatically adopt Second Temple Judaism as the paradigm in which to interpret or reconstruct the historical Jesus—is often presented as self-evident, unquestionable, and beyond dispute. However, the promotion of the Jewish Jesus raises serious questions—specifically, whether this consensus is the product of theological and ecumenical agendas. In Judaizing Jesus, noted scholar Robert M. Price challenges this trend and offers a menu of alternative ways of seeing Jesus: Sacred King, Cynic Philosopher, Gnostic Redeemer, and...the Buddha! He concludes by proposing a new theory of Christian origins to explain how and why the first Christians themselves Judaized Jesus.