Start the New Year off right. This is not a commercial! Biblical Archaeology Society lecturers do not get royalties for our lectures; we donate our time and expertise as a public academic service. BAS is a non-profit organization. If you become a Biblical Archaeology Society Library member for 2018 you…
Quintessential JZ Smith…if you never had the pleasure of hearing him…his Plenary Address to the American Academy of Religion in 2010. https://vimeo.com/20286150 You can read an informal fascinating interview with Mr. Smith (as Chicago professors are called–no titles please!) published in The Chicago Maroon in 2008 here. Don’t miss this one!…
“Well Socrates…but How shall we bury you? However you please, he replied, if you can catch me and I do not get away from you. And he laughed gently.” A sad day for so many of us who loved Jonathan Z. Smith as a teacher and friend. There was…
Joseph, husband of Mary, mother of Jesus, is never mentioned in the gospel of Mark. Since Mark is our earliest gospel that seems all the more striking. Mark has no account of the birth of Jesus whatsoever, much less any story of the virgin birth. When Jesus is identified in…
I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of Gaius Caligula, I am all men as I am no man and therefore I am God. Millions of my generation will remember,…
And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. –Jesus of Nazareth One of the more intriguing stories that Mark preserves is that of an unnamed woman who anoints Jesus’ head with an…
Everyone repeats endlessly that “Jesus was a carpenter.” Hey even Kris Kristopher has a song that begins that way, and one sees bumper stickers about following a “Jewish carpenter” all the time. Did you know that the reference to Jesus having such a trade only occurs one time in all…
There are three basic positions that have been offered in response to the two birth stories we get in Matthew and Luke: 1) Jesus had no human father; 2) Jesus is in fact the biological son of Joseph; 3) Jesus is the biological son of an unnamed male under unknown…
Although only Matthew and Luke assert the “virgin birth” of Jesus, and the teaching is found nowhere else in the New Testament, the belief that Mary’s pregnancy resulted from a divine act of God without any male involvement developed into a fundamental theological dogma in early Christianity. For millions of…
What about the family tree of Jesus? It is quite a complex question when you begin to look into it. Matthew calls Jesus a “son of David” in the opening line of his gospel. In Luke the angel predicted to Mary that her son Jesus would “sit on the throne…
