Many years ago a man from the BBC came to me and he asked me if the Dead Sea Scrolls will harm Christianity. I said to him that nothing can harm Christianity. The only thing which could be dangerous to Christianity would be to find a tomb with the sarcophagus…
The CNN “Finding Jesus” special titled “Secret Brother of Jesus,” that dealt with with the question of whether Jesus had brothers and sisters as well as the controversies surrounding the “James ossuary” has put the latter back in the news. For those a bit rusty on the background of all…
With all the recent attention to the ossuary inscribed “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” I thought it might be helpful to give some consideration to the confusion about the name “James” in most English bibles. When news of this ossuary inscription first broke in 2002 any number of…
Something of which I am more and more convinced is the paramount importance of James the brother of Jesus to the very survival of the Messianic movement in the critical months and years following the tragic and brutal murders of both John the Baptist and Jesus. I present my extended…
The issue of the relationship of Jesus to the “Essenes,” as well as to the the Dead Sea Scrolls, whether Essene or otherwise, is central to our attempts to view Jesus in his historical contexts. In other words, we are essentially asking, in our historical Quest–“what kind of a Jew…
That Jesus had four brothers and at least two sisters is a “given” in Mark, our earliest gospel record. He names the brothers rather matter-of-factly: James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. Mark mentions but does name the sisters, but early Christian tradition says there were two—a Mary and a Salome (Mark…
Ben Witherington ((Ben Witherington is Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and on the doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University in Scotland, see “About Ben Witherington” )) has a new blog post titled “Once More with Feeling: Did the James Ossuary come out of…