I am teaching a course this semester called “The End of the World as We Know It” after the REM song of that name. We are examining ideas associated with Biblical prophecy and the Apocalypse, both Jewish and Christian (and towards the end, a bit of Islam), in the…
So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the…
Happily, I come out of a Christian tradition in which the Hebrew Bible carries as much authority as the New Testament. No different weight is given to one or the other. The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition. My own interest is far more in the…
I was recently pleased to participate in a wide-ranging conversations with my colleagues at UNC Charlotte as a guest on their ongoing series “Conversations about Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed.” You can listen to or download from iTunes. This program is dated 8/17/2017 but please browse some of the previous ones…
Back in 2015 I published a piece in the Huffington Post dealing with what I consider to be reasonably strong evidence for a “married Jesus” and within hours it drew thousands of responses and hundreds of comments–positive, negative, and even threatening and denunciatory. Clearly this is a topic that generates more heat than…
As some of you know, and as I mention in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, the most commonly accepted explanation for the tradition that Jesus is “son of Pantera” is that the word pantera is a pun for the Greek word parthenos or “virgin” in Greek and not a “real…
Yesterday morning in Jerusalem I heard the bells of the Dormition Abbey on Mt Zion and wept thinking of Bob Dylan’s song. Here are some thoughts on the profound lyrics. There are many “Gospels,” many Gods, many Lords, and many Christs. The challenge is sorting them out. Paul refers to…
Birger Pearson’s piece at the BAS Web site addressing the questions of whether Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife? and Was Mary Magdalene a Prostitute? is really well done in my view. It is short but to the point. I see it as an advance over the article he did some…
In the meantime, it is indeed interesting to note that this very practice of patronymy/paponymy/metronymy, by its repetitive nature, leaves the sample of names quite narrow and refutes in essence the argument of “very common names” put forward by a number scholars that the Talpiot tomb was not that of…