And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. –Jesus of Nazareth One of the more intriguing stories that Mark preserves is that of an unnamed woman who anoints Jesus’ head with an…
Everyone repeats endlessly that “Jesus was a carpenter.” Hey even Kris Kristopher has a song that begins that way, and one sees bumper stickers about following a “Jewish carpenter” all the time. Did you know that the reference to Jesus having such a trade only occurs one time in all…
There are three basic positions that have been offered in response to the two birth stories we get in Matthew and Luke: 1) Jesus had no human father; 2) Jesus is in fact the biological son of Joseph; 3) Jesus is the biological son of an unnamed male under unknown…
Although only Matthew and Luke assert the “virgin birth” of Jesus, and the teaching is found nowhere else in the New Testament, the belief that Mary’s pregnancy resulted from a divine act of God without any male involvement developed into a fundamental theological dogma in early Christianity. For millions of…
What about the family tree of Jesus? It is quite a complex question when you begin to look into it. Matthew calls Jesus a “son of David” in the opening line of his gospel. In Luke the angel predicted to Mary that her son Jesus would “sit on the throne…
As we begin to reconstruct the birth, life, and teachings of Jesus our best and earliest sources are the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, contained in the New Testament. For the past two hundred years scholars have analyzed and compared these texts and their relationship to one another.…
When I think of Mary the mother of Jesus I think of the forgotten city of Sepphoris. According to tradition she was the firstborn daughter of an older couple named Joachim and Anna who lived there.[i] Few today have heard of Sepphoris. It is not mentioned in the New Testament.…
Our Gospels present us with not only a profoundly “male” story, but it is also a profoundly asexual one. Theology is one thing, history is another, and on these matters of sex, birth, and death there can clearly be a conflict but little contest. I have written a variety of…
“There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.” Gospel of Philip 36 According to the Coptic Gospel of Philip, found in Egypt…
In my 2006 book, The Jesus Dynasty, (pp. 235-237) I published a photo of an fragment of an 1st century CE limestone ossuary, or burial box, inscribed with the name “Simon bar Jonah,” a rare patronym used by Jesus one time in Matthew 16:17 to refer to Simon Peter: And…