About

Welcome to Phronesis

This blog is dedicated to a wide range of topics relating to religion, politics, culture, science, and other areas. The primary focus of Phronesis, however, is biblical studies and other academic forms of inquiry concerning the history and interpretation of the Bible. Here you will mostly find commentary on contemporary issues relating to online apologetics and counter-apologetics and surveys on the goings on in the world of biblical studies. I also post the odd review of books and debates here and there should you find those interesting as well.

About Me

My name is Jacob and I run this blog all on my lonesome. My personal area of expertise is in the historical study and origins of the New Testament and other early Christian literature. Previously, I earned my Bachelors in Film and Creative Writing at Portsmouth University. I am currently studying at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David for a Diploma in Bible and Theology. Born-and-bread British, I have previously lived in Adelaide, Australia and currently reside in Hampshire, England.

My Journey

For those of you interested in how I got to where I am now:

I was never interested in religion through my childhood years. I had a comfortable, middle-class, and secular upbringing with little need to be concerned about the bigger topics in life. It was not until 2016 that my journey began. This was the beginning of the new wave of European populism and nationalism that flooded the continent in the mid-late 2010s—what I like to call the "Trump Effect." While Marie la Pen made a mockery of Emanuel Macron on French television, my native Britain contended with the challenge of Nigel Farage and the Brexit campaign. The EU Referendum had just taken my country by storm. Division was rife. The decision to leave the EU by just a 52% majority vote threw my country into chaos. It felt like the world was on a knife's edge.

As for 16 year old me (I was born in 2000 so I trust that keeping track of my age through this recounting won't be too difficult), I found myself getting embroiled in far-right identity politics shortly after Brexit had won. Groups like Generation Identity—with their emphasis on standing up for British people and culture—captured my impressionable, young imagination. Though I never went so far as to espouse anything akin to ethno-nationalism, I was down the path of believing some pretty bad things. This was the point of my life I can definitively identify as my "leaving-the-nest" phase. I wanted to find my identity. It was just unfortunate that, in the hysteria and division that unravelled in the wake of Brexit, I got sucked into the nationalistic hype. 

Things would soon change for me, however, as I devoured as much information that I could from the internet to aid my political forays. My viewing-habits on YouTube at the time led to various Christian groups being recommended to me online. It was through these videos that I was introduced to the Christian gospel for the first time: the message of redemption through the poetic self-sacrifice of the god-man Jesus Christ. Needless to say, this message was music to my wayward 18-year-old ears. After a number of years aimlessly wading through the world's ideas, jumping from group to group and never truly finding my place, I had finally found something that could truly satisfy my teenage existential angst. Thus, on June 22nd 2019, I converted to Christianity.

Following this momentous event in my life, a radical transformation occurred in who I was. There was at once an immediate conflict between my new convictions and my old political inclinations. I had trouble reconciling my sleeper-nationalism and ultra-conservative tendencies with the notion of there being neither man and woman, nor slave nor free, nor Jew nor Greek, but all being one in Christ. A message of the brotherhood of man: we all bleed the same blood. Needless to say, my previous views were swiftly replaced by my new Christian anthropology. Freed from the shackles of my isolationist mindset, I relished in my newfound worldview in which I could see all humans as my brothers and sisters of creation. I quickly found a church and a group of likeminded believers at my University's Christian Union. Everything had fallen into place perfectly.

Nevertheless, it was not long until the first obstacle to my faith would rear its head. Meeting a fervent group of Christians at the university (largely consisting of Pentecostals), I had developed a habit of evangelising my local shopping precinct with these new friends, hoping to fulfil the Great Commission that we so ardently believed in. Whilst on one of these ventures, I soon found myself confronted by an older man: his hair was as long as his face and he had an aggressive curiosity written in his eyes. We got talking and I asked him what he believed in. He told me he was an atheist mathematician and that he didn’t believe anything. Remembering the script I had seen from various apologetics videos on YouTube, I asked him if he believed what he just said. To my pleasure, he said "No." Ha! Silly atheist. He fell into my trap. Hook, line, and sinker!

However, he then turned the spotlight onto me. "What evidence do you have for your religion?" he inquired of me. I had read the essentials of Christian apologetics by this point: Wallace's Cold Case Christianity, Turek's Stealing From God, Lennox's God's Undertaker. Being asked that enticing question kicked my brain into overdrive. "Well, have you heard of the contingency argument?" I asked him. After five minutes of discussion, he said "I'm not convinced." I quickly moved on: "Have you heard of the moral argument?" He replied by confidently asserting "Morality is relative." Suddenly panicking at my depleting supply of arguments, I dug my heels in: "Have you heard of the cosmological argument? The ontological argument? The transcendental argument?"

Case after case for the existence of God I threw at him; they all failed to stick in spectacular fashion. I became flushed at my failure to convince this man who was clearly wiser than myself. I recoiled at his rebuttals as my faith began to seem not so concrete as I thought. I prayed internally for this ordeal to end. After a few more minutes that felt like an eternity each, we shook hands and parted ways. My colleagues in faith continued to proclaim the message of our faith, unaware that my mind was now swimming with unremitting doubt. When we finished up, I walked back to my university accommodation alone. The anxiety hit me the moment I sat in my room. How could Christianity not be true? It changed my life in such a profound way in so short a time. Had I made a mistake?

That week was a tough pill to swallow. It barely took one conversation to shake my faith to the core. Like before, I took to the internet for answers. It was here that my doubts were exacerbated by encountering Jesus Mythicism for the first time. Needless to say, my Christianity would collapse if its founding figure and primary object of reverence were to be revealed to be a fictional person. What was worse, the apologetics books I had purchased failed to address this issue seriously. I dug my heels even further, took this challenge to heart, and looked for better sources.

This is where I was introduced to biblical studies for the first time. I remember the first proper academic book on Christianity arriving in the mail: Robert E. Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000). What better book to counter the mythicist material I had been exposed to? I fondly recall the conversation I had with my Muslim housemate at the time who had unpacked the Amazon package for me. We exchanged our different ideas and he took a great interest in the content of the book. Already this exposure to a serious study of Christianity was beginning to bare good fruit.

I was certainly not prepared for Van Voorst's tome when I opened it up. Jesus Outside the New Testament was unlike anything I had ever read before: hundreds of footnotes in small font, an extensive bibliography, text in languages I had never even heard of. I scoured Van Voorst's book for his arguments regarding the earliest sources on Jesus: Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius. It was thorough and fascinating, but most importantly, it quelled my doubts instilled by the mythicists. From here I continued to study. I picked up various critical introductions to the New Testament including those by Udo Schnelle (1994) and Werner Kümmel (1973); the historical side of Christianity quickly became my go-to subject. From here, my love of biblical studies was born. 

Then COVID hit.

Almost as soon as I had settled into this comfortable synthesis of faith and academic inquiry, it was ripped from me by the cold hands of quarantine. Whilst it was a disheartening experience to be separated from my new friends, a part of me was happy for the change of pace. I used the time to expand my understanding of the Christian faith, reading endless tomes on biblical studies and theology. My confidence grew with my faithfulness and I looked forward to every morning on God's good earth. Regretfully, it was in this context of disciplined study and rigorous prayer where my faith began to unravel. 

There were several components that led to my faith's demise. The first was my battle to understand the relationship between the Christian God and the theory of evolution. My conversion to the faith had annihilated my childhood passion for palaeontology; a jarring acceptance of young-earth creationism quickly took its place. I will never understand why I abandoned my scientific roots, especially given that I hold college qualifications in geology and geography. Truthfully, it was solely because I was convinced that there was no other way to interpret the creation account in the book of Genesis. The mostly American pastors who influenced me insisted that Christianity simply made more sense if the earth was created ex nihilo a few thousand years ago as opposed to humanity being the tail-end of blind, random genetic variation over billions of years. Like many other creationists, I was coerced by a vocal minority of extremely zealous activists into believing that there was no other valid interpretation and that to believe otherwise was an affront to the divine.

Mercifully, this was a view that I abandoned about half-way through my time as a Christian. After recognising the folly of such a pseudo-scientific belief, I "evolved" my understanding of earth sciences and Christian religion into a tentative theistic evolutionism. Yet it never failed to irk me that I had been so easily duped by these evangelical influencers into accepting the single-minded perspective of creationism and, in the process, discarding my roots in the hard sciences. 

What heightened this irritation was not the difficulty in reconciling evolution with Christian theism (a weighty yet surmountable challenge), but the fact that such a view has become standard in many ordinary congregations—even here in the UK. Tension between Darwinism and Christian faith, rightly or wrongly, is normative in many if not most of the churches I visited. What’s more, many within said congregations simply do not think to object to that tension. I began to question how the church had become so awry as to accept such a worldview—one that often places the age of the earth on the same level as the resurrection of Jesus itself and deems other Christians as hellbound for not embracing it. 

What made my ire boil over was both the pervasiveness of this view and the response to my change of heart by other believers. After getting called a heretic by a youth pastor for affirming the existence of humans before Adam and Eve (apparently it was meant to be a joke), I quickly realised how this unnecessary and demonstrably false add-on the the Christian faith had infected what is supposedly meant to be the bastion of truth in a world of darkness. The church began to look like every other institution in the world, rife with internal bickering and scandal. 

As for my own personal convictions, the reactions to my reversion to evolutionism forced me to be careful with how far I was willing to push my own "orthodoxy." My new theology had to be carefully scaffolded with "acceptable" Christian belief. But who got to decide what "orthodoxy" even was? Which exegete held the unimaginable authority to demarcate where truth ended and error began? The theological baggage that was hoisted upon my shoulders by this conundrum was weighty indeed. I began to wonder if I was getting ahead of myself and that the whole endeavour of determining what was "true" Christianity was all just a fool's errand.

My second problem laid in the questions I had about the origins of the Bible, in particular the New Testament. Analysing the gospels and the letters of Paul spawned an insatiable passion for studying these documents. Their origins are a historian's playground and I read up on many works defending their veracity and historicity. I found myself branching out to an array of other fields like papyrology, literary criticism, and archaeology in my desire to better understand these texts. But it slowly became apparent to me that the New Testament took primacy in my mind as literature: powerful literature written by geniuses, but literature nonetheless. As my passion grew for biblical studies, my ability to use the Bible for personal devotion and ethical guidance gradually faded away. 

This is not to mention the plethora of problems that traditional perspectives of the New Testament face when confronted by the advances of recent scholarship. The who, what, when, and where of the New Testament are contentious topics and the conclusions that many critical scholars had arrived at were highly problematic to theological conservatives like me. Even if all these suspicions about the origins of the Bible were to be proven baseless, there was no chance that I could complete a comprehensive research project on them in such a short amount of time from first hearing about the gospel to converting—which was, audaciously, a mere couple months. Centuries of debate and scholarship cannot be compressed and rapidly absorbed, especially given my tenancy to discard scholarly voices whom I disagreed with. So-called "liberal" scholars earned my distrust and contempt whilst bastions of "conservative" perspectives were given preferential treatment. I was defending an ideology that I had incorporated into every fibre of my being, not seeking the truth no matter where it led. 

All of this was unconscious, of course, but it demonstrated how I was clearly unsuited and unprepared for the world of actual academic discourse. So when I finally forced myself to accept the arguments of my "opponents" that were watertight and consistent, it further destabilised my faith. Surprisingly, it was not the actual arguments themselves that gave me pause but rather acceptance of the fact that I was plagued by a warped perspective through which I was looking at everything. Take off the Christian lens and everything was suddenly not as black and white as I had been led to believe. My understanding of Christianity would not allow this.

That being said, there were some arguments that I found to be truly compelling which began to upset my view of the Bible. Whilst interrogating the tricky question of whether the apostle Peter actually wrote the First Epistle of Peter, I came across an essay by Robert J. Myles featured in his book Class Struggle in the New Testament (poetically released the same years as my conversion, 2019) entitled "Fishing for Entrepreneurs in the Sea of Galilee? Unmasking Neoliberal Ideology in Biblical Interpretation." This brilliant essay applied social-scientific criticism to our understanding of class in the ancient world, exposing it as being marred by our modern economic and political ideas. Myles undermines the notion that fishermen in ancient Galilee were from a "middle-class" background and that the nature of these ancient agrarian economies likely prevented people like Peter from accumulating wealth or climbing the social hierarchy. 

From this essay, it was difficult for me to deny that Peter—a rural fisherman held down by an oppressive economic system that empowered the wealthy elite—was probably not capable of composing a letter akin to 1 Peter. This tentative albeit reasonable conclusion obliterated my conception of the Bible being "free from error" in the sense that a pseudepigraphic writing (a forgery) was inconspicuously an error. This had the domino effect of introducing new doubt elsewhere concerning the reliability of the gospels when they assert that the fishermen apostles had servants or hired men (Mark 1:20), and raised further doubt regarding the truthfulness of their portrayals as a large and leisurely family business (Luke 5:7, 10-11; John 21:1-3). If Peter was not some middle-class idealist as the gospels seem to suggest, then I could only conclude that the portrait painted by the evangelists and the presence of two letters attributed to him was simply misleading, if not incorrect. 

Now, perhaps I could have delved deeper into the literature and found other explanations for this. But that required time that I was quickly running out of. Thanks to Myles' work, I began to question my commitment to the brittle doctrines of inerrancy and inspiration, affirmations that threatened to snap at the slightest pressure. What justification did I have to think that this book was divinely inspired or inerrant to the dot? And what do these terms really mean? Since then, I like to think that I have come to a greater understanding about these topics and that I had only been exposed to a very myopic understanding of the relationship between the Bible and God. But I wonder if it was inevitable that my increasingly fragile faith would have been unwoven solely by the existence of these questions. 

Thirdly was the Charismatic invasion of my church following the pandemic. Before lockdown imprisoned everyone in their own homes, I had found a lovely non-denominational church in the heart of the city of Portsmouth where I was studying at the time. It was friendly, welcoming, and had consistent teaching. Following COVID I struggled to find a church closer to where I lived, so I took a journey one Sunday back to this church after quarantine had eased up. I reunited with familiar faces and felt at peace with a community once more.

But once the teaching started, I found that things had drastically changed. During worship, the pastor encouraged everyone to lift their voices up and speak in tongues all at once. Aside from being explicitly in contradiction to the ordinances set out by the apostle Paul in the New Testament, it was a very uncomfortable experience to endure. Mindless bellowing from the congregation eliminated any focus I had on the worship service. It continued even after worship had finished; people where still shouting "Jesus!" as the pastor was trying to speak! If I felt so uncomfortable, imagine how a visiting non-believer would have felt.

I had to ask myself if it had always this way at this church. Had I simply missed something prior to the isolation of quarantine? A hint of charismatic discord in an otherwise normal congregation? Perhaps. Regardless, this experience left me stranded.  I had no desire to partake in a Christianity that put the faux experiences of a few overly-zealous members over good teaching and community outreach. A sheep without a shepherd, I was deprived of a local community to plant myself into. Without a place to learn, to grow, or even to get baptised, my dwindling faith continued to unravel.

Undoubtedly what pushed me over the edge and onto the crash course with apostasy was my treatment at the hands of the Christian Union (hereafter CU). As a veteran of the organisation by my final year at university, I served as the evangelism coordinator for the CU during COVID. I organised events, set up outreach programs, and did my own evangelism on the streets with my faithful friends. It became quickly apparent to me, however, that my understanding of Christianity and how we should interact with the world was irreconcilable to many in the CU. 

For starters, my insistence that Christians should learn theology and church history were vehemently shut down by fellow committee members. To discuss such topics were deemed as inappropriate for the CU setting. In hindsight, I don't find this hesitance to teach the meat of Christianity too surprising. Like me, most of these Christians were merely fledgling believers who were just starting to spread their wings and explore their faith after leaving home for the first time. The topics that I encouraged were weighty and often dense—perhaps too dense for a group who were primarily concerned with seeking a place for them to develop surrounded by like-minded people. 

Nevertheless, I stand by my insistence that theology and church history are essentials for any Christian to at least get the gist of, especially those like us who were seeking to fulfil the Great Commission. I found it preposterously hypocritical that the same CU which had previously hosted a debate between theologian Glen Scrivener and Islamic apologist Adnan Rashid would reject the concept of teaching the basics of Christian belief. Indeed, this became a fork in the road for my relationship with these Christians. What would these students say if confronted with objections to the reliability of the Bible or the oft-quoted myths about the Council of Nicaea? Or what evidence that God even exists? 

This refusal to dig deeper into the faith had noticeable ramifications. I distinctly remember my predecessor on the committee being asked questions about God's existence by a curious seeker only for her to recount her personal testimony in the vain hope that it would be sufficient evidence to convince this person that Christianity was true. Seriously? An entire worldview about God and man, life and death, heaven and hell, bolstered purely by the what she felt at this one time or another. Christianity has a rich intellectual history and it pained me to see it go virtually untaught to the new generation of disciples.

Either way, things just weren't the same once my tenure on the committee ended. I never felt at home with the CU once I had, apparently, outlived my usefulness. From there the whole society remained deadlocked in its apathy and negligence towards completing its own mission. It was more about having awkward parties and fulfilling the quotas of modern evangelicalism as opposed to making a difference in the local community and the wider church. Needless to say, few if any of its members have kept in touch with me since my departure.

You can probably see where this is all headed. No church, no community, no reason to be a Christian. I was thankful for what it had done for my life; I could never imagine where—or what—I would be had I not converted on that faithful day in 2019. And indeed, I could have remained a Christian and tried to do something about the issues I saw in the church and the CU. Those crises of faith were never the tell-tale signs to me that God did not exist. But by this point the fire had died out. The seeds had been choked. No less than three months after I had left the CU, I stopped calling myself a Christian.

Applying some retrospective to my experience revealed the holes in my journey. Aside from the aforementioned issues, I came to recognise late in my journey that my conversion was in and of itself not an encounter with the Holy Spirit as I had thought. Rather, quite ironically I must add, it was instead the feeling of rebellion inside of me that stemmed from my politics at the time. I wished to be different and unlike the crowd, most of whom had either apathy to meaningful questions or were entrenched in militant political ideologies (the antecedents of what we would call "woke" today). The trembling I felt as I got on my knees and uttered my sinner's prayer was not an encounter with the divine but a reflection of my wayward desire to "counter" what I perceived as the mainstream opinion: to do something "edgy." Make no mistake, it was a spiritual experience. Heck, it was the definition of an inward transformation. But the decision came from a place not of intellectual conviction or ritualistic piety, but of moral debasement and selfish desire to be autonomous. Just a little bit of introspective at that moment could have saved me much embarrassment and strife.

I let my heart dictate my decision that day; my uncritical adherence to the Christian ideology was reminiscent of my previous embracement of identitarianism. It was symptomatic of a greater problem in my journey: my critical thinking skills were disengaged for the sake of belief. Whether it was politics or religion, I wanted to believe what I believed. I was guilty of the same mindset as those I mockingly labelled "Social Justice Warriors." This lapse of judgment first occurred when I refused to heed the conversation I had with the atheist mathematician, as well as the mythicists. I had failed to consider that any other side to what I had committed myself to had anything worth saying. By digging my heels in. I had doomed myself to my own conclusions and, by extension, an inevitable deconversion.

So where am I at now? It's been well over 2 years since I left the faith and, indeed, much has changed. The sad reality of my deconversion is that most of my Christian friends no longer speak to me. This is also true for most of my secular friends prior to my conversion. My decision to burn so many bridges has left me with fewer contacts than I had prior to getting involved in these topics. I must take the blame for this; much of my previous behaviour was less than palatable, though it doesn't excuse the obvious symptom of modern intolerance for different ideas. Nevertheless I have maintained some valuable friendships through the years; the faithful believers in the Cottage Industry Discord and my IRL atheist friends who have all contributed to my journey in some way.

I found that one benefit of leaving the faith was to open myself up to different topics outside of biblical studies. I feel far less restricted now that I no longer see everything through a theological lens. I currently find myself occupied with issues such as conservationism. I have always had a passing interest in environmental issues. Lockdown gave my time to turn those thoughts into action, rescuing frogspawn from puddles that I knew would dry up before summer even arrived. Right now that is what takes primacy in my mind as well as topics like education, music, modern culture, and other religions. It is here on Phronesis that I hope to unpack some of these topics served with some dry wit and critical rigour.

Yet even with all these new topics to study, it is hard not to admit that the love that I found for studying the Bible never wavered. There is just something about that book that draws you in and makes you crave a better understanding of it. Not in some mystical way where supernatural forces are coercing my desires, but simply a wish to make sense of these texts. They are often so clear and yet so ambiguous. A child can understand the biblical meta-narrative, yet millions of pages worth of ink have been spilt trying to understand even the basics of its message: what does Paul mean by the faithfulness of Christ? Who even was Christ? And what does Christ mean for today? I also seek to understand these things on Phronesis.

It seems, like Hotel California, you can check out of Christianity at any time but you can never truly leave.