In my previous post, “Have I Not Seen the Lord? What Did Paul Claim to Have Seen?” I suggest that we need to go to Paul, and what he says in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, as our earliest witness to faith in Jesus’ resurrection–rather than to our latest witnesses–the gospels of…
Most people who read the New Testament read it “backwards.” By that I mean they begin with the four Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–move through Acts, and finally get to the letters of Paul and the rest. What many fail to realize is that the seven letters of Paul (1…
I have been thinking deeply about “Paul’s Ascent to Paradise” for the past forty years. When I first suggested a dissertation on two verses of Paul’s letter we called 2 Corinthians back in 1975 at the University of Chicago, Jonathan Z. Smith, my soon-to-be advisor smiled and said, “You just put…
Last week I posted an article I published some years ago dealing with Paul’s idea of “Apotheosis,” or “Divinization,” i.e. “becoming Divine.” Several readers wrote me that the extensive use of Greek in that published article, made it difficult for them to follow. I apologize for not noticing that. It…
Those who have read my book, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity might recall that in the Introduction I survey what I consider to be Paul’s “Six Major Ideas,” several of which are underemphasized, or even overlooked, in many standard treatments of Paul. One of those, which I explore in…
Bart Ehrman has a very interesting post up on his blog (July 3) titled “Do Matthew and Paul Agree on the Matter Most Important to them Both?” I highly recommend both the post and the blog. ((The blog requires a membership fee, which is rare among us Bible Bloggers, but…
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all affirm the doctrine of “resurrection of the dead” as a central tenet of eschatology–that is, the understanding of the “last things” or how human history is to end. One common misunderstanding, especially among Christians, is that resurrection of the dead is equivalent to the idea…
How did it happen that the way Jesus came into the world, and how he left—Christmas and Easter—came to define Christianity itself? I have spent my forty-year career as a scholar of Christian Origins investigating the silence between two back-to-back statements of the Apostles’ Creed, namely that Jesus was: “Conceived…
This post is continued from the previous one here. Here are the last three in this two-part posting. You will find a full exposition of these ideas, chapter by chapter, in my book Paul and Jesus. At the Recently Discovered “Tomb of Paul” in Rome 4) Already but Not Yet.…
One thing historians of religions often emphasize is that no religious tradition is a static monolithic entity. Whether we are talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, the varieties and diversity within each tradition as it develops at the beginning, and over time, are rich and complex. Judaism is no…