I want to continue my discussion of the virgin birth in the NT, with a set of reflections that is pretty unusual: the views of the Virgin Birth in Mark and John (who do not narrate it!).  I've talked about this on the blog before, but it's been a few years, and is worth thinking of again. It is interesting that Mark, our first Gospel to be written, does not have the story of the Virgin birth and in fact shows no clue that it is familiar with the stories of the Virgin birth.  On the contrary, there are passages in Mark that appear to work *against* the idea that Jesus’ mother knew anything about his having had an extraordinary birth. There is a complicated little passage in Mark 3:20-21 about Jesus’ family coming to take him out of the public eye because they thought he was crazy.  It is a difficult passage to translate from the Greek, and a number of translations go out of their way to make it say something that it [...]

Yesterday I discussed Matthew’s account of how it is that Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, if in fact he “came” from Nazareth.  It may well be that Matthew has placed Jesus' birth there to fulfill Micah's prophecy (5:2) that a great ruler (the supposed messiah) would come from Bethlehem. Matthew explains it all by indicating that Joseph and Mary were originally from Bethlehem.  That was their home town.  And the place of Jesus’ birth.  Two or more years after his birth, they relocated to Nazareth in Galilee, over a hundred miles to the north, to get away from the rulers of Judea who were thought to be out to kill the child.  (That in itself, I hardly need to say, seems completely implausible, that a local king is eager to kill a peasant child out of fear that he will wrest the kingdom away from him….) Luke has a completely different account of how it happened.  In Luke, Bethlehem is decidedly not Joseph and Mary’s home town.  The whole point of the story [...]

The last time I went to visit my mom in Kansas during the holiday season  was six years ago (she is now in a retirement home in Ohio; 93 and still walkin' around!).  I talked about it on the blog soon thereafter.  I was not a church going person then (still not) but I did the sonly thing and took her to her church.  This was a conservative evangelical Free Methodist Church – one that my mom has attended for many years.  It was not really my style – I rather prefer centuries-honored liturgy to electric guitars and drums, myself – but I wasn’t there to satisfy my own aesthetic preferences.   (She doesn’t like the guitars and drums either, but we missed the earlier service with the choir). The sermon in that kind of church is very different from what one hears in an Episcopal church and is also very different from the kind of sermon I learned to preach when I was in my Masters of Divinity program at the Presbyterian Princeton Theological Seminary.  [...]

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 [...]