In this new six part series I present responses to essays offered in my course at UNC Charlotte on “John the Baptist.” John is the most underrated figure in Christian tradition, rarely given his due as a messiah and inaugurator of the movement Jesus himself arose from. The responses are by…
In this new six part series I present responses to essays offered in my course at UNC Charlotte on “John the Baptist.” John is the most underrated figure in Christian tradition, rarely given his due as a messiah and inaugurator of the movement Jesus himself arose from. The responses are by…
The 1st century CE Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus, known today as Josephus, was born Yosef ben Matityahu /יוסף בן מתתיהו in the year 37 CE. He began his career as commander of the Jewish forces in the Galilee in the 1st Jewish Revolt against Rome in 66CE, subsequently surrendered…
Most of us who teach in the field of Christian Origins get asked from time to time by students or in public lectures, “Professor, Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?” Scholars are aware of the rich and diverse ways in which the term “Son of God”…
Tomorrow night at Wingate University, 5pm, join us if you are in the area. For those who can not be there you can read some of the ideas I will present here: “What Kind of a Jew Was Jesus?” and download my handout here.
In my post on “That Other King of the Jews,” I stressed my own conviction that Jesus of Nazareth thought of himself as much more than a teacher, prophet, or healer, but rather that he understood himself to be nothing less than the “one to come,” the Davidic Messiah or…
Then they arrayed him in scarlet, and when they had plaited it they invested him with a victor’s wreath made of thorn, and saluted him with, “Hail! King of the Jews!” (Mark 15:18). According to the gospel of Mark, when Jesus is on trial before the Roman Prefect Pontius…
It has become common to read the Gospel of John, with its theology of Christ as the heavenly Messiah, its attitudes toward the Torah, and its “othering” reference to “the Jews,” as elements of an emerging anti-Judaic, or even anti-Semitic, stage of the developing Jesus movement. Years ago James McGrath…
Legendary stories of gods fathering humans, so common in Greco-Roman culture, may well have contributed to accounts of Jesus’ miraculous birth in Matthew and Luke but I would suggest an alternative. I am convinced that the idea of Jesus’ birth from a virgin–without a human father–implicitly goes back to the…
The influential Israeli newspaper HaAretz offers a nice profile of our 2016 Mt Zion excavation highlighting some of our new finds and offering a summary of past seasons and what we are concluding. Archaeologists excavating in the heart of ancient Jerusalem have begun to uncover the neighborhood that housed the elite…