I am sure many of my older readers will remember Hugh J. Schonfield’s , 1965 blockbuster international best seller, The Passover Plot, now re-released in a special 40th anniversary edition. Schonfield was somewhat of a “maverick” independent scholar, well trained but never pursing an academic university career, but publishing dozens of…
Josephus mentions a dozen or more “messiah” figures beginning with Hezekiah/Ezekias c. 45 BCE whom the young Herod defeated whom he variously labels as “brigands” (ληστής) or “imposters” (γόης)—though he calls Judas the Galilean a “wise man” (σοφιστής) and credits him with the founding a the “fourth philosophy” (Jewish Antiquities18.23).…
Of the hundreds of books that are written in biblical scholarship every year, few make a long term impact and have an extended shelf life. Very few indeed deserve to be read and reread thirty-five years after their original appearance. Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician is one of them, a…
A first century CE mikveh or ritual bath was was uncovered in 2015 just south of the Old City and east of Hebron road in the Arnona neighborhood of Talpiot as a result of construction of a kindergarten. At the time of its discovery Shimon Gibson and I were been…
How did it happen that the way Jesus came into the world, and how he left—Christmas and Easter—came to define Christianity itself? I have spent my forty-year career as a scholar of Christian Origins investigating the silence between two back-to-back statements of the Apostles’ Creed, namely that Jesus was: “Conceived…
In this photo is represented the past 30 years of my life, including 67 trips to Israel since 1990, tracking Jesus, with most of my work related to this panorama of the City…
In March, 2007, when all the publicity on the Talpiot Jesus tomb broke, I wrote a blog post that summarized what we knew at the time regarding the 1980 discovery and excavation of the “Jesus tomb,” and perhaps more important, what we did not know. It is still worth reading for…
The east Talpiot tomb, exposed to view by demolition by the the Solel Boneh construction crew, was reported by engineer A. Shochat to the Israel Department of Antiquities on March 27, 1980. That was a Thursday. Neighbors, including local children, visited the tomb that afternoon and also called the Department…
One thing historians of religions often emphasize is that no religious tradition is a static monolithic entity. Whether we are talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, the varieties and diversity within each tradition as it develops at the beginning, and over time, are rich and complex. Judaism is no…
My wife Lori often offers comments on my various blog posts, articles, and papers, as one “outside the field,” so to speak. Her field is English Literature but more often than not she sees things that I have missed. Sometimes we who are the so-called “experts” in our fields are…