I have written several posts recently on the different Jesus traditions reflected in Mark, our earliest gospel, and John, our latest, namely on The Last Days of Jesus, A Wedding at Cana, The First Burial of Jesus, and Comparing our Earliest and Latest Sources. If you missed any of these and…
This summer will mark my 68th trip to the Holy Land since my first visit with my family in the summer of 1962 at age 16. All but two of these trips have been since 1990. I find the number astounding looking back. By far most of these trips have…
Dear Reader:This is one of the most thorough and complex blog posts I have ever done based on years of careful textual work. It is not something to breeze through, though it is written clearly and simply. You will need your Bible out and a pad of paper but your…
Gary Greenberg was kind enough to send me a copy of his fascinating new book, Proving Jesus’ Authority in Mark and John: Overlooked Evidence of a Synoptic Relationship (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018). I am just beginning to read it, so I will not attempt any kind of overview or review at this…
I am teaching an advanced undergraduate/graduate course this semester on the “Archaeology of Earliest Christianity,” probing the question of what archaeology provides as a context for understanding Jesus and his movement. Those of us who work on “Christian origins” understandably focus primarily on texts, particularly the texts of the New Testament,…
James F. Strange died on March 23rd. I got the sad news via a text message while traveling in the deserts of Jordan. I loved him dearly, considered him my “archaeological” mentor, excavated with him for three seasons at Sepphoris in the 1990s. We differed sharply in our views of…
What can we reliably know about Paul and how can we know it? As is the case with Jesus this is not an easy question. Historians have been involved in what has been called the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” for the past one hundred and seventy-five years, evaluating and…
To understand Jesus and the movement that developed after his death we need to have a handle on a way of thinking that I call messianic apocalyptic eschatology. This is a way of describing a certain expectation and outlook on the world and human history that was characteristic of certain…
Sorting through the New Testament gospels accounts of the “sightings” of Jesus is incredibly complex. I have done my best to lay them out for comparison and interpretation in several posts on this blog, including “How Faith in Jesus’s Resurrection Originated and Developed: A New/Old Hypothesis.” One thing that any…
Everyone seems to “love” the Dead Sea Scrolls though I fear, much like the Bible, few seem to have actually read them. Some years ago I remember a very enthusiastic woman who came up to me after one of my public lectures on this scrolls, exclaiming, “Dr. Tabor, I just…