Historical Jesus Archives - Page 15 of 34 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Who Was Jesus?

This is a continuation of a soon-to-be-compiled longer post for broader consumption on the New Testament. Now that I have described what the NT is, how it is structured and organized, and how it has come down to us, I get to one of the key issues: what does the New Testament tell us about the historical figure of Jesus himself? ********************************************** There can be no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth has been the most influential person in the history of the world. The church founded on his name shaped the history of Western Civilization, and over two billion people worship him today. And yet, because of the nature of our sources, it is surprisingly difficult to know what he actually said and did. Jesus is thought to have died around 30 CE. He is not referred to in any Greek or Roman sources of the first century, and only briefly in our major Jewish source of the period, the historian Josephus. The earliest Christian references are from the New Testament, but most of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 29th, 2019|Historical Jesus|

Maybe Jesus DOES Talk about “Homosexuality”?

In my recent post I pointed out that Jesus said nothing – nada! – about same sex relations in any of his surviving teachings. One blog member pointed out a post on a different blog by New Testament scholar Scot McKnight arguing that there are there passages in the Gospels where in fact Jesus *may* have been referring to homosexuality, in condemnatory terms. I thought, HUH? THAT’s interesting! I better look. So I did. I don’t think there’s any way this is right, but you can decide for yourself. This will take two posts. I’ll cite the the passages, then Scot’s assessment of them (which I summarize), and my response. Several things to say at the outset. I have known Scott (not well, but a bit) for many years. He is a bona fide scholar of the New Testament, a well-trained and careful interpreter of the text. He is also a committed evangelical Christian, and an interesting one: a few years ago he “converted” (or at least moved on or over) to join the Episcopal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 22nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Is the Bible Inspired by God? Guest Post by Evangelical Apologist Mike Licona

This particular post is free and open to the public. If you belonged to the blog, you would get five posts a week, for about what it costs to send a letter. And every penny goes to charity! So why not join? Mike Licona has burst on the scene as one of the leading spokespersons for evangelical Christianity and its theological claims, especially that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, that purely historical research can actually demonstrate that it happened, and that the Bible is literally inspired by God himself and to be accepted as inerrant. As many of you know, I have had three public debates with Mike (on the question of whether historians can proved that Jesus was raised from the dead; the debates were not about whether Jesus was raised from the dead – they were about whether this kind of claim can be proved by historians using historical methods, or, instead, is a theological claim that cannot be demonstrated historically); and recently we shared a stage at an evangelical Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 17th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus|

Jesus and “Homosexuality”

This post is free and available to everyone. Most posts on the blog are for members only. But the good news is that it's extremely easy and inexpensive to join. It costs less than 50 cents a week, for five posts of this substance. You get TONS for your money. And all proceeds to to charity. So why not? Most Christians today who continue to condemn homosexuality, whether in publicly opposing the LGBTQ community or privately assigning people of various sexual identities or non-heterosexual actions to eternal damnation, or at least to God’s bad side, do so on the basis of the New Testament. Yes, they know about the book of Leviticus and it’s condemnation of men having sex with men; but most of the time that is a kind of back-up argument. Since they realize and openly admit that so much else in the book of Leviticus is no longer applicable to Christians (for example, kosher food laws), they realize that the case against same-sex relations, let alone sexual orientation, cannot be water-tight with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 15th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

What Does the Name Judas “Iscariot” Mean?

I received a number of questions about Judas Iscariot from my recent post. I had dealt with many of these within living memory on the blog, but given their frequency, I think I should deal with them again. Here is one of the most frequent: QUESTION: I read somewhere that “Iscariot” was a version of “Judas the Sicarii” which as it was handed down orally got altered. Is there any truth to this? RESPONSE: Behind this question is a bit of rare historical knowledge. In Jesus' day there was a group of Jewish insurrectionists supporting a violent overthrow of the Roman occupancy who were called "Sicarii" -- literally "people who wield daggers." They had a reputation for mingling in a crowd and stealing up to an aristocrat and killing him with a dagger, mixing in then with everyone else and escaping. The name Iscariot is very odd and no one really knows what it means. Could it mean that Judas was actually a zealot seeking a military uprising against Rome, so that when he realized [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 28th, 2019|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

The Quest for the Historical … Judas Iscariot

I occasionally (in fact, just last week) get asked if I think Judas Iscariot was a real person or a fictional character, wholly made up. I have a definite view about that. Real person. Actually one of Jesus’ disciples. And the one who betrayed him to the authorities leading to his arrest and crucifixion. But what makes me think so? I talked a bit about the “Quest of the Historical Judas” in a chapter of my book on the recent discovery of the Gnostic "Gospel of Judas," a highly intriguing text that emerged into public view about fifteen years ago (the book: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed, Oxford University Press, 2016). Here’s what I say about the existence of the person himself, starting out with the basic and fundamental question of how historians know about *any* figure from the past (Robert E. Lee; Charlamagne; the Emperor Tiberius; uh, Jesus …), and then applying the question to Judas. ************************************************************* What kinds of sources of information do historians look [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 25th, 2019|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Who Would Invent the Story of Women at the Tomb??

Who in the ancient world would ever try to *prove* the resurrection by making up a story that women, in particular, discovered Jesus' empty tomb? Weren't women seen as complete unreliable witnesses? Their testimony never even accepted in a court of law? If someone want to prove that Jesus had been raised -- and that therefore the tomb was empty -- they would have invented *men* at the tomb (reliable witnesses) rather than *women* (untrustworthy). Right? I've been asked this question several times since my recent post on Jesus' women followers not doubting the resurrection. The reason anyone ever has this question is because it is a favorite claim of Christian apologists wanting to prove that Jesus really was raised from the dead. Proof? The tomb really was empty. How do we know? We have witnesses. How do we know we can trust the reports of these witnesses? No one would have made them up: the witnesses in the stories are always * and no one would invent "unreliable" witnesses to back up "proof-claims." When [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 22nd, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

But the Women Who Did NOT Doubt the Resurrection

In my previous post I noted something unusual about the doubting tradition in the resurrection narratives (i.e., the tradition that some of the disciples simply didn’t believe that Jesus was raised) – in addition, of course, to the fact that there is such a dominant doubting tradition! (itself a fascinating phenomenon) – which is that there is no word anywhere of the women who discover the tomb doubting, but clear indications (either by implication or by explicit statement) that some or all of the male disciples doubted. This is true of three of our four Gospels. Mark 16:8. (This one is by implication only) We are told that the women never tell anyone that they have found the tomb to be empty. So, the disciples are not said to believe and, in fact, so far as we know from this Gospel, no one does come to believe. (Obviously someone did, otherwise we wouldn’t have the Gospel!) Luke 24:10-11. The disciples think the tale of women told that Jesus has been raised as he predicted is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:48-04:00October 16th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

Why Would Jesus’ Disciples Doubt the Resurrection?

I was just now browsing through posts from seven years ago, and came across this one, which is related to questions I get from time to time. It is an absolutely fundamental issue for Christian faith, but I almost *never* see anyone talk about it. Surprising! Here's the interesting question and my response (back when I was starting just to do work on the resurrection stories for my book How Jesus Became God). QUESTION: Are we to understand from this that some of the actual disciples, the inner circle, doubted? Is this the origin of the “Doubting Thomas” character in John? Maybe not everyone got a vision of the risen Christ? Perhaps these are hints that after the crucifixion some of the group ran away and DIDN’T come back! RESPONSE: This is a question specifically about the stories of the resurrection of Jesus, and it is one that I’ve been pondering myself intensely for a couple of weeks. It would help to have the data in front of us. The tradition that the disciples [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:48-04:00October 14th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Does Isaiah 53 Predict Jesus’ Suffering and Death or Has Isaiah 53 Been Debunked?
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Does Isaiah 53 Predict Jesus’ Suffering and Death or Has Isaiah 53 Been Debunked?

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus

Does Isaiah 53 Predict Jesus’ Suffering and Death or Has Isaiah 53 Been Debunked?

Isaiah 53 is the ONE passage, above all others, that has been used over the centuries by Christians to be a prediction that the messiah will suffer and die for the sake of others. Every semester my students quote the passage to me and say "SEE! Jesus really *is* the messiah predicted by Scripture, centuries before he came!" I have been talking about how the view of a future resurrection of the body came from. This idea, that we would live forever in our bodies (if we were among the "righteous") was repugnant to just about everyone in the ancient world. But it became a widely held view among Jews, and was taken up with passion by the early Christians. These Christians appealed to the Jewish Bible for support of their view, even though "resurrection" is actually only clearly taught in one passage (Daniel 12:1-3). But they found other passages they claimed were relevant for the idea of resurrection. And most strikingly, they turned to Isaiah 53. Why do I call that striking? Because it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00August 23rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus|

Was James the Actual Brother of Jesus?

I’ve started talking about the epistle of James, first in relation to Paul (yesterday) and then in relation to … James, the man himself, Jesus’ brother (today). My ultimate goal is to explain why I’m sure James himself did not write the letter (later). But in the meantime I’ve received a question that I should probably address first: did Jesus really have a brother named James? Uh… don’t a lot of Christians think that Jesus never had any siblings (since his mother remained a virgin)? How do you explain him having a brother? I’ve talked about this on the blog before, but in the current context, it’s worth talking about again. Here’s the question and my response: ************************************************************ QUESTION: In what way was the James you are talking about here, the “brother” of Jesus? Was he another one of Mary’s sons from Joseph? Was he another one of Joseph’s sons from a previous relationship? RESPONSE: One of the non-canonical books from early Christianity that I regularly teach is called the Proto-Gospel of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 15th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

An Official Copy of Jesus’ Death Sentence: Another Forgery?

I have been intermittently posting accounts of modern forgeries of Gospels that provide, as a rule, sensationalized information about the “lost” records of Jesus – for example an account claiming he traveled to India as a young man to learn his wisdom from the Brahmins, or another purportedly based on an eyewitness to the crucifixion. Here now is yet another, this one an allegedly official copy of the death sentence from his trial, written by Pontius Pilate himself, in Hebrew no less. It’s amazing how gullible modern readers can be. But for a long time now, many people have simply assumed that if they read something in a tabloid, hey, it must be true! Critical scholars, however, have no trouble demonstrating when these things are forgeries. One could only wish that such critical skills were shared by the reading public at large (and not just those interested in early Christianity!). Again, I have taken this discussion from the final chapter of my book Forged. ********************************************************* The Death Sentence of Jesus Christ One of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 27th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

Was Jesus Perfect? Then How Was He Human?? Guest Post: Jeffrey Siker
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Was Jesus Perfect? Then How Was He Human?? Guest Post: Jeffrey Siker

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus

Was Jesus Perfect? Then How Was He Human?? Guest Post: Jeffrey Siker

Another guest post by Jeffrey Siker, raising a very hard question with some peculiar answers and a provocative suggestion. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity and Homosexuality in the Church. Jesus and Sinlessness: Metaphor and Ontology, Blog 3 In the two previous posts I have shown how the tradition developed that Jesus was sinless, namely, retrospectively in light of resurrection faith. If Jesus was raised to divine stature at the right hand of God, then surely he must have been God’s divine Son throughout his public ministry (even if hidden by a messianic secret), and also in his baptism and birth. Thus, the logic goes, he must have been perfect throughout his life. He could have no taint of sin. On this the earliest Christians generally came to agree, though they expressed this agreement in different ways. Gnostic Christians like Valentinus in the second century associated sin with material existence, and bodily physicality. This led Valentinus to argue that Jesus only appeared to be a flesh and blood [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 24th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

How Jesus Became Perfectly Sinless: Guest Post by Jeff Siker

Here is the second guest post by Jeff Siker on how Jesus came to be thought of as completely sinless in early Christianity, a view that probably no one entertained while he was still living. It's intriguing and important stuff. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. This particular post is available to everyone; to see most of the posts on the blog, and the other posts on this topic itself by Prof. Siker, you will need to join. Won't cost much. Will pay huge dividends. And all money goes to those in need. So what's the downside? Jesus and Sinlessness, Part 2: From Retrospection to Retrojection In the first blog post I showed how the earliest Christians were forced to make sense of the death of Jesus in light of belief in his resurrection. Why had the one they “had hoped” would redeem Israel died at the hands of the Romans by means [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 19th, 2019|Historical Jesus|

An Eyewitness to the Crucifixion? Another Modern Forgery
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An Eyewitness to the Crucifixion? Another Modern Forgery

Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus

An Eyewitness to the Crucifixion? Another Modern Forgery

The crucifixion by an eyewitness. I’ve started to discuss several modern forgeries connected with the life of Jesus. These are all completely bogus, but they’ve nonetheless fooled a lot of people. I get emails from people maybe once a month who want to ask me about something they’ve “heard” about Jesus, and it usually turns out that it comes ultimately from one of these things, which someone has read, and then told someone else, who told someone else, who took it as Gospel truth. The Essenes mentioned in this apocryphon are that Jewish sect in the time of Jesus who were a kind of separatist group concerned to retain its own ritual purity in view of the coming apocalypse, which they expected any day now. Today they are most famous for having produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when this Gospel account was forged, the Scrolls had not yet been discovered. The Essenes were seen at the time as a kind of secretive magical group on the fringes of real Judaism. Again, I have taken [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 17th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

When Did Jesus Become Sinless?

I recently received a question from a blog member about when it was in the Christian tradition that Jesus came to be thought of as “perfect,” without sin. I feel no great need to answer the question myself because my friend and occasional guest blog poster Jeffrey Siker, long-time professor of New Testament at Loyola Marymount University, has written an entire book on the topic. And so I asked him to prepare some blogposts, and here’s the first one. For what it’s worth, he and I both liked very much the title he wanted for the book, Jesus the Perfect Sinner; but, as often happens, the publisher went with something less scintillating: Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity. But the cover of the book is to die for. - Jeffrey Siker is also the author of Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ********************************************** Jesus and Sinlessness How and when did Jesus come to be viewed as sinless in earliest Christianity? Surprisingly, this question [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 14th, 2019|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Did Jesus Go to India? A Modern Gospel Forgery.

Did Jesus go o India? Last week I mentioned in passing the little-known fact that the apocryphal idea that Jesus traveled to India as a child to learn from the Brahmins, comes to us not from ancient forgeries but relatively modern ones. That raised some interest among readers, and I realized that I haven’t actually dealt with this intriguing issue on the blog before. But I did deal with it in one of my books on forgery, the one written for a general audience, Forged: Writing in the Name of God. In that book, I devote a final chapter to modern examples of the ancient phenomenon, of forgeries of Gospels. I will spread this discussion out over several blog posts, for your reading pleasure. Here is how I begin the chapter and then discuss the first example, a particularly influential forgery (even though most people who have been influenced by its views have never actually heard of the book!. Did Jesus Go To India? Let's Find Out More When I give public talks about the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 13th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

The Radical Implications of the Resurrection

Over the years on the blog, I have reflected a number of times on the significance of the earliest Christians' belief in the resurrection. On this Easter morning, I thought it would be appropriate to return to one of those reflections. The most important result of the disciples' belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead was that it radically changed their understanding of what it meant to say Jesus was the messiah. As I have explained before that in my view, ,Jesus did believe he was the messiah (in a certain sense), and his followers believed it. Given everything we know about Jewish beliefs at the time, that almost certainly mean that they thought that he was (or would become) the king of the Jewish people. That’s certainly how the Roman governor Pontius Pilate took it. It was because Jesus made such a claim that Pilate ordered him crucified. The crucifixion would have proved beyond any doubt -- to anyone paying attention -- that Jesus was not the messiah after all. Rather than [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00April 21st, 2019|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

Do Any Ancient Jewish Sources Mention Jesus? Weekly Mailbag

I recently received a succinct but very important question about whether Jesus is ever mentioned by any Jewish sources of the first century. The premise behind the question is that if Jesus was the miracle-working son of God who was healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead – wouldn’t everyone be talking about him, all the time? It turns out, the answer is – we don’t know! We have hardly any Jewish writings from his time and place. At the end of the first century we do have the copious and massively important historical writings of Flavius Josephus, and there is one passage in particular where he does indeed refer to Jesus. The passage is typically called the “Testimonium Flavianum” (that is, “Flavius [Josephus’s] Testimony to Jesus”). But did Josephus actually write this passage? Or has it been inserted into his work by a later scribe? Or did a later Christian scribe “touch it up” a bit? Here is the simple but crucial question I have received. QUESTION: How much of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 10th, 2019|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

A Return to the Historical Jesus

One of the most interesting developments within New Testament studies happened in the 1950s. To set the development in context, I need to remind you that the long “quest” of the historical Jesus – trying to determined what Jesus said and did historically – was evidently put to rest by the work of Wrede and Schweitzer fifty years earlier, and not a whole lot was being done in that field, as scholars *either* thought that our sources were basically reliable and so should be simply be accepted for what they said, *or* realized that our sources were so highly problematic that we couldn’t actually say much about what had happened in Jesus’ life historically. And so scholars turned their attention to other things, first in examining the oral traditions about Jesus through form criticism, and then starting in the 50’s focusing on the distinctive *portrayals* of Jesus in the Gospels using redaction criticism. (I’m simplifying things here, of course, since there were lots of scholars doing lots of different things at the time). In the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00February 27th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

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