In my last couple of posts I've talked about how the King of Israel could, oddly enough, be called "God."  That seems contrary to what we think of ancient Judaism, where only God can be God.  But it helps explain why later Christians could call Jesus God.  There was precedent for a human to be called that, even within Judaism, Possibly yet more unexpectedly, within the Jewish tradition even Moses was sometimes considered a divine being, and called God.  Here's how I explain it in my book How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014) ****************************** It is interesting to note that not only the king of Israel, human as he was, is lauded with divine status and even the term “God,” but so too in ancient Jewish texts was that great savior and lawgiver of the people, Moses. The root of this tradition is in the Torah itself, from an intriguing passage in Exodus 4.  God is commissioning Moses to go to the Egyptian Pharaoh and demand that he set free the children of [...]

I gave a lecture the other day in which I mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This morning, when looking back over the blog, I realized I haven't really said much about them for ... years!  So, here are some of the basics you can pull out when things get dull at your next cocktail party. Even though just about every thinking human being in our context has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most have no clue what the scrolls are, what they contain, and how they were found.  It's no surprise they've at least heard of them.  The Dead Sea Scrolls are by virtual consensus the most significant manuscript discovery of the twentieth century, of major importance for understanding Judaism at the time of Jesus and, in some respects, the teachings of Jesus himself. Here is what I say about the scrolls in my New Testament textbook (Oxford University Press: The New Testament:  A Historical and Literary Introduction).  I begin by talking about the Jewish group widely thought to have been responsible for producing, using, [...]

In my previous post I talked about two of the known Jewish sects from the days of Jesus in Palestine.  The idea that there are specifically four sects comes to us from the late-first-century Jewish historian Josephus, whose many volumes of writings (e.g., on the Jewish War and on Jewish Antiquities – the latter a history of the Jewish people from biblical times up to his own day) are our principal source of information about Judaism at the time.  In addition to the Pharisees and Sadducees, Josephus mentions the “Essenes” and a “Fourth Philosophy.”  Here is a summary of what these groups stood for, again taken from my introductory textbook on the New Testament.   ************************** The Essenes are the one Jewish sect not mentioned in the New Testament. Ironically, they are also the group about which we are best informed. This is because the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were evidently produced by a group of Essenes who lived in a community east of Jerusalem in the wilderness area near the western shore of the [...]

I often get asked about what Judaism was like in the time before and up to Jesus.  It's a vital question, since whatever else you might want to say about Jesus, he was definitely Jewish and the Judaism he was born into, raised in, and accepted was the Judaism of his time (not medieval and not modern!).  Here' I'll say something about a major period in the history of the history of Judea over the four hundred years from approximately 540 BCE, when the Persians were in control, up to 63 BCE, when the Romans came in and took over. I’ve taken the sketch from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ****************************** The Later History of Judea In the Persian period (starting in the late 6th century BCE), the land of Judah came be a province called Judea.  This will be its name in the time of the New Testament.  So too, as we have seen, inhabitants of this land, and descendants of former inhabitants who maintained their ancestral religious and cultural traditions, [...]

I have devoted a large number of posts to going carefully through the main arguments that Craig Evans makes in his critique of the position I take in How Jesus Became God with respect to the burial tradition, in his essay, “Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right”  (in How God Became Jesus; check it out!).   To this point I have been trying to argue that the accumulation of arguments in and of itself does not constitute a “cumulative argument.”  Each of the accumulated arguments has to carry *some* weight if the overall argument is to carry *much* (or a lot of) weight.  And in my judgment, none of the arguments that I have adduced and responded to so far carries much, if any, weight. Some of you will probably disagree with me, and that’s fine.  But I do hope that I’ve shown that I’m not the uninformed skeptic that Craig portrays in his essay.  At times, reading it, I felt like I was being lectured to.  On the other hand, maybe Craig feels the [...]