Here is a provocative and intriguing post on a topic not widely known outside the realm of Roman historians: the miracles attributed to the Emperor Vespasian (which sure sound a lot like the miracles attribued to Jesus, written in Gospels produced just at the time of or after his reign.) The post is by Platinum member Ryan Fleming.  Platinum members are allowed to write posts for other Platinum members.  It's a great perk of the highest level of blog membership!  And when we have a few in the bag, Platinum members vote for which of them can appear on the main blog. This is the current winner.  It raises a number of intriguing possibilities about this little-known set of narratives of obvious importance to understanding Jesus and the Gospels.  What do you think?   **************************** Roman historian Tacitus (56 CE to 120 CE) in The Histories, Book IV, Section 81, and Suetonius (69 CE to 122 CE) in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars wrote of miracles Vespasian performed in the temple of Serapis in [...]

I'm pleased to announce that I will be doing a special event this Christmas season, a two-lecture online course called Jesus:  The Actual Son of Joseph: Evidence From the New Testament Itself.   This is a topic I have long thought about casually but never really dug into until recently.  And when I dug, I started realizing that in fact there's a lot buried, more than I expect.  There are very good reasons for thinking that a number of the earliest sources of the New Testament (Paul, Mark, the sources of Matthew and Luke), as well as the latest (John), not only did not KNOW the tradition about Jesus being born of a virgin, but actually maintain (in some places) and suggest (in others) that he was not.  Whoa. In two lectures delivered remotely on Sunday December 10, I'll be laying the case out in full.  Obviously what someone (say the authors of the Gospels) *thought* about the circumstances of Jesus' birth (whether those who indicate his mother was a virgin and those who indicate she [...]

I'm teaching  The Birth of Christianity this semester, a course that deals with the history of Christianity from right after the New Testament up to about the conversion of Constantine.  Want to take my Final Exam?   Well, I ain't gonna grade it if you do.  But here are the instructions I gave to the class so they could know what to expect -- including the ten POSSIBLE essay questions, from which I will choose two for them to answer, in essays they could take one hour (each) to write.  What do you think?  Could you nail it?   The Birth of Christianity, Reli 208 Final Exam Questions Our final exam is scheduled for Tuesday, December 12 at (gulp) 8:00 – 11:00 am in our regular classroom.  The exam will consist of ten short answer identification questions and two essays. The exam will be closed book, closed notes, and open mind. You will need to write out your answers in a blue book (bring several) with pen and ink!   Identifications The first section of [...]

In my last two posts I talked about the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity.   The standard view, held for many many centuries, goes back to the Church History  of the fourth-century church father Eusebius, who argued that orthodoxy represented the original views of Jesus and his disciples, and heresies were corruptions of that truth by willful, mean-spirited, wicked, and demon inspired teachers who wanted to lead others astray. In 1934 Walter Bauer challenged that view in his book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.   Bauer argued that in many regions of the church, the earliest known form of Christianity was one that later came to be declared a heresy.   Heresies were not, therefore, necessarily later corruptions of an original truth.  In many instances they were the oldest known kind of Christianity, in one place or another.   The form of Christianity that became dominant by the end of the third century or so was the one known particularly in Rome.   Once this Roman form of Christianity had more or less swept aside its [...]

A number of blog members over the years have asked about Thomas’s relation to the Synoptic Gospels and the famous Q source --  that is, the lost source that both Matthew and Luke used for many of their sayings of Jesus not found in Mark (called Q from the German word Quelle, which means “source”).  Here is what I say about those issues in my textbook:  The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press). ****************************** Thomas and the Q Source.  The Gospel of Thomas, with its list of the sayings of Jesus (but no narratives) reminds many scholars of the Q source. Some have maintained that Q was also composed entirely of the sayings of Jesus and that the community for whom it was written was not concerned about Jesus’ activities and experiences, including his death on the cross. If they are right, then something like Thomas’s community was already in existence prior to the writing of the New Testament Gospels. Many other scholars, on the other hand, have their [...]