Stay ConnectedChristianity is deeper than you’ve been shown.
Each episode, Nate Hanson sits down with scholars like N.T. Wright and Tim Mackie to talk through Jesus, the Bible, and the origins of Christianity in conversations you can actually follow. Nate came back from deconstruction through scholarship.
Copyright: © 2022 Almost Heretical
Most of us were taught to believe the Bible, but almost nobody was taught how it actually works. Why does Genesis repeat the same words over and over? Why do later stories echo earlier ones in ways that feel too precise to be accidental?
Tim Mackie, co-founder of The Bible Project, walks through how the biblical authors used design patterns, repeated keywords, and narrative "hyperlinking" to build meaning across the entire Hebrew Bible. From the word "good" threading through Genesis to the way sin crouches at Cain's door like the serpent in the garden, Tim shows why treating the Bible like a rule book or a textbook misses what these ancient literary artists were actually doing.
This is part 1 of our conversation with Tim. When you finish, listen to part 2.
🔓 Members get the full unedited interview, including Tim's thoughts on the LGBTQ conversation, church, and more we trimmed for time: faithlabshow.com/premium
Read the full write-up: faithlabshow.com/tim-mackie-how-to-read-the-bible
★ Support this podcast ★What if the strongest arguments against Christianity actually lean on ideas Christianity introduced in the first place? Rebecca McLaughlin has spent her life listening to the smartest objections to the faith, and she's convinced the hardest ones look very different up close.
Rebecca McLaughlin, author of Confronting Christianity, joins Faith Lab to ask whether Christian faith can stand up to serious scrutiny. The conversation covers the historical reliability of the Gospels and their eyewitness roots, women in the early Christian movement, moral critiques of the church that quietly borrow Christian values, and the problem of suffering through the story of Lazarus. Rebecca also explains why Christianity has always made public, testable claims that invite investigation rather than shut it down, and why deconstruction so often follows questions that were postponed instead of engaged.
🔓 Members get the full unedited interview: faithlabshow.com/premium
Read the full write-up: faithlabshow.com/rebecca-mclaughlin-confronting-christianity
★ Support this podcast ★For most people, faith means believing without evidence. But the word the New Testament writers actually used, pistis, was the ordinary Greek word for trust, and trust is something you have reasons for. Blind faith came later.
Shane Rosenthal, host of The Humble Skeptic podcast, joins the show to trace how faith got detached from evidence: what pistis meant to Aristotle and to the first Christians, how the Christian West forgot its arguments once everyone around was Christian, why Hebrews 11:1 is about a title deed rather than a blind leap, and how Jesus answered John the Baptist's doubt with eyewitness testimony instead of shame. It goes a long way toward explaining why so many people deconstruct today. You can find Shane's work at humbleskeptic.com, and check out his recent video on whether archaeologists have discovered biblical Bethsaida.
🔓 Members get the full unedited interview: faithlabshow.com/premium
Read the full write-up: faithlabshow.com/blind-faith-shane-rosenthal
★ Support this podcast ★Nate spent eight years hosting Almost Heretical, a deconstruction podcast with millions of downloads. Then following his doubts all the way through led him somewhere he never expected: back to Christianity.
In this first episode of Faith Lab, Nate tells the whole story: burning out while planting churches in San Francisco with Francis Chan, losing his belief in the resurrection, and then noticing that the skeptical explanations required a blind faith of their own. He shares what changed when he finally engaged the historical scholarship for himself, from the eyewitness texture of the earliest sources to the creed Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15, and why Faith Lab exists to test whether Christianity holds up under honest scrutiny.
🔓 Members support the show and get every full unedited interview: faithlabshow.com/premium
Read the full write-up: faithlabshow.com/deconstruction-led-me-back-to-christianity
★ Support this podcast ★
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