I have written quite a bit since February about the controversial Moses Shapira Dead Sea scrolls–sixteen leather strips containing two copies of the final address of Moses to the children of Israel, delivered in the first person. When Shapira presented his manuscripts to the academic world in 1883-with scholars from Germany,…
In 1965 I well remember the publication of British biblical scholar Hugh J. Schonfield’s controversial and best-selling book, The Passover Plot. I like millions of others read it avidly and followed the controversies closely. I remember traveling on a flight just after it came out and seeing half a dozen people…
This by far the best 3.33 minutes of the Aronofsky Noah film. Beautiful, stunning, unspeakably profound…incredible! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwSWRdbSQK0 I have already posted my view on the film as a whole that I saw on the day it was released, see https://jamestabor.com/bashers-of-the-noah-film-need-to-re-read-their-bibles/ As most of you know I have focused a lot…
Who are you? Are you the Messiah? Or the Prophet? Or Elijah? We find this series of questions addressed to John the Baptizer in the gospel of John. One of the ideas I explore and develop in my 2006 book, The Jesus Dynasty, was the notion of the expectation…
Did you know that Joseph, husband of Mary, the 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…
Many Christians know the traditional “Seven Sayings of Jesus on the Cross,” that are a compilation of all that Jesus said during his last hours hanging between life and death on the cross based on our four New Testament gospels. Few could sort out which gospel says which, or which sayings…
Most of my readers know that the anonymous author of the writing we refer to as the “Gospel of Luke,” in fact, wrote a second volume to his work–known to us today as the “Acts of the Apostles.” The author refers to himself in the first person in the opening…
I think the main problem in discussions between theists and atheists is the assumption that static categories like “the Divine,” the “supernatural,” the “natural,” and the “material” exist other than as our dualistic semantic projections upon the whole of reality as we can perceive it. Our experiences are never reductionistically…
My favorite Blog dealing with biblical matters, other than my own (!), is “Scribes of the Kingdom” run by Alex Finkelstein, whom I have met only on line through email letting him know how much I appreciate his work. He is one of the most thoughtful students of early Christianity…
My book, The Jesus Dynasty was published in April 2006 (Simon & Schuster). It was a New York Times Best Seller for several weeks, featured on ABC’s Nightline and 20/20, and made the covers of USNews & World Report in the US and Profil magazine in Europe. It has been translated into 22…
