I wanted to thank Bart Ehrman, my colleague down the road at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for inviting me to guest post on his popular Blog. My post, titled “The Historian and the Supernatural,” will appear in two parts–today and tomorrow. I have also agreed…
If you want to travel with me to Israel in 2020 we have just opened registrations for a specialized tour like no other. I am just back from our Mt Zion excavation which marks my 70th trip to the Holy Land since my first visit with my family in the…
Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus centers around a quotation from Isaiah 7:14. Let’s look at the verse as Matthew presents it: Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found…
There is a new article up at the fabulous website The Bible & Interpretation, by Ken Hanson. If you don’t know the web site check it out and bookmark. It is worth checking several times a week. Ken is Director of Judaic Studies at the University of Central Florida. Some…
I am posting here this morning a most informative document from my friend and fellow-scholar Greg Doudna, whose Ph.D. deals with the history and archaeology of the Dead Sea Scroll sectarian community (you can see some of his publications at this link). In January 1985, Greg visited and interviewed Dr.…
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…
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…
There has been a lot of discussion over the past 45 years regarding the late Columbia University historian Morton Smith and his discovery, publication, and interpretation of a so-called “Secret Gospel of Mark” in 1973. According to Smith, fifteen years earlier he had come across, quite by accident, a copy…
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…
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…