About

Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed was the first book I ever published. I published that book because I had written roughly a book’s worth of material on the subject for my website rationalrevolution.net and I felt that my perspective on the subject was one that was not represented in the existing literature. As a result, Deciphering the Gospels was created largely by restructuring and editing material I had written years earlier for my website. Beyond my own analysis of the Bible and the writings of the church fathers, very little research went into the development of Deciphering the Gospels. I had very little engagemnt with the work of modern biblical scholars or relevant historians; that book is based almost entirely on my own personal analysis and interpretation of the Bible.

After publishing Deciphering the Gospels I received a lot of feedback—both positive and negative—which really encouraged me to pursue the development of another book. I knew what I wanted to write about, but I also knew that I would need to take a very different approach to writing the next book. For the next book I committed myself to studying established scholarship on the material and writing everything from scratch instead of cobbling together my prior work.

As I state in the preface to Cracking the New Testament, I spent two or three years working on a book about ancient prophecy in Greek, Roman and Jewish culture before eventually setting that book aside to work on a book about Paul. It was during the process of working on a book about Paul that I developed some interpretive insights about the Gospel of Mark that led me to set that book aside and start work on what would become Cracking the New Testament Changes Everything We Thought We Knew About Jesus.

In my view, Cracking the New Testament is a huge leap forward from Deciphering the Gospels. The amount of research that went into Cracking the New Testament dwarfs the research that went into Deciphering the Gospels. There are things I learned in the process that changed my mind about some of the positions that I put forward in Deciphering the Gospels. For example, when I wrote Deciphering the Gospels I thought that the Gospel of John was a unity, but after reading the work of many scholars on the Gospel of John I firmly agree that it is not a unity, it is the product of multiple hands.

Likewise, the journey I went through by first working on the book about ancient prophecy was very productive and beneficial. A lot of what I learned about prophecy and ancient writing has certainly shaped my understanding of the development of Christian literature. Almost everything presented in Cracking the New Testament is information that I learned and synthesized after publishing Deciphering the Gospels. I went through an extensive process of discovery after the publication of Deciphering the Gospels that continued until I wrote the final sentences of Cracking the New Testament.

Even when I started writing what would become Cracking the New Testament I didn’t completely know where the book was going or what my conclusions would be. I basically just kept writing until I realized it was complete, which is to say that when I started writing Cracking the New Testament I still had many unanswered questions about the origins of Christianity, and I just kept going until I had answered my own questions. Some of the conclusions that I reached by the end of the book surprised even myself. I would have to say that by the time I had completed writing the book my understanding of how the New Testament was produced was quite different from what I believed when I started the project.

When I started writing Cracking the New Testament I still believed that Paul was a real person and that there may have been real people worshiping a heavenly Jesus Christ figure prior to the First Jewish-Roman War. But following the evidence changed my mind on those assumptions and led me to conclude that there never were any worshipers of Jesus Christ, in any form, prior to the creation of writings about him—the writings came first and the beliefs followed.