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As Christmas approaches, and the religious Right try to force everyone to say “Merry Christmas,” and mean it, the rest of us may want to know why they protest so much. What is the relationship between the religious Right, the Christian Church, and the gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth; where do they intersect, and where to they part ways?
Robert Price, a professor of Theology and Scriptural Studies, and a fellow of biblical criticism’s most activist research groups, The Jesus Seminar, has asked these questions (and more) of himself and fellow researchers, and has published his opinions in a host of controversial books and papers. He has taken on Pastor Rick Warren with his book, The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For?; Dan Brown, with his book, The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger than Fiction; discussed his own de-conversion in Beyond Born Again; and even addressed the question of whether an historical Jesus ever existed in Deconstructing Jesus. His answer to that dangerous question…? No.
For Equal Time for Freethought’s one-hour special this Sunday, we will speak to (and take calls for) Dr. Price regarding two of his most recent books; Jesus is Dead (a collection of essays discussing both the historicity of Jesus and the Resurrection), and The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church got LEFT BEHIND (a critical look at myriad apocalyptic novels, including what one reader called, “the biblical errors and theological absurdities in the Left Behind series”).