NEW! The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus (New York: Knopf, 2025). Kindle and Audio. Also published by HarperCollins UK available on Amazon.co.uk serving United Kingdom, EU, and worldwide A world-renowned historian of early Christianity and ancient Judaism lifts the veil on the life of Mary—revealing her revolutionary role as…
Excuse my enthusiasm! What are the chances that the same week that Ross Nichols’s new book, The Moses Scroll, which relates the saga of the Moses Shapira “Deuteronomy” manuscripts, was officially published (see my post from Monday here), the summary evidence of a new and solidly academic book on the Shapira “scrolls,”…
Last summer I revised my published University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation that was titled Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise, long out of print and selling for $250-$750 used on Amazon! I had had so many requests for it over the years, so, since used booksellers were ripping people off like…
In April, 2006 I published a trade book called The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. Now in paperback it has continued to sell moderately but steadily. I wrote it as a popular summary of my own personal lifelong “quest” for the…
Quintessential JZ Smith…if you never had the pleasure of hearing him…his Plenary Address to the American Academy of Religion in 2010. https://vimeo.com/20286150 You can read an informal fascinating interview with Mr. Smith (as Chicago professors are called–no titles please!) published in The Chicago Maroon in 2008 here. Don’t miss this one!…
I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, on “Paul’s Ascent to Paradise” under the direction of Jonathan Z. Smith, the late and great Robert M. Grant, and Arthur Adkins. Its focus was the celebrated passage where Paul reports his extraordinary experience, as a “man in Christ” who…
The 2017 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Awards were just announced in the latest November/December issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. These were carefully selected from hundreds of entries so any or all of them are certainly worthy of purchase and reading. I was honored to serve as one of the judges in…
So a lively and thought provoking attempt to resolve some of the historical problems that Paul poses–yes. But, sadly, tendentiousness and text-selectivity renders most of the thesis increasingly implausible. James D. G. Dunn, who is the Emeritus Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the department of theology and religion at Durham…
This is the third installment of my response to the review of my book, The Jesus Dynasty, by my friend and colleague Prof. James F. Strange published in the Biblical Archaeology Review (November/December, 2006, pp. 72-76). You can read Parts 1 and 2 here and here. Toward the end of…
Discover the historical Jesus in a new way through The Jesus Discovery. The book begins with the controversial Talpiot tombs (see “Does the Evidence Add Up?) but then uses that avenue to open up the whole forgotten world of the earliest Jesus movement, combining textual and material/archaeological evidence. As a result…