Most of us who work in what we academics call “Christian Origins” hold to the “Two Source” theory of Synoptic Gospel origins. That is, Mark was the earliest narrative gospels, Matthew and Luke both used Mark as their core source, but they had access to another source that we call…
“One of the great puzzles for most researchers of the Shapira Affair is why he spent the final months of his life in the Netherlands. The basic story, oft repeated, is that after the official rejection of his manuscript strips by Christian Ginsburg, the dejected Shapira travelled to Amsterdam, then…
We read in the New Testament gospels of the “baptism of John,” spoken of quite specifically, with Jesus and his core original followers all joining that movement through baptism (Mark 27-33; Acts 1:21-22)–but then also the “one” baptism “into Christ” that Paul administers–which in fact makes one “united” with the…
Such a sad day. As Leonard Cohen put it, The Day They Wounded New York. Those of us who were alive and lived through it remember precisely where we were when we heard the news. I was pulliing into our main campus entrance for my 9am Intro to New Testament…
Yesterday I did a two hour interview (originally scheduled for September 1st) with Night Light Radio radio host Barbara DeLong on my two books on Paul, namely: Paul and Jesus (2012) and my latest, Paul’s Ascent to Paradise (2020). It was a wide-ranging time covering everything from the possibility that Paul was born…
Over the years I have been amazed at how many of my academic colleagues, who do not find the arguments convincing that the East Talpiot “Jesus” family tomb can likely be identified with that of Jesus of Nazareth, are nonetheless quite sure that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is…
WRITTEN IN SEPTEMBER 2015. I just heard via Jack Sasson the sad news of Prof. John Howard Schütz’s passing. John was professor Emeritus in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His obituary from the Raleigh News and Observer is archived here. What…
For Christian believers, general readers, and scholars alike the most dramatic and riveting section of our N.T. Gospels is the “Passion Narrative,” found in three versions in the Synoptics (Mark, Matthew, Luke), as well as in the gospel of John. Whether John’s Gospel offers an independent version of the narrative…
I have just updated this post from 2017 with lots of additional readings. I think this might be the most comprehensive summary of evidence pro and con for the question of whether the two Talpiot tombs in Jerusalem are connected to the Jesus family. One reads a lot of material…
I thought my TaborBlog readers might be interested in the archive of my blog posts at the Huffington Post web site. That site tends to get massive traffic so the input one draws is truly a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is a cross section…
