Howdy!
Thanks for the interest and query.
Unfortunately, about a million things interrupted, so I put that one down quite a while ago. At the time, I had something like 800 pages of draft already written. I will eventually get back to it - there's some really great stuff about the influence of India, for example, in the Mediterranean during the first centuries surrounding the common era.
But I'm glad I left it off for now, because I've come across scads more fantastic research about that subject and others since then.
In the meantime, I've got hundreds of pages of the re-write of
The Christ Conspiracy as well. What I'm going to do with that one is include a summary of the arguments I've written in response to Ehrman and many others over the past 14 years since I finished writing Christ Con. It will follow the same format as the old edition, but with much new research, different sources and expansion of issues that, while obvious to me, were not sufficient for others.
For example, the forged nature of the Jesus passage in Josephus, the Testimonium Flavianum or "TF," remains patently obvious to me, without all manner of analysis, which is why I included a mere mention of the controversy in the first edition of Christ Con. However, since this short and succinct statement of faith blatantly breaking the narrative constitutes the "best evidence" for the alleged existence of Jesus Christ, the devout believers and sentimental historicizers alike must constantly keep this sunken ship afloat, through the most tortured of reasoning and sophistry. If it were any other subject, the obviously forged nature of this passage would have been acknowledged centuries ago - as it indeed was, by some of the greatest scholars of the day. But religious fervor and euphoria cloud even the best of minds, and the lure of vocation and lucre are great.
By last year, I had some 100 pages of draft written about the subject of Josephus that included the most modern and touted analyses, such as the one by Dr. Alice Whealey. She does a good job for what it is, which is a sophisticated apologist tract, although I could find no confirming evidence that she is an avowed Christian. However, while she makes many good arguments that need to be addressed in any indepth analysis of the Testimonium, her main conclusions cannot be sustained, in my opinion. To wit, she assumes that Origen knew about the TF but simply failed to mention it. She therefore concludes that the entire TF was original to Josephus, removing as interpolation
only the sentence "He was the Christ," since Origen had specifically stated that Josephus did not say Jesus was the Christ.
As I say, I address these issues in dozens of pages that I intend to make available via a monograph on Josephus. So many projects, so little time.
This one,
The Christ Myth Anthology, is unfortunately on the back burner and will be for quite some time, possibly two years. But there will be plenty of fascinating information in between now and then as well to entertain and edify.
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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read
Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:
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