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…
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…
So once again Holy Week has arrived–the “final days of Jesus” with the Last Supper, Passover, and Easter falling in a back-to-back cluster this weekend, just like they did in the time of Jesus. Just about everything about this week is controversial. Did Jesus eat his last Supper on a…
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…
As many of my readers know I have been working on my new book, The Lost Mary: How the Jewish Mother of Jesus Became the Virgin Mother of God now for three years! I am still doing final re-writing and editing and it won’t be published until 2020. I hope it…
December 25th as the date of the birth of Jesus can be traced back to the early 3rd century CE although it did not achieve more universal recognition until the late 4th century. It is common to hear the charge that “Christmas is pagan,” based on the popularity of the…
My wife Lori often offers comments on my various blog posts, articles, and papers, as one “outside the field,” so to speak. Her field is English Literature but more often than not she sees things that I have missed. Sometimes we who are the so-called “experts” in our fields are…
In April, 2006 I published a trade book called The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. Now in paperback it has continued to sell moderately but steadily. I wrote it as a popular summary of my own personal lifelong “quest” for the…
I have written several posts recently on the different Jesus traditions reflected in Mark, our earliest gospel, and John, our latest, namely on The Last Days of Jesus, A Wedding at Cana, The First Burial of Jesus, and Comparing our Earliest and Latest Sources. If you missed any of these and…