Jesus believed there would be levels of reward in the coming Kingdom of God, as I began to show in my previous post.  Could there be any problems, though?  Any unruliness? Any need for discipline and judgment for people who did something illicit or harmful?  Could or would people sin in the Kingdom of God? These are tricky questions that Jesus never addresses directly in the canonical Gospels.  I never even thought about them or realized they could  be problems until, well, something like two weeks ago.  My assumption since I became a sentient human being has always been that the afterlife for the saved would be perfect in every way, that there would be no pain, misery, suffering of any kind, no harm done to anyone, no sin or disobedience.  A realm of perfection. This indeed is what most people think about heaven today.  But as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, Jesus had a different understanding than his modern day followers about the “Kingdom of God.” For him it was not to entail a [...]

This past weekend I sponsored the fourth annual "New Insights into the New Testament" conference, with an array of speakers giving talks for non-scholars on a particular topic.  This year the topic was "Apocrypha and Canon" which was dealing with books that did not make it into the New Testament -- other Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses. The most recent significant discovery in this field was the Gospel of Judas, and we certainly had a paper on that.  It made me wonder when I last discussed Judas Iscariot on the blog and I looked -- and it's been years. So I thought I should give it another go, either to refresh years-old memories or to inform others who were not here among us at the time. For starters, if he's called Judas Iscariot -- what's Iscariot mean?  It turns out, the question is much debated.  Here is what I say about it in my book. The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (Oxford University Press, 2006), which includes a long section on the "historical Judas" ****************************** [...]

I have been talking about Jesus' life before he was baptized, the so-called "Lost Years."  But how many years was that?  How old was he when he met up with John the Baptist?  And beyond that, how long did his ministry last?  How old was he  when he died? The standard line is that Jesus started his ministry when he was thirty and was executed three years later when he was thirty-three.  But none of the Gospels says all that.  So why is it the common view? It'll take a bit to explain how it's calculated (and a bit more to explain why it's highly uncertain). Only one of the Gospels says about how old he was when Jesus began his ministry.  Luke says that he was “about thirty” years old when he John baptized him (Luke 3:23). This number is not confirmed by any other source and we really don’t know if Luke had special information about this or if he was just guessing. The other three canonical Gospels say nothing explicit at [...]

I continue here with events from Jesus’ life before he started his public ministry that I think we can treat as historical.  (If you need some background on how I’m claiming this information is historical, see the previous post).   His Parents In all our sources Jesus’ parents are assumed to be Jewish.  They, as we’ve seen, came from Nazareth, a small rural village in Galilee, the northern part of what we today think of as Israel.  They are consistently named Joseph and Mary in our sources (for example, independently, Matt. 1:16-18; Mark 6:3; Luke 2:5, 16; 3:23; John 1:45; even rabbinic sources call his mother “Miriam”). In none of our traditions are there stories about Joseph after Jesus begins his public ministry.  It is usually assumed that he had died by then.  The idea that he was already an old man when he became betrothed to Mary is not found until the second century, when it is sometimes used to explain why they never had sex.  But it has absolutely no basis [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the social/cultural/economic/historical context of Jesus lately, and reading a good bit on what we know about Galilee from the time.  I’ll be saying more about all that anon, but I thought this might be a good chance to cover some of the basics on the blog – what do we know about Jesus from the time he was born to the time he was baptized as an adult, which is how he begins his ministry in the Gospels. For stories of his life before that, of course, all we have are Matthew and Luke.  I won’t explain here why I don’t think their accounts of his genealogy and birth can be historical.  I’ve posted on that a good deal before and you can find them on the blog by doing a word search for “virgin,” “Bethlehem,” “census,”  and so on. But both Gospels also have short stories about him as a boy.  Matthew describes the circumstances of his “descent to Egypt” with his family to escape the [...]

I have been arguing that that are many political and social issues that many of us care deeply about that, surprisingly, Jesus apparently did not.  Another passage that illustrates Jesus relative indifference to governmental policies and economic systems is his discussion with Simon Peter about paying the “temple tax,” a story found only Matthew (17:24-27). They have come to the town of Capernaum and some collectors of the “two drachma” temple tax ask Peter if his teacher pays the tax or not. Peter replies that he does, but when he goes back home, Jesus talks to him about it, asking whether kings tax their own children or only other people.  Peter naturally replies that children of the king don’t pay taxes, only others. Jesus agrees:  the ruler’s “children” are exempt from taxes – implication being that God’s children should not have to pay for the running of God’s house any more than a king’s children pay for the running of his palace. Jesus indicates that, even so, they should “not give offense” and [...]

How concerned was Jesus about the social, economic, cultural, and political issues that are so vitally important to us and occupy so much of our mental space? The answer is surprising. First some (probably unexpected) background. As a Jewish peasant in early first-century rural Aramaic-speaking Galilee, Jesus would not have known about Greek Stoics or their philosophical views.  He nonetheless appears to have shared a perspective with them, one that is a bit unexpected.  Like them, he was completely indifferent to a number of issues most people find deeply relevant and important, including fundamental questions connected with governmental policies and religious practices. Stoics insisted that a person’s happiness depended on maintaining an internal state of peace and calm, undisturbed by external events and circumstances.  There are only so many things that a person can control in their life.  Those are the things they should focus on.  Anyone who worries about things over which they have no control creates unnecessary stress and anxiety.  So it is best to distance yourself, simply not to be [...]