In this Preface I lay out a bit of autobiographical history that took me from my evangelical Christian college days as a Greek and Biblical Studies major to where I find myself now, many decades later, in my quest for a better historical understanding of the Mary/John the Baptizer/Jesus/James “movement”…
This is Part 2 of my lecture on the DIDACHE that I recently prepared for my “Tabor Research Community for our upcoming monthly Zoom meeting. This ancient manuscript, lost in ancient times and re-discovered in 1873, dates as early as 100 AD. It contains the earliest record of the “Teachings”…
Just printed it out. Final manuscript type set and formatted–just as the book will look. Goes now to page proofs. For the next three days I am going to read it aloud…every word–as a FINAL ultimate check. Just to see what might have been missed by two professional copyeditors who went…
This is a continuation of the topic I explored in the previous post. The assumption of many scholars is that Paul, even in his preaching of what he calls “his Gospel” to the Gentiles, was just reflecting a more open version of the core message of Jesus, the Twelve, and…
I gave this short overview lecture recently to a group of my students and patrons members and wanted to share it with all of you. It explores the possible break between Paul and his “Gospel” and that of the Jerusalem followers of Jesus led by James the Just. You may…
A detailed survey of our earliest sources on James–whose proper name was Jacob of Yaaqov–the brother of Jesus, was written out of the standard master narrative of Christian history. What can we know about James, by trying to reassemble all the disparate strands of evidence, from the Gospels, Acts, Paul,…
In this video I reverse the normal argument that Paul inherited the fundamentals of his “Christ Message,” from the Jerusalem Church, and then adapted and refined it for his mostly Gentile followers. https://youtu.be/7kzPsV1TN04
In the aftermath of Jodi Magness’s recent lecture on the “Burials of James, Jesus, and the Talpiot Tombs” in Bart Ehrman’s course “Archaeoolgy in the Time of Jesus” one thing was clear to me that I had not fully realized. Most treatments of the data on the Talpiot tomb research…
Reduced Price until Sunday Midnight February 25th Some of you might have seen that Bart Ehrman is promoting a new course with archaeologist Jodi Magness. The two of them are faculty together at UNC Chapel Hill. I have never enrolled in one of Bart’s courses before, though I have often…
This wonderful interview with Robert Eisenman, famous Dead Sea Scrolls scholar whose views are out of the mainstream, captures the man, his life, and his ideas. He is relaxed, reminisces, and lays out his basic theory about Christian Origins, Paul, James, and Jesus. Don’t miss this one! Check out his…