Some years ago in working on the narrative materials in the gospel of John, I ended up flying to Amman, Jordan to look at a specific site that I thought might be referenced in the last verse of John 10: John 10:40 He went away again across the Jordan to…
In this video I offer an informal account of my thirty-year history of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, beginning in 1992 when our team spent a month surveying the site, doing radar ground scan, and surveying caves from Qumran to Ein Gedi. My new course, “Jesus and the Dead…
I know many of my blog readers have been anticipating the release of my new online course titled “Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls.” I have worked on this for several months and I am excited about its content and quality. It comes with a hefty course pack of study…
Sorry, this tour is FULL…after four days…I will keep you informed about future tours… A personal note: I am thrilled to see such interest in my May 2024 “Tracking Jesus” tour…I only announced it here on August 25th–three days ago! Apparently there is quite a bit of interest. I…
Registration open yesterday for my 2024 my “Tracking Jesus.” The dates are May 14-23, 2024–that’s ten days of touring and nine nights in 4 Star+ Hotels. Most trips to the Holy Land are sponsored by churches and their pastors, synagogues, or other cultural groups, and each of these has their…
Those who have done a bit of academic reading about our New Testament gospels have come across the idea of what is most often referred to as the “Q Source.” Over the years I have found that despite lots of discussion about the hypothesis few have in fact sat down…
When people want to talk to me about what I believe about Jesus and early “Christianity,” I often tell them–read Those Incredible Christians first and then we can talk. The late Hugh Schonfield was a brilliant scholar who came to international fame in 1965 with the publication of his controversial and best-selling…
Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton University Press, 2009) (Kindle and Hardcover links). There is no end of confusion regarding texts about the figure of Jesus of Nazareth and whether he is or is not referenced in the Talmuds and Rabbinic literature, and if so whether such references offer anything…
Ken Dark, Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth (Oxford, 2023) (Kindle link), is a marvelous little “must have” volume for anyone interested in the a readable summary of the evidence. The archaeology of ancient 1st century CE Nazareth has been controversial over the years, with some even claiming there was no such…
Critical scholars, using the most rigorous historical-critical criteria, have concluded that the following statements of Jesus from the Synoptic tradition are unquestionably authentic. This is not so say that other materials are necessarily inauthentic, but that these particular sayings are at the core of the unedited tradition. These results are…