Few readers of the English Bible realize that the name “James” actually comes from the Hebrew name Jacob or Yaaqov, which adds to the confusion over the various “Jameses” mentioned in the New Testament. There is, of course, Jacob the Patriarch, grandson of Abraham; James the Apostle, the fisherman brother…
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…
Here is the Part 2 of my reposting of my responses to the review of my 2006 book, The Jesus Dynasty, by my friend and colleague Prof. James F. Strange originally published in Biblical Archaeology Review (November/December, 2006, pp. 72-76). You can read Part 1, “Was Christianity All a Mistake?”…
Parts 1 & 2 are posted here and here. These were introduced by another post on “Another Comforter: The Forgotten Brother of Jesus” which you can read here. The disciples said to Jesus, “We know you will leave us. Who is going to be our leader then?” Jesus said to…
Subscribe to TaborBlog in the sidebar and don’t miss a single post Part 1 was posted here. If you missed it please go back and read this series of posts in sequence. Thus in Luke’s account in Acts, when James suddenly appears out of nowhere as leader of the Nazarene…
Subscribe to TaborBlog in the Sidebar and don’t miss a single post. Today I begin a series of posts on “James the Just,” the largely forgotten brother of Jesus, following up on my post “Another Comforter: The Forgotten Brother of Jesus” on the missing key to understanding Christian origins. ((Robert Eisenman,…
Discover the historical Jesus in a new way through The Jesus Discovery. The book begins with the controversial Talpiot tombs (see “Does the Evidence Add Up?) but then uses that avenue to open up the whole forgotten world of the earliest Jesus movement, combining textual and material/archaeological evidence. As a result…
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…