Summer Sale: The Book of Genesis: A New Translation from the Transparent English Bible, is available in Kindle, Paperback and Hardcover at significantly reduced prices on Amazon. What is the best-known verse in the Bible—one that millions could quote immediately by heart? Christians might say John 3:16—after all, one even sees placards and signs…
In 1883 fifteen leather strips found by Bedouin in caves on the east side of the Dead Sea came into possession of book and manuscript antiquities dealer Moses Shapira of Jerusalem. These ancient texts were written in Paleo-Hebrew and after painstaking reading and transcription of the faded letters by Shapira,…
POSTPONED due to technical difficulties until Friday, June 17th–same time–same station–at 9pm EST. I will be on BlogTalk radio live with host Barbara Delong on her popular show “Night Light.” We will be discussing my book, The Jesus Discovery, co-written with Simcha Jacobovici (Simon & Schuster, 2012), with a focus…
The three hundred year period of Jewish history from 150 BCE to 150 CE was characterized by the utter failure of all apocalyptic expectations of the End of the Age arriving. These failed hopes and dreams shape collectively what might be called “The Great Disappointment.” This included a variety of…
The mysterious woman, otherwise unknown in our New Testament texts, Mary Magdalene, briefly appears and disappears toward the end of Jesus’ life in all four of the New Testament gospels. As this video makes clear, it is Mary Magdalene who is the KEY figure in our historical reconstruction of what…
Few think of Jesus of Nazareth as part of the royal family of David–even though Paul affirms the same as our earliest source–namely that he was descended from the messianic lineage of King David (Romans 1:3). Given that pedigree, that means Jesus’ brothers and sisters, as children of Mary, which…
In this video I offer a succinct thirteen minute overview of the apostle Paul’s original idea of Jesus’ resurrection–totally ignored and forgotten by later Christians, including the writers of our later gospels–Luke and John. I don’t think you will find anything summarizing things as clearly and in as short a…
I usually don’t do personal reflections on this Blog–which is reserved for academic biblical/historical matters. However, it is called TABORBlog–so why not. On this day, June 2, 1952, marks the 70th Anniversary of Queen Elizabeth–the longest reigning monarch in English history. My two sister and I were there in London…
In 2006 I published a best-selling book with what seemed a rather odd and clumsy title for a Jesus book, namely The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (Simon & Schuster). Every term in that title was carefully and deliberately chosen–and the phrase “the…
In this 2015 lecture I talk about the ways in which dualistic forms of thinking about the cosmos, often referred to as “Enochian” in their Jewish forms, and “Gnostic” in the wider Hellenistic world, basically took over the Western world and fundamentally transformed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into religions of…
