One of my classes this semester is a First Year Seminar, designed, obviously for students in their first year of college (either semester) and meant to be a bit more hands-on and with an unusual creative component.  I’ve mentioned the course on the blog in previous years; it is called “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.”   (The creative element: for a final writing project they have to write a Gospel.) In preparation for the second meeting of the semester this time I asked the students to reflect on what they thought would be the difference between studying religion – and especially the New Testament and the historical Jesus – in a faith context such as a church, synagogue, or Sunday School, and in a secular research university funded in part by the state. It led to an interesting discussion and the students had good ideas.  Most of the comments were along similar lines, that there must be a difference between discussing biblical writings in light of your faith / personal beliefs and studying them as historical [...]

In case you're interested: here is the post I made a while back about the course I'll be starting tomorrow. *********************** I am pleased to announce that I will be doing a six-lecture online (recorded) course called: “In the Beginning:  History, Legend and Myth in the Pentateuch.  Part 1.  The Book of Genesis.”   This will not be in connection with the blog per se, but there is an important connection worth noting for blog members (see below). The plan is to make this course the first installment of a rather long series of courses that I am calling, “How Scholars Read the Bible.”  (The next six-lecture course – no surprise! – will be the rest of the Pentateuch after Genesis).  Each lecture in this course, and the ones that follow, will be thirty minutes of length. We will later be announcing the release date of the course (it will probably in February).   But I want to let you know about it now, so that it can be on your radar screen.  And because there is [...]

Jewish apocalypticism was a very common view in Jesus’ day – it was the view of the Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the Pharisees, of John the Baptist, later of the Apostle Paul – and almost certainly of Jesus.  I can demonstrate that in some later thread if it seems appropriate.  For now, let me just say that this is a widely held view among critical scholars – by far the majority view for over a century, since the writings of Albert Schweitzer, author of The Quest of the Historical Jesus  What did early Jewish apocalypticists believe?  Let me break it down into four component themes.  I have Join the blog and you can get five posts a week like this, giving information that can help you understand the New Testament and the historical Jesus!    Click here for membership options   drawn this discussion from my textbook on the New Testament.   Dualism Jewish apocalypticists were dualists.  That is to say, they maintained that there were two fundamental components to all [...]

Just a reminder in case you haven't signed up yet:  I'll be doing a book event Thursday evening (Jan 27).  Here's the announcement from last week.  I hope you can make it! ****************************** I am excited to announce a new and unusual fund raiser for the blog, to take place on Thursday January 27 at 7:30 pm EST.  For anyone who is willing to make a donation, I will be holding a discussion on: “What Book Should I Write Next?”   Those who come will be able to talk it over with me and give me their opinions. Here’s the deal.  I have all but finished my book on Revelation: Expecting Armageddon: What Revelation Really Reveals.  I have just a couple of mop-up exercises, then it’s off to the publisher.  And now I have to decide what to do next. This is the first time in my adult life, since 1983, that I did not have the next writing project lined up, in my head, ready to be started, after finishing the current one.  For some [...]

In order to understand the difference between what the prophets of the Hebrew Bible proclaimed, and what came to be the views of apocalyptic Jews, I need to sketch a set of historical events that the people of Israel had to live through.  Without this kind of historical knowledge, you simply will not understand ancient Judaism at the time of Jesus.  That is to say, you really have to know what happened among ancient Jews in order to make sense of what their theological beliefs were, since these beliefs were molded by and informed by nothing so much as the historical context out of which they emerged. And so here is a very brief sketch 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 [...]

I am excited to announce a new and unusual fund raiser for the blog, to take place on Thursday January 27 at 7:30 pm EST.  For anyone who is willing to make a donation, I will be holding a discussion on: “What Book Should I Write Next?”   Those who come will be able to talk it over with me and give me their opinions. Here’s the deal.  I have all but finished my book on Revelation: Expecting Armageddon: What Revelation Really Reveals.  I have just a couple of mop-up exercises, then it’s off to the publisher.  And now I have to decide what to do next. This is the first time in my adult life, since 1983, that I did not have the next writing project lined up, in my head, ready to be started, after finishing the current one.  For some time now, while in the throes of the last two books, I thought that I simply would stop now.  The past couple of years have been a bit hellacious for the ole' work [...]

On December 20 I had a very interesting interview on the Podcast called Blogging Theology (Blogging Theology – Exploring Life, the Universe and Everything with a former Christian, now Muslim Paul Williams, who, as it turns out, is highly knowledgeable about the Bible, early Christianity, and the scholarship connected with them..  This is the kind of interview I really enjoy: an astute questioner with the right queries that get to the heart of important issues. Here it is.  I hope you enjoy it!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeZrdgxi9bY    

As you know, Platinum members of the blog are allowed to submit posts for other Platinum members, and other members vote on which of them should be provided to the blog as a whole (It's a nice perk. You should think about moving up to Platinum.  There are other perks too--one, of course, is that you are contributing a larger amount to the charities we support!)   The most recent winner is this intriguing post by Dan Kohanski, about why most Jews had no interest in joining the Jesus movement. Dan will be happy to respond to your comments and questions. ****************************** Why did only a fraction of one percent of all Jews in the empire or even in Judaea ever believe in the message of the Jesus Movement?[1] The answer starts with that message itself. The first members of the Movement were all Jews themselves, saw themselves as Jews, and argued that Jewish traditions and beliefs inevitably led to their version of Judaism. However, the way they used those traditions and beliefs to solve the [...]

I am pleased to announce that I will be doing a six-lecture online (recorded) course called: “In the Beginning:  History, Legend and Myth in the Pentateuch.  Part 1.  The Book of Genesis.”   This will not be in connection with the blog per se, but there is an important connection worth noting for blog members (see below). The plan is to make this course the first installment of a rather long series of courses that I am calling, “How Scholars Read the Bible.”  (The next six-lecture course – no surprise! – will be the rest of the Pentateuch after Genesis).  Each lecture in this course, and the ones that follow, will be thirty minutes of length. We will later be announcing the release date of the course (it will probably in February).   But I want to let you know about it now, so that it can be on your radar screen.  And because there is a special opportunity connected to it.  I will be delivering the lectures to a live audience (remotely), and anyone who purchases [...]

I have finished a draft of my book on Revelation and am now having readers take a look at it, both layreaders and experts.  Once I get their comments back I'll make revisions and then get it sent out to the publisher; the plan is to have it published in the spring of 2022. I may change all this, but here is how at this point I'm planning to start the book, in ch. 1. ****************************** I was expecting a good deal of culture shock when I moved to North Carolina in 1988.  I had spent ten years in New Jersey, four of them teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.  It was a position I loved: teaching New Testament to students who were curious but not, as a rule, particularly invested in the subject before taking the class. Most of my students there were Roman Catholic, at least nominally; others were Jewish or completely secular.  Not many were Bible-reading evangelicals.  I was pretty sure things would be different in the south.  The University of [...]

Here we are at the end of the year.  What a year.  We thought we would see the end of the pandemic and the good times would roll.  Well, not exactly.  They sure seemed about to roll but, nope, just when we thought the thing was ending … hello Omicron!   I hope you have come through it OK so far, and that you can keep safe as we move forward. Not for all, but for some there have been bright spots through the darkness, and we should certainly celebrate them.  It’s been a very good year for the blog – the best ever – and so that part’s good.  We started this blog venture in April of 2012, so this is the conclusion of the ninth calendar year.  We now head into year 10!  Who woulda thought?  Certainly not me…. As you know, I have had two goals for the blog from Day 1, and have never wavered on them. I’d say we’ve done unusually well this year in achieving our goals for the blog, [...]

We've been doing short stories in this thread, and now I will introduce two more.  These are from the "Apocrypha."  This is the term that Protestants use for a group of Jewish books not in the Hebrew Bible that are, however, accepted by both Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians as having a secondary canonical status.  In these denominations, therefore, they are called "Deuterocanonical Books." There are some terrific narratives among these books.  Here I describe two of the best known, Tobit and Judith, again from my textbook on the Bible. ****************************** Tobit Tobit is a work of historical fiction—by which I mean it is a fictional tale set within a real historical context. Originally the book was written in Aramaic, either in the late third century B.C.E. or the early second. The narrative is set in the eighth century B.C.E. in the city of Nineveh, where the hero of the story, Tobit, has been exiled from his town in Galilee during the conquests of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. In other words, the account is [...]

Here now is my second post on that intriguing little article by Louis Markos in the journal First Things, which he entitled “Errant Ehrman.”   If you’ll recall from my last post, Markos starts the article by indicating that he felt “great pity” for me because I was the wrong kind of fundamentalist back when I was a conservative Christian.  My problem, he indicates, is that I applied modern standards to decide whether the Bible was inerrant.  Here are his words: He [Ehrman] was taught, rightly, that there are no contradictions in the Bible, but he was trained, quite falsely, to interpret the non-contradictory nature of the Bible in modern, scientific, post-Enlightenment terms. That is to say, he was encouraged to test the truth of the Bible against a verification system that has only existed for some 250 years….. And so, as I pointed out last time, the right kind of true believer is obviously one who does not “test the truth of the Bible” by modern standards using modern criteria, but only by pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment [...]