Back in 1996 I began to develop a web site called “The Jewish Roman World of Jesus” to which I uploaded all sorts of original sources and handouts related to my my undergraduate and graduate classes. It was initially hosted and developed by my friend Mike McKinney, at CenturyOne.com.…
Here is a real “blast from the past.” Ernest Martin had released his theories on the Jewish Temple in the time of Jesus not being located up over where the dome of the Rock is today, but to the south in the “City of David” area. In this lecture, given…
Once again “Holy Week” has arrived. Today is Palm Sunday, with Easter one week away. So one might say this week is “doubly holy,” in that it binds together what Jesus as a Jew would have been intimately familiar with his entire life–Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread–and the…
In this video lecture I survey what might be called the “dynamics of Messianic identity”–or even “self-identity,” in the late 2nd Temple period of Judaism, as well as the emergence of what eventually became “Christianity.” For more resources related to this topic see these blog posts as well as my…
One of the enduring questions historians of early Christianity struggle with is the issue of when we can properly speak of the “new religion” of Christianity, as contrasted with a variety of forms of Judaism in the decades following the death of Jesus the Jew. The title of Paula Fredriksen’s book, When…
Delivered at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, 1997 Since the release and subsequent study and translation of the entire Dead Sea Scrolls corpus in 1992, it is now possible to sketch out what I would characterize as a rather full and reliable portrait of the community that produced…
It is noteworthy that Paul’s testimony in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 remains our only firsthand autobiographical account of such an experience from the ancient world. The idea of Jesus “ascending to heaven” after his resurrection from the dead is a theme well known in our culture. Along with his “resurrection from…
Please visit my Youtube Channel and Subscribe, for much more to come. I regularly teach a course called “The End of the World as We Know It,” with thanks to REM and Leonard Cohen’s, “The Future.” I did this thirty-minute overview with Derek Lambert, the dynamic host of MythVision Podcasts–which…
I am continuing to post the materials that I have used in my courses for 45 years now–free for anyone to see and use. You are welcome to print out, read, and share the link via social media, but please do not repost or reproduce without permission. The following excerpt from…
I have another guest post over on Bart Ehrman’s blog. I encourage my readers to head over there and check it out: Is the Book of Revelation a Revised Version of a non-Christian Apocalypse? This post is a bit special in that it not only responds to the question in…