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 [...]

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 [...]