Julius-Kei Kato is a member of the blog, a PhD from Graduate Theological Union, an expert on the new Testament, and an Associate Professor in Religious Studies at King's University College at Western University.  You can learn about him here:  https://jkato.kingsfaculty.ca/about-jk-kato/?mobileFormat=false Prof. Kato has written a very interesting article for the blog as a guest post, on one of the most familiar and least understood passages in the New Testament, the Beatitudes.  I can't say that I always agree with those who provide us with guest posts, but oh boy do I agree with this one.  And for my money it gets especially interesting at the end, where he shows how Christians today should understand this most critical teaching of Jesus precisely in light of the fact that the apocalyptic end of the age that he predicted never happened.  Even those of us who are not Christian should see the real merit and strength of this position -- it ends up endorsing precisely the vision that many of us have. Here is the post, in [...]

Did Jesus support a violent revolt against Rome?  The one argument that probably gets used more than any other in support of that view is that when Jesus gets arrested in the Gospels, his followers pull out their swords to fight.  What are they doing with swords?  Why are they fighting?  Since this is in all the Gospels (independently attested) and since it's not a story that later Christians would be likely to make up (since they would want to portray Jesus to their Roman audiences as peace-loving, not as a rabble-rouser) -- wouldn't that show that it's something that really happened?  And if so, then clearly Jesus was interested in arming his followers and fighting the authorities. That's how the argument goes, and it's a very good one.  But after some long reflection, I don't find it convincing.  Here is how I discussed the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (the only book title that I deeply regret!  No one knows what it's about but it's unusually important: it's about how memory [...]

Did Jesus support of an armed uprising against Rome?  Yesterday I re-posted some comments I had made years ago on the blog about Aslan's popular book Zealot, which advances that thesis.  I won't be dealing with the entire book this time around: I'm just interested at this point in dealing with this vital question itself Now I want to show how two data that are crucial for the “zealot hypothesis” actually make better sense with this apocalyptic understanding of Jesus.  The two data involve the temple cleansing and the crucifixion itself. If one wants to establish – as Aslan very much does want to do – that Jesus favored violence, there is no better scene to focus on than the disruption he caused in the Temple upon arriving in Jerusalem in the last week of his life.  According to the earliest accounts, Jesus enters the temple, overturns the tables of those exchanging money, and drives out those who were selling sacrificial animals. In our first account, Mark’s, Jesus actually shuts down the operation of the [...]

I try not to repeat blog posts from just a couple of years ago, but in this case I can't resist.  In the last post I talked about the two accounts of Judas Iscariot's death in the New Testament, one in Matthew and one in Luke, and argued that even with their intriguing and important similarities, there were also striking differences, some of which, in my judgment, simply cannot be reconciled.   But we have other accounts from Christian antiquity that are at least equally interesting, even if more obviously legendary.  Still, they are worth considering and thinking about; it's not at all clear that the authors of these accounts thought they were as humorous as most readers today do. One of these accounts is reasonably well-known to biblical scholars, from the writings of Papias (we've talked a lot about him over the years on the blog; just do a word search for Papias and you'll see).  Almost *nobody* knows about the other -- including New Testament experts --  except for a few specialist scholars. Papias [...]

In response to my recent thread on the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot, a number of readers have asked me about the aftermath.  OK, supposing, as I'm arguing, there really was a Judas, one of Jesus twelve disciples, who betrayed something about Jesus (his whereabouts? his claim to be the future king?) that led to his arrest and execution.  What happened next?   Did Judas really kill himself? Many people don’t realize that Judas’s death, after he betrayed Jesus, is not mentioned in three of our Gospels: Mark, Luke, and John.  It is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, however, and just as important, in the book of Acts, written by the same author who produced the Gospel of Luke (so, well, let’s call him Luke).  What is striking is that the descriptions of Judas’ death in these two accounts are at odds with one another, even though there are, at the same time, some striking similarities. Matthew’s account (ch. 27) is the one more people are familiar with, since here we are told that .... [...]