My interviews on the PBS Series “Closer to Truth,” hosted by Dr. Robert L. Kuhn, have now been posted on line–twelve topics in all on topics ranging from the historical to the theological. This amazing show is in its third season and the new series on  “Cosmos, God, & Consciousness” pulls together top experts from the worlds of science, philosophy, and religion…The site as a whole is well worth endless browsing far beyond my meager contributions…

You can access the following topical clips at the link below:

Does God Know the Future? (James Tabor)
How is God the Creator? (James Tabor)
What would a Judgment be Like? (James Tabor)
Is This the End Time? (James Tabor)
Do Angels and Demons Exist? (James Tabor)
Arguing God from Miracles & Revelations? (James Tabor)
Does God Intervene in the World? (James Tabor)
Authentication and Conflict in Religious Belief? (James Tabor)
A New Heaven & A New Earth? (James Tabor)
Imagining Immortality and Eternal Life (James Tabor)
What is Immortality? (James Tabor)
What is an Afterlife? (James Tabor)

http://www.closertotruth.com/participant/James-Tabor/104

God and weather permitting I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening (Thursday, February 11th), at the Center for Jewish Studies, UNC Asheville, titled “What Kind of a Jew Was Jesus: How Texts and Archaeology Tell us a New Story.”

What I want to try to do is place Jesus within the parties and politics of his time (thanks to Morton Smith’s rubric here) in terms of what Michael Stone so aptly called “Scriptures, Sects, and Visions” within Late 2nd Temple Judaisms of his time. I am a historian not an archaeologist, so I want to mostly deal with texts, but texts within a context, such a Qumran (which combines site and texts!) and Mt Zion, that has every bit to do with material evidence as well–based on some of my experiences in the field. My intention is to highlight several of what I consider to be the most telling archaeological discoveries

Here is a press release and a news-story in the local Asheville paper, most of which I would own up to:

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20100207/LIVING/302070018/1311/ADVERTISING

http://www.unca.edu/news-events/news/2010/2/tabor

Maybe I will see some of you there.

I have taught Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism the past 20 years in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte, a North Carolina state university. Prior to that I taught in the Dept. of Religion at the College of William and Mary,  a Virginia state school. Even earlier, my first job was teaching in a Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Although some of the methods and approaches to the study of early Christianity are the same, what goes on in the distinctive field we call “Religious Studies” is quite different from that of Theology. I studied and wrote my dissertation under Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago, who perhaps as much as anyone one single person of our generation has contributed to the developing enterprise we call “Religious Studies” in our various state and private schools throughout America.

Our UNC Charlotte Department of Religious Studies was recently profiled in a very nicely done cover story in UNC Charlotte Magazine, which is a nice slick color publication for alumni and friends of the University, but fortunately also appears on-line. I highly recommend this insightful article and I am honored to serve as Chair, for the past six years, of this wonderful and thriving department with such a great history. I think what is said about us can be rightly said for many such departments around the country, and indeed for the study of Religion in the academic study of the Humanities in general.

You can read the story here or download as a PDF file:

http://www.publicrelations.uncc.edu/resources/pdfs/magazine/uncc_magazine_q42009_updated.pdf

A few months ago I published a blog post about an anonymous evangelical Christian author who went by the pseudonym “Servetus the Evangelist” who had self-published a new and challenging biblical study on the Trinity titled: The Restitution of Jesus Christ. The original plan was that the author, a well known evangelical, would reveal his identity on the 500th anniversary of Michael Servetus’s birth, but in the meantime, as a kind of playful contest, would release weekly clues as to his identity and invite readers to make guesses.

Recently “Servetus” has announced a change of mind. He promises to reveal his identity this coming Thursday, on November 19th. The following announcement has appeared on his Website:

ANNOUNCEMENT!!! October 18, 2009
I have decided to end this contest and reveal my identity as the author of The Restitution of Jesus Christ on November 19, 2009, almost two years earlier than planned. I will tell on this webpage who I am. And I will tell about the interesting development that has caused me to change these plans. It is something totally unexpected and that I could not have foreseen. Yet I am very excited about it.

Stay tuned, we don’t have long to wait…

I want to commend Biblical Archaeology Review and editor Hershel Shanks for the sequence of articles on Morton Smith and “Secret Mark” in the current issue of BAR (November/December, 2009) which I just received this week. In my view the treatment was factual, fair, and quite comprehensive and I agree wholly and without equivocation with Koester and Shanks that Morton Smith did not forge the letter of Clement of Alexandria that contains the quotations to so-called “Secret” version of Mark. What one then makes of these passages is another subject but they surely go back authentically to Clement in the 3rd century CE, not to Morton Smith in the 20th. Here I have to respectfully disagree with my colleagues Bart Ehrman and Birger Pearson.

I knew Prof. Smith quite well as he so graciously helped me with my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul (Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise 1989) at Chicago back in the 1970s, just when all the controversies broke over first his Harvard volume, and the popular Harper volume Jesus the Magician to follow.  His devotion to my project gained him nothing, and he was at Columbia, and had nothing officially to do with Chicago or my committee (I wrote under Jonathan Z. Smith), but he loved ideas and recognized in my fledgling attempts to enter the field of “Jewish magic,” a beginning scholar who wanted to produce something of quality. He spent hours heavily annotating my dissertation chapters and wrote me these wonderful handwritten notes with citations and suggestions that I treasure to this day.  I will never forget when a photo-copy of the manuscript of Sefer HaRazim arrived in the mail, prior to it being available in print, compliments of Prof. Smith. He would not even let me pay him for the copy costs or postage. Over the next twenty years we often spent time together at the annual meetings and on other occasions and he came to visit us when I was teaching at William and Mary.  He was a regular participant and contributor to our SBL seminar over the years dealing with Greco-Roman idea of the “Divine and the Human.” I think I can say I knew him fairly well, both professionally and personally. Those of us who did know him find these charges of mendacious duplicity and forgery inconceivable and insulting to the kind of scholar and human being that Smith was.

In terms of the arguments themselves, the BAR articles cover things well but the Scholem correspondence, in my view, settles things once for all for anyone who takes the time to read it. I covered this recent turn in the story and controversy in a previous post on this blog: http://jamestabor.com/2009/02/02/latest-on-the-secret-gospel-of-mark/