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…
Who are you? Are you the Messiah? Or the Prophet? Or Elijah? We find this series of questions addressed to John the Baptizer in the gospel of John. One of the ideas I explore and develop in my 2006 book, The Jesus Dynasty, was the notion of the expectation…
My favorite Blog dealing with biblical matters, other than my own (!), is “Scribes of the Kingdom” run by Alex Finkelstein, whom I have met only on line through email letting him know how much I appreciate his work. He is one of the most thoughtful students of early Christianity…
Josephus (b. 37 C.E.) is our best literary source for the practice of crucifixion in Palestine during the Greco-Roman period. As a general in command of the Jewish forces of Galilee in the Great Revolt against Rome (66-73 C.E.), he reports his attempts to save the lives of three crucified…
Many decades ago I had the privilege of studying at the University of Chicago with the late, great, Norman Perrin. I have many memories of Mr. Perrin, some personal, that I have shared previously on my blog, see “Remembering Norman Perrin.” One of his most distinguished students, Werner H. Kelber,…
I regularly get queries from readers asking whether my university courses are on-line or available to the public. Although during this “year of Covid” I have been teaching on-line–and will next semester–registering requires admission and enrollment through the university, with normal tuition payments–which I think is not what most people…
Note to the reader: During the “Covid Summer of 2019” I spent about a month digging through old files from my University of Chicago days–back when I was writing my dissertation at the University of Chicago under Jonathan Z. Smith. I found so many treasures, including these handwritten notes I…
For the next few weeks I plan to post many of my previously published articles that have fallen off the radar of many of my readers. Some, but not nearly all, are available as PDFs on this Blog site under “Publications and Papers,” in the dropdown menu above labeled “Academic.”…
I am sometimes asked, “what is your greatest discovery or insight in the world of biblical archaeology?” I have been involved in or stumbled upon quite a few things over the past thirty years, including the “Tomb of the Shroud,” with Shimon Gibson, and our ground-breaking DNA and ancient disease…
Many years ago I when I was studying the history of religions I was taught to ask about the various religions of “salvation” that so thickly filled the Hellenistic-Roman world (400 BCE-300 CE) to pose the following probing questions of any text or system of religious thinking about humanity and…