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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|

A New Way of Looking at the Gospels

In this long and complicated answer to the "messianic secret" in Mark I have explained how 19th century scholars were interested in "source criticism" -- the attempt to figure out what the sources of the Gospels were, and in particular, how to explain the "synoptic problem," that is, the problem of explaining how Matthew, Mark, and Luke have so many similarities, in terms of the stories they tell, often in the same sequence, and even at numerous points in precisely the same words. The goal in this source analysis was to figure out which Gospel was closest to the time of Jesus and therefore most reliable. The answer: Mark. But after some decades Wrede showed that even Mark was not a simple historical account of Jesus' life, but was driven by literary/theological purposes, causing the author to alter the traditions about Jesus' words and deeds he had inherited. That killed for a time the Quest of the Historical Jesus. Scholars turned to a different interest: what can we say about the traditions of Jesus *before* [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00February 25th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Non-Christian Sources for Jesus: An Interview with History.com

I have recently had a written interview about the historical Jesus with Christopher Klein, correspondent with History.com, the web site of the History Channel. I’m not sure what the title of the article will be; it should be appearing relatively soon, as a lead up to Easter. He has graciously allowed me to post the questions and answers from the interview. They all deal with the non-Christian evidence we have for the life of Jesus. QUESTION: Can you say a few words about why it's not surprising that there is no archaeological evidence of Jesus? RESPONSE: It makes sense that people today would think that we should have archaeological evidence of Jesus – after all, he’s the most important figure in the history of Western Civilization! If he existed, surely we’d have some physical record of it, right? The problems are that (a) we too quickly assume that someone who is important *after* his life must have been equally important *during* his life; but that’s absolutely not the case. No one who has [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00February 24th, 2019|Historical Jesus|

If the Quest for the Historical Jesus Failed… What Then?

In response to a question about the Messianic Secret in Mark, I have now shown how scholars (most signficiantly William Wrede) came to realize that not even the Gospel of Mark was a straightforward historical account of what actually happened in the life of Jesus. Some five years ago on the blog I talked about what happened next, in the scholarship on the New Testament. It's a crucial element of the history of biblical scholarship. Here is what I said. ***************************************************************************************************** Once it came to be realized that Mark’s Gospel – the earliest of our surviving accounts of Jesus – was driven not purely by historical interests in order to record biographical information with historical accuracy, but was (like the other Gospels) written in order to convey theological ideas in literary guise, the movement to use Mark to write a “Life of Jesus” more or less collapsed on itself, for a time and among most New Testament scholars. What arose from the ashes of this “Quest of the Historical Jesus” could not have been foreseen [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00February 22nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

The Death Knell for the Study of the Historical Jesus

Once Wrede convincingly showed that the Gospel of Mark was not a literal, factual description of what Jesus said and did, in his 1901 book The Messianic Secret (but that it, like the other Gospels, had incorporated its own literary and theological concerns into its account), the cottage industry of Historical Jesus books pretty much collapsed. Its entire foundation had for decades been built on the assumption that even if the other Gospels were not completely historical, but theologically biased, Mark was not. Wrong. It was. Contributing significantly to the collapse of this academic venture was the first full account of its history, Albert Schweitzer’s classic, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, produced five years later, and still very much worth reading. As I have mentioned, Schweitzer discussed virtually all of his predecessors, starting with the first critical/historical attempt to figure out what Jesus really said and did (i.e., an account that didn’t simply think the Gospels were inspired and flawless in their reporting, but needed to be examined critically to establish the historical reality [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00February 20th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Wrede’s Revolutionary Claim about the “Messianic Secret”

Yesterday I pointed out all the passages in the Gospel of Mark that repeat, time and again, the idea that Jesus tried to keep his messiahship a secret. He doesn’t allow the demons to identify him when he casts them out; when he heals people he strictly instructs them not to tell anyone; he teaches his disciples the “secret of the Kingdom” privately when no one else is around; he teaches the crowds only using parables precisely (Mark indicates) so no one can understand what he means. And he never publicly teaches about his own identity. This last point should be emphasized. Unlike other Gospels (see John 4:25-26!) Jesus never tells anyone publicly that he is the messiah. When he is acknowledged as the messiah by Peter in a private conversation with the disciples in Mark 8:29-30, Jesus orders them not to let anyone know. And then he starts teaching that as the messiah he has to be rejected and executed. That seems to be a complete contradiction of terms for Peter, who has just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00February 19th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Is It Plausible that Jesus Kept the Whole Thing a Secret??

Back to the Messianic Secret in Mark. As we have seen, 19th century scholars by and large determined that Mark’s Gospel was the first to be written, and from that they concluded that it was a straightforward factual description of what actually happened in the life of Jesus. In their view, unlike the other Gospels, Mark had not invested his story with any (or many) literary touches – i.e. fictionalized any of it – and he hadn’t imposed his own theology onto the account. He laid out what really happened, and Matthew and Luke, then later John, took this factual account and modified it in light of their literary and theological interests. So if you wanted to know what happened in the life of Jesus: read Mark! And for the various gaps (why did Jesus do this? Why did he start doing that? What drove him to do this other thing?) you provided plausible, psychological explanations of what Jesus was thinking at the time. William Wrede’s book in 1906, Das Messiasgeheimnis (The Messianic Secret) called [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:46-04:00February 18th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Who CARES if Mark was the First Gospel Written?

When I teach students in my Introduction to the New Testament class about the Synoptic Problem, it becomes a bit like pulling teeth. To be sure, at the very outset, students are intrigued. When I set it up, it’s kind of like a detective story – who copied whom, and how would we know? I make it as interesting and intriguing as I can: how can we figure this out? But then I have to get into the weeds to explain the evidence, such things as the patterns of verbal agreements among Matthew, Mark, and Luke in passages they all three have in common (such passages are called “the Triple Tradition”): sometimes all three have exactly the same wording; sometimes all three have different wording; sometimes Mattthew and Mark have the same wording but Luke disagrees; sometimes Mark and Luke have the same wording, but Matthew disagrees; but only rarely do Matthew and Luke agree, and Mark disagrees. I show this in detail with a particular passage (the rich man that comes up to Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 15th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

The Beginning of the Quest of the Historical Jesus

In 1901 William Wrede, a German Protestant biblical scholar, published his earth-shattering work, Das Messiasgeheimnis, “The Messianic Secret.” It overturned in a rather devastating way the entire scholarly consensus about the Gospel of Mark and, more important and relatedly, undercut the whole enterprise scholars had undertaken to use the Gospels to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus. When five years later, Albert Schweitzer (later famous as a great humanitarian, medical doctor to Africa, who had abandoned his career as a biblical scholar and concert organist to engage in his mission; he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952) published his even-better known and justifiably classic study The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he gave it the rather uninspiring title Von Reimarus zu Wrede: “From Reimarus to Wrede.” This was a history of scholarship on the historical Jesus, written to explain the attempts scholars had made since the Enlightenment down to Schweitzer’s own day to describe what Jesus really said and did given the problem of our Gospel sources. Starting with Hermann Samuel Reimarus in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 7th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Do We Explain the Messianic Secret?
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How Do We Explain the Messianic Secret?

Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions

How Do We Explain the Messianic Secret?

What is the Messianic Secret - For this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, I address a question of central importance for understanding the Gospel of Mark, our earliest Gospel and often thought to be the one that best represents what actually happened in the life of Jesus. I’ll have to *explain* the question before answering it (!). Then most of this post will be setting up the answer with the crucial background information, which, as it turns out, the vast majority of casual Bible readers have never even thought of or heard. QUESTION; I’ve looked back through the archives, but I can’t find anything on Mark’s “Messianic secret”. It’s possible I simply missed it, but if you haven’t dealt with it before would you consider doing a post on the subject, please?! Particularly on why it’s no longer accepted by scholars. What is the Messianic Secret RESPONSE: The “messianic secret” is a term that over a century ago came to be applied to the Gospel of Mark to explain one of its most distinctive and puzzling features. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 3rd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Guest Post! Joel Marcus on His New Book on the John the Baptist

Many readers of the blog will already be familiar with my long-time friend and colleague from Duke, Joel Marcus, one of the top New Testament scholars in America (or anywhere else, for that matter). Joel and I have known each other for over thirty years -- since he started teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, soon after I finished my PhD there. He is especially well known for his massive and learned two-volume commentary on the Gospel of Mark for the Anchor Bible commentary series. Joel has now produced a full book on John the Baptist, both as he is portrayed in our Gospels (and Josephus) but also, of even more interest, as he can be reconstructed historically. What can we actually know about him? The book is the most authoritative account ever to appear, and will be the standard study for our generation. It is called John the Baptist in History and Theology. Joel has kindly agreed to post a summary of the book and its key findings (some of them gratifyingly controversial) for us here [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 1st, 2019|Book Discussions, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus|

If Jesus Wasn’t God, Was He Necessarily Either a Calloused Liar or a Raving Lunatic?

This is my my last of three blasts-from-the-pasts dealing with fundamentalist, or conservative evangelical, forms of Christianity, this time addressing the claims often made (first by C.S. Lewis, who was decidedly *NOT* a fundamentalist) that since Jesus called himself God, he either was a bald-faced liar, a raving lunatic, or the Lord of the universe. No other option. Or ... is there? - C.S. Lewis was the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Problem of Pain. QUESTION: Do you think Jesus was a great moral teacher? If you think this is the case would you mind blogging about it? Fundamentalist are using C.S Lewis approach in this matter. Apparently they are happier if people call Jesus a lunatic vs. a great moral teacher. RESPONSE: In my last post I indicated what I think about Jesus as a great moral teacher: yes he was one, but completely and irretrievably in an apocalyptic context that we no longer share with him. In a future post I may deal with the question of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:44-04:00January 22nd, 2019|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Was Jesus A Great Moral Teacher? A Blast From the Past

A few days ago, in response to a question, I reposted on the problem of fundamentalism; looking back on the blog some six years, I see that at about the same time another related question appeared. This involves fundamentalists who object to calling Jesus a "great moral teacher" since, for them, he is actually God himself. It will take two posts to reply to that view, first, in this one: was Jesus in fact a great moral teacher? The answer might seem obvious but, well, not so much. ****************************************************************** QUESTION: Do you think Jesus was a great moral teacher? If you think this is the case would you mind blogging about it? Fundamentalists are using C.S Lewis (the well-known author of Narnia and The Problem of Pain) approach in this matter. Apparently they are happier if people call Jesus a lunatic vs. a great moral teacher. RESPONSE: I think this question is going to require at least a couple of posts: one on Jesus as a moral teacher and one on the claim by [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:28-04:00January 21st, 2019|Historical Jesus|

Readers’ Mailbag 1/20/2019: The Only Story of Jesus as a Boy in the New Testament

Based on the feedback I’ve received on the blog this past week, I’ve decided to reinstate the weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I have actually continued responding to questions since abandoning the feature of the blog, but in a less formal way. Formalizing it seems like a popular option, and so I’ll try to do this once a week. I start this week with an interesting question about Jesus as a boy. QUESTION Outside the birth narratives, the only canonical story about the young Jesus is in Luke 2, although there are numerous childhood legends in the apocryphal gospels. Do you have any opinion, please, as to why this story of Jesus at twelve made it into Luke? RESPONSE Over the years I have found among readers of the Bible an almost endless fascination about the “missing” years of Jesus’ life. The narratives of our earliest and latest canonical Gospels, Mark and John, begin with Jesus as an adult associating with John the Baptism. In Matthew and Luke, we have the stories of his birth; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:28-04:00January 20th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Were There Other Virgin Births in Antiquity?

As happened four years ago when I made a series of posts on the virgin birth stories in the NT, this time too I've received queries about whether the idea of a virgin birth was a common motif in antiquity; some "popular" books out there claim that other alleged sons of God were born of virgins. Is that true? Well, I don't think so. Here is how I responded before. ********************************************************************************** I have devoted several posts to the issue of Jesus’ virgin birth, as recounted in Matthew and Luke. As I pointed out, there is no account of Jesus’ virgin birth in the Gospel of John, and it appears that the idea is actually argued *against* (implicitly) in the Gospel of Mark. Several readers have asked me (or told me) about the parallels to the virgin birth stories in pagan texts, where a son of God, or demi-god, or, well, some other rather amazing human being is said to have been born of a virgin. Aren’t the Christians simply borrowing a widely held [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:26-04:00December 30th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

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