I have devoted several posts to Matthew's genealogy, and I realized it's only fair for me to say something about Luke's as well.  As you may know, these are the only two Gospels -- in fact the only two books of the New Testament -- that provide an account of Jesus' birth and very young life, the "infancy narratives."  In Mark Jesus shows up as an adult, and so too in John.  They say nothing about the circumstances of his birth, nothing, for example, of his mother being a virgin, of him being born in Bethlehem, of .. of any of the stories celebrated every Christmas.  Either do any of the other books of the NT.  That in itself is a striking fact.   An "essential doctrine" of Christianity such as the Virgin Birth -- said by many Christians to be a decisive doctrine: anyone who denies it (lots of Christians say), cannot be Christian.  Yet 25 of the 27 books in the NT say nothing about it.  Did they know about it?  How could we [...]

Since I've started talking about Matthew's genealogy, I've decided to stick with it a bit longer.  Most of my students, when they pick up the New Testament and I have them start at the beginning, they begin with Matthew 1:1 and moan.  A genealogy?!?  Ugh. I tell them to get over it.   This thing is only 16 verses long.  C'mon!  If you want a GENEALOGY, read 1 Chronicles 1-9.  Nine CHAPTERS of fathers and sons, starting with Adam.  Now *that* is a genealogy! (Anecdote: when I was an undergraduate at Moody Bible Institute in the mid 70's, for some reason I had to take a correspondence course to fill out one of my requirements.  This is back when a correspondence course meant doing it as correspondence -- through the mail!   It was some kind of broadly based Bible class, and one of the requirements was that you had to memorize and then reproduce a certain number of verses from the Bible.  You could choose.  Just your favorite verses.  They were expecting, of course, things like [...]

I started this small thread in response to a question about the use of “gematria” in the New Testament, the ancient Jewish interpretive technique that uses the numerical value of letters to find deeper significance in the words they are found in.  If you did it in English, and  a = 1, b= 2 and so on, when you got to  j it would = 10, k = 20, and so on.  In that case if your name is Jack your name would add up to 34; when you found another word whose letters also add up to 34 (say, “brilliant” or “egocentric” – neither of which, of course, does add up to 34…) then you could connect the two words and say that the one explains the other. One possible use of gematria occurs in the very first passage of the NT, the genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew.   I pointed out in my previous post that Matthew presents a numerically significant genealogy of Jesus in order to show that something of major significance [...]

Yesterday I was asked about the use of the Jewish interpretive procedure called gematria (the interpretation of words by the numerical value of their letters), and its use in the NT.  In that post, I explained how it worked.  Now I want to explain how it gets used in the NT.  As it turns out, it appears at the very outset (implicitly) in the first book of the NT, the Gospel of Matthew, and at the very end (implicitly) in the final book Revelation.  The latter will be familiar to many of you:  666!  But the former?  It’s a bit trickier. And to explain it I need to provide some background on the genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel in general.  In my next post I’ll talk about the possible use of gematria. Here’s what I've said about it before: A reader who first comes to the New Testament, and so begins at the beginning, with Matthew chapter 1, first finds him/herself confronted with a genealogy. This may not seem like an auspicious beginning, but the genealogy [...]

This now is number eight of my favorite posts from the past.   Often I deal with issues in the New Testament that in my judgment cannot be historically accurate.  One of these, to the surprise of many readers, is the familiar story of what allegedly happened at the trial of Jesus according to the Gospels: Pilate is said to have offered to release him as a favor to the Jewish crowds gathered in Jerusalem for Passover; but instead they choose a Jewish insurrectionist and murderer, Barabbas – and so that was the one Pilate released.   Could that have happened? I addressed the issue in 2019, in response to a reader’s question: ****************************** QUESTION: Pilate condemns Jesus to execution for treason against Rome. Pilate gives the Jewish crowds the option of releasing Jesus or a Jewish insurgent, Barabbas (15:6–15).   I did a quick search to see if this was an attested practice in the Roman Empire and couldn’t’ find any relevant information.  So, I have two questions:  Do you think this detail is accurate?  Is there [...]

Back to Christian apologists for a minute (from my post a few days ago).  One common argument that the resurrection stories must be historical is that no one would invent the idea that the first witnesses to the resurrection were women; therefore the tomb really was empty (i.e. since no one would have made up the story that way).  I get asked about that probably once every four or five months.  I dealt with it on the blog -- in fact exactly eight years ago.  Here is the question I was asked about it and my response -- the same one I would have today! QUESTION: How do the stories of the women at the tomb found in the canonical gospels come to be told?  As many scholars I've read have pointed out, having women, who were considered untrustworthy witnesses, as the first to see the risen Christ, was not exactly a way to get people to believe the stories.  So why would the gospel writers tell the stories with the women in such a [...]

I was just browsing through old posts and came across this one that appeared eight years ago tomorrow – a circumstance I thought was remarkable, since the very topic I cover in it is what I’ll be talking  about with my undergraduate class tomorrow, in my course on Jesus in Scholarship and Film.  At this stage of the semester we are learning about the various Gospels, and one of the BIG points I'm trying to make in the class -- one that is extremely hard for anyone raised with a traditional view of the Bible to get their mind around -- is that each of the Gospels has its *own* story to tell about Jesus:  the portrayal of Matthew is not the same as that in John; that Mark's is not Luke's; that none of them is like the Gospel of Peter; or of Thomas; or of Mary; etc....  Each is different – sometimes in contradictory ways and more often in emphasis (which is just as important).  And you can't just assume they all are [...]

I have been arguing that Jesus talked about a figure he called the Son of Man, a cosmic judge of the earth who was soon to arrive from heaven to judge all people, to destroy the opponents of God (both human and non-human) and to reward his (human) followers with a utopian kingdom here on earth.  This was not a weird, unusual, or psychotic message: in basic terms it was a rather common view among Jews in Jesus day, a view that scholars have called "apocalyptic." The word comes from the Greek term "apocalypsis," which means a "revealing" or an "unveiling."  Jewish apocalypticism was widespread in Jesus' day: it was a view held by the Pharisees, the Essenes (including the authors and users of the Dead Sea Scrolls), authors of books such as 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch, various "prophets" we know about (named and unnamed), John the Baptist, and many, many others.  These Jews believed the world was controlled for now by forces of evil, but God was soon to re-assert his [...]

In order to answer a very specific question about how Matthew uses the phrase “son of man” for Jesus, I have had to discuss what the phrase generally means in the Gospel and whether it is a phrase that Jesus actually used.  I am arguing that he did use it.  That one of the ways he used it was to refer to the judge of the earth who was coming from heaven to destroy God’s enemies and set up a kingdom here (down here, on earth).  And here is the big surprise.  My argument is that when he talked about the future cosmic judge, he was *not* talking about himself. In my last post I talked about the criterion of dissimilarity.  Now I want to show how it relates to this specific problem/issue.  Among the various sayings about the Son of Man on the lips of Jesus are some that would not have been put *on* his lips by his followers.  (The ones where he is talking about himself obviously *could* have been put on [...]

In my previous post I began to talk about the phrase “the Son of Man” in the New Testament, in response to a question about Matthew 16:13-16. (See that post!)  I will get around to answering the question itself eventually, but for now I’m discussing the use of the phrase “Son of man” generally in the Gospels.  Yesterday I pointed out that Jesus uses it a lot, in a variety of ways. Some scholars have claimed that since prior to Jesus, within Judaism, it was not a “title” for a person (that is, like “Son of God” or “Messiah” or “Lord” or “King” etc.), then it could not be a title when Jesus uses it.  I responded by saying that doesn’t make any sense, since the phrase *is* used as a title in the Gospels, so *someone* had to be the first to use it that way, and in principle there is no reason to say it could not have been Jesus. Now I want to argue that Jesus did use it as a title, [...]

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 [...]