Alan Segal, Life After Death: A History of Afterlife in Western Religion (Doubleday, 2004). Alan Segal was a scholar of late Antiquity with a host of influential landmark books, including Rebecca’s Children and Two Powers in Heaven–both laying new ground in understanding the intersections between Jews and Christians. In this…
David Clausen, The Upper Room and Tomb of David: The History, Art and Archaeology of the Cenacle on Mount Zion (McFarland, 2016). This fascinating Medieval structure, visited by millions of Christian a year as the “Room of the Last Supper,” whereas the lower floor is revered by Jews as the…
I have continued my series on Youtube dealing with ideas of Death and Afterlife in the Ancient Western world. The level of interest is a total surprise for me. The first episode alone, on “Ancient Hebrew Views,” has over 200,000 views! In this tenth segment of the series I try…
I truly love this interview with Dom Crossan–as we so affectionately call him. What a phenomenon he has been over the years in our field–that special “Irish” force of nature, truly so. In this interview I hear a voice I have never heard so clearly, a kind of clarion CALL–that…
In this ninth of my series on” Death, Afterlife, and the Future,” I consider the thesis of the late great Oscar Cullmann who argued that Christianity–anciently and down into our own time–has largely lost the view of “resurrection of the dead” as declared by Jesus in our gospel sources and…
When I was a freshman in college at Abilene Christian University in the mid-1960s I decided early on to focus on the Bible and early Christianity–basically New Testament Studies. I had returned from a trip to the Holy Land the previous summer, and I was fired up with the idea–at…
Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (T&T Clark, 2021) is truly Allison’s magnum opus on the subject of the resurrection of Jesus. It is by far the best, most comprehensive, and acutely discriminating work on the topic of which I am aware. I love its organization…
This revised post I originally wrote in 2015 and it has received an enormous amount of traffic over the years–definitely in the “Top Ten” category of over 500 posts on this Blog. I have revised it here and there but it sets forth a solution to the matter of how…
Please don’t laugh. This is in fact a serious question that I have never heard addressed, though it apparently occurred to Michelangelo! Tomorrow I am recording a Youtube segment in my ongoing series on ideas of “Death and Afterlife” in the ancient Western world that will deal with our early…
