25 Powerful Productivity Tactics (The Productivity Project)

I just finished reading The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey, and this book is absolutely fantastic. After spending a year researching, experimenting, and testing all of the prevailing productivity wisdom that's out there, Chris distilled his findings into one book for people like you and me to benefit from. I will definitely be coming back to it repeatedly in the future. For anyone interested, here are Chris's top 25 powerful productivity tactics, each tested over a year of deep study and experimentation, which each have full chapters dedicated to them in the book.

1. Identify your most important tasks.

2. At the beginning of each day write down just three things you want to get done.

3. Track your daily energy levels to determine what your typical peak productivity hours are.

4. Find the triggers that make you procrastinate, then flip them.

5. Get in touch with your future self and treat him well.

6. Disconnect and allow yourself to feel bored.

7. Budget your attention and energy, not just your time.

8. Shrink your work by budgeting less time for certain tasks.

9. Defend your peak productivity hours (#3).

10. Chunk all your weekly maintenance tasks together into one day.

11. Dedicate more time to your most rewarding and high-impact tasks.

12. Shrink or eliminate your time wasting low-impact tasks.

13. If you can delegate your low-impact tasks, do. Determine how much your hour is worth.

14. Get a notebook and perform a brain dump, get as much off your mind as you can.

15. Make a list of the 7 major areas of your life (home, work, friends, health, etc.) and review them occasionally.

16. Make room for your mind to wander.

17. Find a way to quickly record ideas and thoughts that come up wherever you are.

18. Dive into the settings on your phone and turn off your notifications.

19. Make a habit of single-tasking instead of multi-tasking.

20. Practice meditation and mindfulness.

21. Eat for health and energy.

22. Drink water, use caffeine strategically, and avoid alcohol.

23. Elevate your heart rate with regular exercise.

24. Get a full night of sleep.

25. Make sure that you enjoy your life; you won't be productive if you're unhappy.

Want to know more? For a four page, in depth, extended table of contents of this book, click here.

The Roman Catholic Church and Canon Law

In 1997, a group of Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland drafted a study document, outlining ways to deal with the sexual child abuse crisis which was becoming endemic in the Church. Under the new rules these bishops maintained that there would be mandatory reporting of offending priests and instant removal of the positions of those behind the abuse. The Vatican shut these bishops' reforms down. The letter the Vatican sent in response (linked to in above) read, "In particular, the situation of 'mandatory reporting' gives rise to serious reservations of... a canonical nature."[1] To make it more clear, the letter raised "particular" concern about mandatory reporting because of issues with canon law.

WHAT IS CANON LAW?

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, canon law is "the body of laws made or adopted by [the Roman Catholic Church] for the government of... its members."[2] Also, "The ultimate source of canon law is God". This law is a codified version of their Tradition, which the official Catechism of the Catholic Church states “must be accepted and honored with equal devotion and reverence" alongside the Bible.[3] In the same way that Persian kings could not go back on their decrees -even bad ones- canon law can only be reinterpreted or added to, but the Roman Church can never repeal its own canonical decrees. This means that in situations such as the known sexual molestation of children by priests, the Church is bound by its own law even if that law protects predators and places thousands of innocent children in real danger.

WHAT DID JESUS SAY ABOUT CANON LAW?

In Jesus' time, there was a Jewish denomination known as Pharisaism which believed pretty much the same thing about Tradition as the Roman church believes today: besides Scripture, there was also a code of equally authoritative traditions handed down from Moses and his 70 elders through an unbroken chain of leaders up until their own day. (This set of traditions is referred to as the oral law; see The Jewish Encyclopedia for more information.)[4] Jesus thought these laws were ridiculous and offensive. In Mark 7.1-13 HCSB He blasted their great Tradition as mere "commandments of men" (Mark 7.7-8) and said "you revoke God's word by your tradition that you have handed down" (Mark 7.13). In Protestant terms, Jesus was arguing for sola scriptura - the idea that the Bible alone had divine authority over God's people. Any other traditions or laws, no matter how old they were, did not have that kind of authority in Jesus' view.

DOES CANON LAW GO AGAINST SCRIPTURE?

In The Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus once warned that "whoever causes [children] to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matthew 18.6 NASB). Jesus of Nazareth -God become flesh- was very protective of children. And yet, the Roman Church has gone out of its way not to cast out those who cause children to stumble, and has instead protected priests instead of their victims - for reasons of canon law, by their own admission: "In particular, the situation of 'mandatory reporting' gives rise to serious reservations of... a canonical nature." Whatever the particular law was which stood behind this letter from Rome to the bishops of Ireland, it (1) protected child abusers from being reported to the authorities, despite Jesus' words about causing children harm; (2) it protected priests against removal from their positions, despite the fact that the Bible demands that Christian leaders be "above reproach" and "self-controlled" (1 Timothy 3).[5] On both counts, this letter is proof that canon law sometimes goes against the Bible, and that the Roman Church has been guilty of revoking God's word by their tradition that they have handed down.

PRACTICAL RESPONSE TO THE CRISIS

As reports of Roman Catholic abuse continue to pour in from all corners of the world, including this instance reported in Canada's The National Post just this past week, we need to continue to pray for the victims of abuse and for those parents who have lost their children's innocence to the cumulative failures of the Church of Rome's tradition, which have all culminated in an undeniably widespread sexual abuse scandal within that denomination. At the same time, let's re-affirm our commitment to sola scriptura, to the authority of Bible alone. Our interpretations of Scripture and our understanding of what's best should never be so inflexible that we find ourselves with our own version of canon law, where we have become unable or unwilling to change when new circumstances or information demand that we do.

SUMMARIZING THE ARTICLE

To sum up: (1) Jesus taught that God's people should follow the Bible alone, and verbally blasted the oral law/traditions of the Pharisees; (2) the Church of Rome's view of tradition is similar to that of the Pharisees; (3) The Roman Church's traditions were -by their own admission- the source of their failure to discipline abusive priests and report them to the local authorities; (4) the Church of Rome's tradition does not always work with the Bible; (5) Protestants are different from Roman Catholics partly because they hold to the Bible alone, and do not hold any other tradition to be equal with the Bible.

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[1] A follow-up article in The New York Times reported that "Jeffrey S. Lena, a lawyer for the Vatican, said in a statement... 'In stark contrast to news reports, the letter nowhere instructed Irish bishops to disregard civil law reporting requirements'" (The New York Times, "Vatican Letter Warned Bishops on Abuse Policy", published 18/01/2011, accessed 28/12/2012). Since the letter specifically objected to, "in particular, the situation of 'mandatory reporting'", Mr. Lena's objections should probably not be taken at face value.

[2] There should be an extra ellipsis between "the body of laws" and "made". The words that fill in the gap, as can be seen by clicking on the link provided, are "and regulations".

[3] As explained within the pages of the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, p1/s1/c2/a2/#2, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PL.HTM (accessed Dec. 28th, 2012).

[4] This is similar to the Roman Catholic Church, which -showing how history repeats itself by following in the footsteps of the Pharisees- believes that various traditions have been handed down from the original apostles through an unbroken chain of bishops, up to their own day. Some of this Tradition has been written down and formalized as canon law, just as some of the Jewish oral law has been written down and formalized as the Mishnah, etc.

[5] Rome's insistence on celibacy for priests also counts as a tradition which has replaced God's word. 1 Timothy 3 comments that an overseer must be "the husband of one wife", meaning that marriage is at least an option for leaders. By removing the option for priests to have wives, the priesthood has become disproportionately filled with men whose repressed and unacknowledged sexuality eventually boils over suddenly in unhealthy and damaging ways, thus adding fuel to the raging fire of clerical abuse.

The Reduced Gospel of Jesus

This next post has been lifted from Donald Miller's book Searching For God Knows What. It's about how the Gospel is more elaborate and beautiful than the "reduced version" that we find in Christian tracts and pamphlets. It's largely because of writing like this that Donald Miller has become my favourite author, beating out more obvious picks like Mark Driscoll, John Piper, or Kevin DeYoung. I have edited Don's format just a little bit to fit the style of most of my Searching For A City posts.

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"THE GOSPEL OF JESUS" 
'My friend Greg and I have been talking quite a bit about what it means to follow Jesus. Greg would not consider himself as somebody who takes Jesus seriously, but he admits to having questions. I didn't have a formula for him to understand how a Christian conversion works, but I told him that many years ago, when I was a child, I had heard about Jesus and found the idea of Him compelling, then much later, while reading the Gospels, came to believe that I wanted to follow Him. This changed things in my life, I said, because it involved giving up everything and choosing to go into a relationship with Him.

Greg told me he had seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. "Those would be the facts of the story," I said, "but that isn't the story." "Those are the ideas, but it isn't the narrative," Greg stated rhetorically. "Yes," I told him.

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE IT CAN BE SUMMED UP THIS SIMPLY
Earlier that same year I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who is a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down he put a Bible on the table as well as a pamphlet containing the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas, and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar that they were critical; that, basically, this was the gospel of Jesus, the backbone of the Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, "If these ideas are so important, why aren't they in this book?" 

"But the Scripture references are right here," I said curiously, showing Omar that the verses were printed next to each idea. "I see that," he said. "But in the Bible they aren't concise like they are in this pamphlet. They are spread out all over the book." "But this pamphlet is a summation of the ideas," I clarified. "Right," Omar continued, "but it seems like, if these ideas are that critical, God would have taked the time to make bullet points out of them, Instead, He put some of them here and some of them there. And half the time, when Jesus is talking, He is speaking entirely in parables. It is hard to believe that whatever it is He is talking about can be summed up this simply." 

THE TROUBLE WITH THESE REDUCED IDEAS

Omar's point is well taken, And while the ideas presented in these pamphlets are certainly true, it struck me how simply we had begun to explain the ideas, not only how simply, but how non-relationally, how propositionally. I don't mean any of this to fault the pamphlets at all. Tracts such as the ones Omar and Greg encountered have been powerful tools in helping people understand the beauty of the message of Christ. Millions, perhaps, have come to know Jesus through these efficient presentations of the gospel. But I did begin to wonder if there were better ways of explaining it than these pamphlets. After all, the pamphlets have been around for only the last fifty years or so (along with our formulaic presentation of the gospel), and the church has shrunk, not grown, in Western countries in which these tools have been used. But the greater trouble with these reduced ideas is that modern evangelical culture is so accustomed to this summation that it is difficult for us to see the gospel as anything other than a list of true statements with which a person must agree. 

OUR REDUCTION HAS CAUSED US TO MISS SOMETHING

It makes me wonder if, because of this reduced version of the claims of Christ, we believe the gospel is easy to understand, a simple mental exercise, not the least bit mysterious. And if you think about it, a person has a more difficult time explaining romantic love, for instance, or beauty, or the Trinity, than the gospel of Jesus. John would open his gospel by presenting the idea that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly bullet points for easy consumption. Perhaps our reduction of these ideas has caused us to miss something.'

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Great stuff from The Donald.

-Sean

Josephus and the Evidence for Jesus

This post is taken from portions of Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist?, written to debunk popular internet conspiracy theories which suggest Jesus never lived. The layout of Ehrman's arguments has been changed to fit SFAC blog format, but all of the words (besides headings) are original to the well-known atheist Bible scholar Bart Ehrman.

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WHO WAS JOSEPHUS AND WHY IS HE IMPORTANT?

"Flavius Josephus is one of the truly important figures from ancient Judaism. His abundant historical writings are our primary source of information about the life and history of Palestine in the first century. He himself was personally involved with some of the most important events that he narrates, especially in his eight-volume work, The Jewish Wars. Josephus was born to an aristocratic family in Palestine some six or seven years after the traditional date of Jesus' death... In his various writings Josephus mentions a large number of Jews, especially as they were important for the social, political, and historical situation in Palestine. As it turns out, he deals briefly also with John the Baptist. And on two occasions, at least in the writings as they have come down to us today, he mentions Jesus of Nazareth."

JOSEPHUS TALKS ABOUT JESUS' BROTHER JAMES

"It is somewhat simpler to deal with these two references [to Jesus of Nazareth] in reverse order. The second of them is very brief and occurs in Book 20 of the Antiquities. Here Josephus is referring to an incident that happened in 62 [AD], before the Jewish uprising, when the local civic and religious leader in Jerusalem, the high priest Ananus, misused his power. The Roman governor had been withdrawn, and in his absence, we are told, Ananus unlawfully put to death a man named James, whom Josephus identifies as 'the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah' (Antiquities 20.9.1). Here, unlike the pagan references we examined earlier, Jesus is actually called by name. And we learn two things about him: he had a brother named James, and some people thought that he was the messiah. Both points are abundantly attested as well, of course, in our Christian sources, but it is interesting to see that Josephus is aware of them."

THE PASSAGE ABOUT JESUS (PART #1)

"[The second passage] is known to scholars as the Testimonium Flavianum, that is, the testimony given by Flavius Josephus to the life of Jesus. It is the longest reference to Jesus that we have considered so far, and it is by far the most important. In the best manuscripts of Josephus it reads as follows:

At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one should call him a man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. He was the messiah. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, just as the divine prophets had spoken of these and countless other wonderous things about him. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out. (Antiquities 18.3.3)

The problems with this passage should be obvious to anyone with even a casual knowledge of Josephus. We know a good deal about him, both from the autobiography that he produced and from other self-references in his writings. He was thoroughly and ineluctably Jewish and certainly never converted to be a follower of Jesus. But this passage contains comments that only a Christian would make: that Jesus was more than a man, that he was the messiah, and that he arose from the dead in fulfillment of the scriptures. In the judgement of most scholars, there is simply no way Josephus the Jew would or could have written such things. So how did these comments get into his writings?"

HOW GENUINE IS THIS PASSAGE? (PART #2)

"Among his own people [the Jews], Josephus was not a beloved author read through the ages. In fact, his writings were transmitted in the Middle Ages not by Jews but by Christians. This shows how we can explain the extraordinary Christian claims about Jesus in this passage. When Christian scribes copied the text, they added a few words here and there to make sure that the reader would get the point. This is that Jesus, the super-human messiah raised from the dead as the scriptures predicted. The big question is whether a Christian scribe (or scribes) simply added a few choice Christian additions to the passage or whether the entire thing was produced by a Christian and inserted in an appropriate place in Josephus Antiquities.

The majority of scholars of early Judaism, and experts on Josephus, think that it was the former - that one or more Christian scribes 'touched up' the passage a bit. If one takes out the obviously Christian comments, the passage may have been rather innocuous, reading something like this:

At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. He was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. When Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out.

If this is the original form of the passage, then Josephus had some solid historical information about Jesus's life: Jesus was known for his wisdom and teaching; he was thought to have done remarkable deeds; he had numerous followers; he was condemned to be crucified by Pontius Pilate because of Jewish accusations brought against him; and he continued to have followers among the Christians after his death."

COUNTERING ARGUMENTS (PART #3)
"Some have argued, however, that the entire passage was made up by a Christian author and inserted into the writings of Josephus. If that is the case, then possibly the later references to James as 'the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah' was also interpolated, in order to reinforce the point of the earlier insertion... G.A. Wells has maintained that if one removes the entire Testimonium from its larger context, the preceding paragraph and the one that follows flow together quite nicely. This one seems, then, intrusive. As Earl Doherty rightly notes, however, it was not at all uncommon for ancient writers (who never used footnotes) to digress from their main points, and in fact other digressions can be found in the surrounding context of the passage. So this argument really does not amount to much.

More striking for Earl Doherty is the fact that no Christian authors appear to be aware of this passage intil the church father Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century [the 300's AD]. In the second and third centuries there were many Christian writers (Justin, Tertullian, Origen, and so on) who were intent on defending both Christianity and Jesus himself against charges leveled against him by their opponents. And yet they never, in defense of Jesus, mention this passage of Josephus. Is that really plausible?... This too does not strike me as a strong argument. The pared-down version of Josephus -the one without Christian additions- contains very little that could have been used by the early Christian writers to defend Jesus and his followers from attacks by pagan intellectuals. It is a very neutral statement. The fact that Jesus is said to have been wise or to have done great deeds would not go far in the repertoire of the Christian apologists... if one reads the passage without the rose-tinted lenses of the Christian tradition, its view of Jesus can be seen as basically negative. The fact that he was opposed by the leaders of the Jewish people would no doubt have shown that he was not an upright Jew. And the fact that he was condemned to crucifixion, the most horrific execution imaginable to a Roman audience, speaks for itself."

"What I did not stress earlier but need to point out now is that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the pagan Tacitus or the Jewish Josephus acquired their information about Jesus by reading the Gospels. They heard information about him. That means the information the gave predated their writings. Indirectly, then, Tacitus and (possibly) Josephus provide independent attestation to Jesus's existence from outside the Gospels although, as I stated earlier, in doing so they do not give us information that is unavailable in our other sources."

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This might have been thick reading (and I chose to cut a lot of Ehrman's material out!), but this is also great information to have on some of the proof for Jesus. I hope it's been helpful! For anyone interested in reading Josephus for themselves, click for the online version of his Antiquities of the Jews.

The Apostle Paul: Did Jesus Exist?

"The Apostle Paul," writes atheist Bible scholar Bart Ehrman in his book, Did Jesus Exist?, "is our earliest surviving Christian author of any kind... Paul was writing some years before the Gospels. His first letter (1 Thessalonians) is usually dated to 49 AD [which is just sixteen short years after Jesus' death on the cross in 33 AD]... Paul understood Jesus to be a historical figure, a Jew who lived, taught, and was crucified at the instigation of Jewish opposition."[1] So Bart Ehrman is saying is that Paul is one of our earliest witnesses to the life of Jesus Christ - one who should be taken seriously.

WHY IS PAUL A TRUSTWORTHY SOURCE?
How do we know that Paul actually wrote letters about Jesus shortly after Christ's death on the cross? (We'll leave the resurrection part out just for now.) Maybe some later Christian made up the persona of Paul, pretended to be him, and wrote untrue things about Jesus. Maybe there never was a man named Paul. So why should we trust the writings attributed to him? To begin with, there are no recognized scholars -agnostic, atheist, or Christian- who actually believe that Paul wasn't a historical person. If "Paul" was a later Christian author hiding behind an elaborate persona, he sure didn't have much time to make things up. By 96 AD Paul was already widely remembered by Christians all over the Roman Empire as the man who "taught... the whole world" about Jesus (1 Clement 5:5), and his first letter to the Corinthians was already considered Scripture written "under the inspiration of the Spirit" (1 Clement 47:3). The communities that Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna wrote to early on in the church's history all remembered Paul, and he is often appealed to as an authority on various matters in their existing letters. For these reasons among others, we can be confident about using Paul as a trustworthy source of early traditions about Jesus.

WHAT WERE PAUL'S SOURCES ABOUT JESUS?
In Paul's letters, he sometimes mentions that he "received" most of his information about Jesus from someone else.[2] He does this, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15.3-7. The question then is, well, who were Paul's sources? By his own admission he never knew Jesus before He was crucified. The apostle tells us what his sources are in Galatians 1.18-19. Three years after his conversion in the mid-30's AD,[3] Paul went to Jerusalem to visit the leader of the apostles, Peter (Cephas), as well as James the Brother of Jesus. Those are pretty good sources! If Jesus didn't exist, wasn't crucified, didn't die on the cross, and didn't rise again, they would have known about it. Paul also mentions, in connection with the resurrection, another "five hundred" people who saw Jesus after he rose from death (1 Corinthians 15.6). Add all of those things up (and there's more), and Paul gives us a pretty solid basis for our beliefs about Jesus.

WHAT DID PAUL WRITE ABOUT JESUS?
If Paul had good sources for what he wrote about Jesus, we might want to stop and take some time to look at what Paul actually said about him. Hover over Scripture references with your mouse to see the verses.

God: Jesus is "Lord of glory" (1 Cor 2.8), Creator of all (Col 1.16-18), God (Rom 9.5).

Birth: Jesus was "born of a woman" -- possibly implying the virgin birth (Gal 4.4).

Lineage: Jesus was believed to be a descendant of King David (Rom 1.3).

Family: Paul mentions Jesus's brothers (plural) in 1 Cor 9.5, and James in Gal 1.19.

Economic Status: Paul writes that Jesus "became poor" in 2 Cor 8.9.

Disciples: "The Twelve" mentioned along with Peter (1 Cor 15.5) and John (Gal 2.9).

Teaching: Refers to "the Lord's" teaching (1 Cor 7.10, 1 Cor 9.14, 1 Cor 11.23-26).

Betrayal: An early tradition includes "the night [Jesus] was betrayed" in 1 Cor 11.23-24.

Crucifixion: Jesus was known to have been executed on a cross (1 Cor 1:23).

Burial: Jesus was buried (Rom 6.4, 1Cor 15.4, Col 2.12).

Resurrection: There is a detailed defense of Jesus's resurrection in 1 Cor 15.12-13.

Ascension: Jesus was known to have ascended into heaven (Eph 4.8-10).

Taken together, written within a short time of Jesus's earthly life, this shows a pretty well-defined picture of who he was! This was all written during the lifetimes of those who personally saw Jesus and knew Him.

WHAT DOES THE OTHER SIDE SAY?
As Bart Ehrman (an atheist, mind you, not a Christian with a vested interest) puts it, those who don't think that Jesus really lived claim "that these references to Jesus were not originally in Paul's writings but were inserted by later Christian scribes".[4] But this is no way to do history! This is a cheap way of ignoring the evidence about who Jesus really was, or is. Ehrman mockingly dismisses this argument against Jesus' existence by saying "If historical evidence proves inconvenient to one's views, then simply claim that the evidence does not exist, and suddenly you're right"![5] To disprove the claim, though, Bart Ehrman writes "there is no textual evidence that these passages were not original... they appear in every single manuscript of Paul that we have".[6] He also writes,

"if scribes were so concerned to insert aspects of Jesus's life into Paul's writings, it is passing strange that they were not more thorough, for example, by inserting comments about Jesus' virgin birth in Bethlehem, his parables, his miracles, his trial before Pilate, and so forth...whatever else one thinks about Paul's view of Jesus -and however one explains why Paul himself does not say more- it is safe to say that he knew that Jesus existed and that he knew some fundamentally important things about Jesus's life and death."[7]

SUMMARIZING EVIDENCE FOR JESUS IN PAUL'S LETTERS
Drawing from the non-Christian author Bart Ehrman, we've learned (1) that Paul is an extremely early source of traditions about Jesus, was converted within a very short time of Jesus' death, and wrote the first of his Biblical letters within sixteen years of Jesus's death on the cross; (2) that there are very good reasons to trust that Paul was a real historical figure who wrote the letters that are attributed to him; (3) that Paul mentions a wide number of facts and beliefs about Jesus that can be traced back to those who originally knew Him; (4) that Paul's own sources included the apostle Peter, also known as Cephas, and Jesus' brother James, and (5) that counter-arguments against the evidence for Jesus in Paul are not very good. Because of Paul's testimony, we can have even greater confidence in Jesus!

Jesus bless,

-Sean Rice

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[1] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, pg. 117-118

[2] Ehrman writes "Even where Paul does not state that he is handing on received tradition, there are places where it is clear he is doing so. I have mentioned, for example, Romans 1:3-4... This creed was not written by Paul: it uses words and phrases not otherwise found in Paul (for example, spirit of holiness) and contains concepts otherwise alien to Paul... He is using, then, an earlier creed that was in circulation before his writing." -Did Jesus Exist?, pg. 130

[3] Paul converted sometime in the 30's AD. This is shown based on the fact that in 2 Cor 11:32 Paul mentions that King Aretas of the Nabateans tried to "seize" him. But, King Aretas died around year 40 AD. So Paul must have converted some time before that, in the 30's.

[4] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, pg. 118

[5] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, ibid.

[6] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, pg. 133

[7] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, ibid.