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…
NEW! The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus (New York: Knopf, 2025). Kindle and Audio. Also published by HarperCollins UK available on Amazon.co.uk serving United Kingdom, EU, and worldwide A world-renowned historian of early Christianity and ancient Judaism lifts the veil on the life of Mary—revealing her revolutionary role as…
I am convinced that the historical figure of Jesus began to pore over key prophetic passages in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Isaiah and the Pslams, where he became convinced that both his identity and his destiny was laid out. After the death of his cousin John the Baptist,…
The on-line magazine, Popular Archaeology, which I highly recommend, recently circulated its “Top Ten” feature stories of the past decade. I was honored and pleased that one of the ten stories that my research on the historical Jesus, as related to material and textual evidence, was chosen as one of…