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…
The discovery of a rare gold coin bearing the image of the Roman Emperor Nero at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s archaeological excavations on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, has just been announced by the archaeologists in charge of the project, Drs. Shimon Gibson, James Tabor, and Rafael Lewis.…
I recently wrote a post titled “Do Historians Exclude the Supernatural?” Here I want to explore a related issue that one often hears from a variety of circles also having to do with methods of the academic study of religions–how scholars evaluate ancient texts–and here I will particularly focus on…
It has become almost axiomatic to assume that any responsible “quest for the historical Jesus” will value the Synoptic gospels–particularly Mark–as primary and more historically reliable in contrast to the gospel of John, which is viewed as secondary, and thus much more theological than historical. ((The Jesus Seminar lists this…
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…
There is a very intriguing story, unique to the Gospel of John, about a wedding attended by Jesus and his disciples at the Galilean village of Cana (John 2:1–11). Within the Gospel of John the story functions in a theological and even allegorical manner—it is the “first” of seven signs,…
They sent over a young archaeologist by the name of Amos Kloner. He climbed into the tomb and came out literally shaking. I’ll never forget. I asked him what he saw and he repeatedly muttered ‘I never saw such a thing….I never saw such a tomb.’ Last year Simcha Jacobovici…
The magazine Popular Archaeology has just done a very nice cover story feature on our Suba “John the Baptist” cave excavation for their Spring issue. We conducted from 2000-2011—overlapping with our Mt Zion dig. Even though that excavation is largely finished Shimon Gibson and I are bringing to completion our academic…
I have been thinking lately about the essential differences between Judaism and Christianity, or more properly, the kind of religion reflected in the Hebrew Bible and that of the Greek New Testament. In terms of definition and label I am neither a Jew nor a Christian — by that I…