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Biblical Scholarship
Apparitions of Jesus
The Resurrection as Ghost Story
By Robert Conner
Could the folklore of ancient ghost stories be the basis for the resurrection accounts of the New Testament? Recent scholarship surveyed in Apparitions of Jesus suggests that early Christians poured their heady new wine–a man saved the world by rising from the dead–into the old wineskins of familiar legend.
Combining his own research with the insights of publications past and present, Robert Conner leads us down haunted hallways of Greco-Roman ghost lore to illuminate neglected corners of the gospels. Along the way, finding yet another human side to the beloved old tales, we understand how ghostly apparitions were spoken about for much the same reason modern-day people still see them: a psychological response vividly experienced by those suffering great loss.
Evolving out of Eden
Christian Responses to Evolution
By Robert M. Price and Edwin A. Suominen
Evolution is an undeniable reality, but it contradicts foundational doctrines of Christianity that themselves evolved into existence many centuries before Darwin. A lot of Christians are now walking a troubled middle path between Genesis and genetics, threatened with the loss of a cherished faith on the one hand or their intellectual integrity on the other. There’s now a whole cottage industry of science-savvy theologians trying to lead troubled believers through the hostile territory outside Eden’s comforting fairyland.
Writing with the combination of high criticism and low humor that fans have come to love from Robert M. Price, he and co-author Edwin A. Suominen survey the apologetic landscape and offer their own frank reckoning of evolution’s significance for Christian belief.
Holy Fable
The Old Testament Undistorted by Faith
In this first of a comprehensive two-volume study of the Old and New Testaments, Dr. Robert M. Price builds a spacious and sturdy ark to carry Bible readers over the floods of mystery that have long perplexed them.
Why are there multiple creation stories? Who are the “sons of god” in Genesis? What’s really going on with those Isaiah passages that preachers love to read at Christmas?
Putting a lifetime of biblical scholarship hard at work on perhaps his most momentous project yet, Dr. Price explains the mysteries without scorning them. The beloved old Bible is revealed to be indeed a Fable, but still a Holy one in its sprawling and fascinating way.
Moses and Minimalism
Form Criticism vs. Fiction in the Pentateuch
The saga of Moses the Lawgiver is a mighty oak that has grown strong and thick through the centuries from an acorn of information found in the first five books of the Bible. But even the biblical Moses was the product of earlier stories, assembled by an unnamed, undated compiler. In Moses and Minimalism, Dr. Robert M. Price applies the critical scrutiny of his biblical scholarship to an Old Testament figure as central, and yet mythical, as he has found Jesus of the New Testament to be.
See also Blaming Jesus for Jehovah in the Christianity section below.
A Wave of Hypercriticism
By Willem Van Manen, with editing and an introduction by Robert M. Price
Willem Christiaan van Manen was the greatest of the once-notorious Dutch Radical Critics who went far beyond F.C. Baur and the Tübingen School, arguing that the historical Paul wrote none of the epistles that bear his name. Never refuted, his arguments have languished in untranslated Dutch and German books. His few articles for The Encyclopaedia Biblica and The Expository Times have been largely out of reach. Until now: These essays convey van Manen’s revolutionary views in a nutshell.
It’s esoteric subject matter, for sure. But if you liked The Amazing Colossal Apostle by Robert M. Price, you will want to read this collection, too. A Wave of Hypercriticism was edited by Dr. Price and includes an Introduction and Afterword by him.
Christianity
Blaming Jesus for Jehovah
Rethinking the Righteousness of Christianity
By Robert M. Price with a Foreword by Valerie Tarico
Christians consider their religion virtually synonymous with morality, believing there can be no moral standard without a God to guarantee it, no moral behavior without belief in God and knowledge of his commandments. Disbelievers are objects of their suspicion, tarred with labels like “relativist” and “nihilist.” But buried under the benign and placid surface of their own theology lies a ticking moral time bomb, and most of them have never realized the sinister implications of what they purport to believe.
Having his loins girt with a lifelong regard for rational truth, wearing the breastplate of former fundamentalism and the helmet of biblical scholarship, Dr. Price does some bomb squad investigation around the deadly and hidden charge lurking under the moral foundations of Christianity.
Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief
A Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith
By David Madison with a Foreword by Bruce Gerencser
An all-powerful God who permits unspeakable horrors and sent a Son who threatened more to come, forever, to those who don’t believe in him. An inspired holy book that turns out to be full of archaic nonsense, moral failures, and contradictions. A world of disagreement not just between Christians and other religions, but within Christianity itself. Blood sacrifice and a tale of the walking dead as the very foundation of faith. These are just a few aspects of Ten very Tough Problems that David Madison describes in this wonderfully deep yet humorous dismantling of his former faith. Combining rigorous scholarship with engaging personal reflections and refreshing wit, he offers understanding and even some laughs while walking with readers past the gravestones of Christian thought and belief.
Freedom to Doubt
Freedom to Doubt is its author’s second book, and that of Tellectual Press as well. Charles Shingledecker accompanies his fellow believers on an entertaining and informative journey through the Bible, Church history, and the nature of Christian belief.
Narrow is The Way, Jesus said. It is a hazardous path, too, lined with obstacles and roadblocks that lurk in the shadows of naive fundamentalism. Chuck has bumped into many rough spots, surprised at the difficulties he never saw coming in a simplistic faith but also fascinated by the nuances of a more authentic one. Now he offers a candle to help light the way for others, to provide some comfort for those troubled Christians who feel isolated and alone in their doubts.
See also Evolving out of Eden in the Biblical Scholarship section above.
History
Good Times in Old Genesee
A Tale of Two Families
By Gerald Hickman with Tea Joe Hickman
With help from his granddaughter Tea Joe, Gerald Hickman shares his love of Western U.S. history in Good Times in Old Genesee. It’s a personal and historical recollection of Genesee, Idaho from a former resident, a trip in time to his childhood ranch and beyond, back to the pioneers, in the Genesee valley of North-Central Idaho. It’s a visit to Old Genesee, a small community deep in the winter snows and summer grains where his family found a place for themselves. The book covers the period from the first settlers of the 1870s to World War II. It describes the natural history of the area, the early town, and the farming and country life of the early pioneers and those who followed, as engines replaced horses out in the fields.
Fiction
Eden
The Genesis Story Retold
By Murray Sheehan, with an Introduction by Robert M. Price and Edwin A. Suominen
Murray Sheehan’s Eden surely qualifies as one of the best books in the Bible fiction genre. After being nearly forgotten in the past ninety years, it turns out to be a very entertaining read even today. One reviewer of the time called Sheehan’s writing “beautifully modulated prose,” with sentences that “have been formed by a fastidious pen and an ear sensitive to flowing harmonies. His interpretation is not without humor and subtlety, . . . that never become strident.”
Tellectual Press is pleased to bring you this fine old work, long out of print and with its copyright lapsed, in both paperback and e-book. With an Introduction by Robert M. Price and Edwin A. Suominen.
Sins of the Fathers
On a summer morning in 1966, fourteen-year old Michael Fisher set out on his paper route in Superior, Wisconsin. His body was found in a ditch but no killer ever was. Now, longtime Superior resident Judith Liebaert commemorates the Fisher case with a murder mystery of her own. Sins of the Fathers is set in her childhood hometown and also begins with a cold case from fifty years ago. But her debut novel is all fiction–from the opening scene where a shadowy old killer confronts a second victim to the surprising end when both murders are finally solved, in a way nobody expected.
