Recent Posts
Foraging in the World of Jesus
I don’t recall hearing or reading anyone make the case that Jesus and his disciples survived during their time of itinerant ministry by foraging. But it’s an idea that makes a good bit of sense and there is some evidence for it in the Gospels. In this post I explain why it seems to make sense; I’ll deal with some of the evidence in the next post. Let me say I’ve only started thinking and reading about all this – so this is my first attempt to articulate my thoughts (at this point). In most developed countries today, [...]
Pro-Roman Jews in First-Century Palestine? Guest Post by Christopher Stanley
I am please to publish this guest post by Christopher Stanley, a scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity who enjoyed a long career at St. Bonaventure University (after receiving his PhD in NT at Duke!) The post deals with a topic most of us haven't thought about before. In the Jewish uprising against Rome that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE, were there *some* Jews who were actually opposed to the revolt and sympathized with the Romans? The answer may be surprising. This is a topic of Chris's recent research and a novel [...]
Did Jesus Have Wealthy Donors?
In my previous post I raised the question of how Jesus and his disciples supported themselves for a year or three (depending on which Gospel you read) when they were unemployed itinerates? One of the options (I'll get to two others in the posts that follow, so stay tuned) would be that they had wealthy donors, as explicitly indicated in one passage of the Gospels (that I'll discuss below), and intimated in other ways. But is it likely? To begin with, Jesus does seem to get invited to a lot of homes for dinner in the Gospels. It is difficult [...]
How Did Jesus and His Disciples Get Enough to Eat?
How did Jesus and his disciples support themselves? They left their families, homes, and jobs, to engage in a life of itineracy, preaching about the coming kingdom. But until it came, how did they survive? Specifically, how did they eat? I don’t recall ever seeing any extended discussion of the question in a scholarly (or a popular) book or article. If one of you has, let me know. It seems like an obvious question, and I suppose most people think there is an obvious answer. There may be (I can think of three), but it’s worth thinking about in greater [...]
The Execution of Pontius Pilate for Killing Jesus (!)
In my previous post I explained and provided a translation of the intriguing apocryphal letter that Pontius Pilate (allegedly) wrote to the Emperor Tiberius to explain why he had crucified the Son of God. Later, another Christian author wrote a fictional account of what happened next. Tiberius did not take kindly to Pilate's horrible crime and ... well, it ends up not going well for the governor of Judea. But on the upside ... he converts! Here is my introduction to the text and a fresh translation of it from the Greek, as found in the collection of apocryphal Gospels [...]
July 2026 Gold Q&A Announcement
Gold and Platinum Members, your next monthly Q&A is on the calendar. Bart will be answering your questions live on Saturday July 11th at 12pm Eastern. For July, we are continuing with the split format. Bart will spend the first half of our Zoom session answering your pre-submitted questions. Please email your questions to [email protected] no later than Thursday July 9th. For the second half of the hour, we’ll be opening things up to live attendee participation, giving you the opportunity to ask Bart questions in real time on a specific topic. For July, Bart has chosen: The Acts of the [...]
A Blog Dinner In Central London July 15. Wanna Come?
I’m in London for a bit just now, as is my summer wont, currently enjoying the heatwave (96 degrees without air conditioning!), as all you other London and thereabouts residents are! But this too shall pass. And so.... I would love to have a blog dinner in central London with anyone who can make it, hopefully in cooler conditions, on the evening of Wednesday July 15. Would you be interested? I’ll probably start around 6:00 or so for a pint with whomever is interested in quenching thirst before satisfying hunger, and then head over to dinner at 7:00 [...]
Did Pontius Pilate Write a Letter Explaining Why He Crucified Jesus?
I was recently asked about a letter allegedly written by Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius, explaining why he crucified the Son of God. Outside of academic circles, this apocryphal letter is not well known. For that matter, it's not well known even within academic circles. Most New Testament scholars don't know it exists. But it does! It is part of a group of texts that scholars (the ones who study these things) sometimes call the "Pilate Gospels." There are a number of these writings -- all of them legendary/apocryphal, of course. This particular letter is called the Anaphora Pilati (= The [...]
Jesus and the Gospel of John: Some Readers’ Good Questions
I've received some interesting and important questions involving the Gospel of John -- who actually wrote it and whether it's record of Jesus' claims to be divine are likely historical. Here are the questions an my attempts to answer QUESTION: I heard Mike Licona say the other day, that he seems to think Tertius wrote Romans in the same way a literate Greek-speaking secretary wrote the Gospel of John on behalf of John, the son of Zebedee. So strictly speaking, these are his words and the letter ought to be called, the Letter to the Romans according to Paul. [...]
How Do You Publish a Book for a General Audience?
In my previous post I talked about what it takes to write and publish a scholarly book. Most people who aren't scholars aren't thinking that way. They want to publish a book for a broader audience to get their ideas out there. How do you do that? These days it can be done relatively simply by self-publishing. I know almost nothing about how that works, other than that people do it all the time (more books get published that way than with trade-book publishers, I believe). But I can say something about what it takes to get a book published [...]
The Realities of Publishing a Scholarly Book
One of the emails I get *all* the time is from authors who have written a book, or hope to write a book, who want to know how they can get a publisher to take a look at it. The short answer: it ain’t easy. Often the inquiry comes from someone who wants to publish a book for scholars to convince them to take a different view on a matter of scholarly importance. How does a someone get a publisher to publish a book like that? People don't like to hear this, but if you don't already have scholarly credentials [...]
Memory of My Past: My First Girlfriend and Jesus
Some of you have probably had this same experience. Now that I'm 70, I'm thinking about my past a lot more than ... in the past. The other day I was thinking about my life in high school soon after I had become a born-again Christian (an incredibly ignorant born-again Christian). One incident quickly came to mind. Before I became a gung-ho Christian, my first serious girlfriend was Linda, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school. She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a [...]
Did Paul Have an Exalted View of Himself?
Yesterday one of my fellow-travelers on a trip I'm taking wanted to talk about Paul and his self-image, and whether Paul had a rather (or extremely) exalted view of his own importance. I gave him one of my standard answers, that I think it's impossible to engage in a psychological analysis of a person's self-image when they lived millennia ago (it's certainly hard enough when they share our time and culture and we've known them for years). But it is possible to know, sometimes, what a person actually thought about themselves on some level. And however we evaluate the psychological [...]
The Most Likely Capitalist Parable of Jesus?
Of all the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30; the same parable, with important differences, is the Parable of the Pounds in Luke 19:11-27), in my view, is the one most amenable to a capitalist interpretation – easily and often seen as an exhortation to invest one’s money to make money, at the highest possible rate. Even so, this, in my calculation (!), would be a serious misreading of the parable. It is indeed a parable that discusses money and investment at interest. But it is not about that at all. I’ll [...]
The Parable of the Sower as Advice for Capitalists
Is Jesus’ parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-9) best understood as providing (pre-)capitalist advice about how to think about monetary investments? Is it a divine guide for growing your portfolio? Is it instructing us to consider the market and plant our wealth where it is most likely to grow – thirty-fold, sixty-fold, one hundred-fold? There are certainly people today who have read it that way. If you’re a hard-core capitalist who sees everything in economic terms then it would make sense that this is how you think about the parable. (Understanding Jesus as the “greatest businessman who ever lived” has [...]
The Capitalist Parables of Jesus
Capitalist Parables of Jesus There is a lot of truth in Albert Schweitzer’s observation in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus (German original 1906), that scholars of every generation since the Enlightenment have portrayed Jesus “in their own image.” Thus Enlightenment-era “rationalists” who realized we do not need supernatural interventions to explain what happens in our world -- from lightening strikes and earthquakes to the healing of physical ailments or mental illnesses -- explained the amazing records of Jesus’ “miracles” as misunderstood natural events. And hopeful, positive, progressive liberals who thought Jesus, like modern folk, just [...]
Why Not Believe in a God Who is *Not* Active in the World?
Isn’t atheism an extreme position to take? If you (or, well, I) give up believe in the Christian God we were (I was) raised on, why give up on the idea of any god entirely? I’m on a trip giving lectures to a group of folks who, well, want to see Norway (!) but also want to discuss issues closely related to what we do on the Blog – questions about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, early Christianity, related topics in religion, and questions about religion in general. It’s a great group with people of a wide range of [...]
How To Figure Out If a Miracle Happened… Questions from Readers
More interesting questions for readers -- including issues connected with miracles... QUESTION: I have a question about the epistemological limits of historical inquiry—one that I have long wondered about without finding a clear answer. My understanding is that historians work with surviving evidence and attempt to reconstruct what most probably happened. Because historical method generally operates with methodological naturalism, events such as miracles—for example, the resurrection—appear either extremely improbable or methodologically excluded within historical analysis, at least methodologically speaking. If this is the case, theology (or faith) seems to operate on a different explanatory level, allowing [...]
More Criticisms of the Criticisms of the Gospel of John (by John! Spong)
Yesterday I wrote a post in which I began to discuss the recent Huffington Post article from 2103 by John Shelby Spong in which he discusses his then new book on John; the book is called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. Today I will finish out what I started to say yesterday. Let me say again that I long appreciated Spong’s work and was sympathetic to his mission. He was trying to do from inside the church something very similar to what I've long tried to do outside of it: help educated lay people outside the field [...]
Controversies About the Gospel of John: The Views of John Spong
Just how reliable is the Gospel of John? Is there *anything* in it that is historical? A radical view of John was presented by John Shelby Spong in one of his last books (he published some nineteen or so over the course of his long career.) In my previous post I gave a brief biographical notice about John Shelby Spong, in commemoration of his death in 2021 -- in case you don't know who he was. There aren't too many Christian scholars who are more skeptical of its historical value than I am: but he is one! Here is how [...]
Radical Skeptic (about the Bible) and Episcopal Bishop: John Spong
I'm with a group of travelers just now who are interested in critical approaches to the Bible (not views that are criticizing per se, but views that approach the Bible using historical methods -- "Biblical Criticism"). One of them - as usually happens - has asked me about the very popular writings of John Shelby Spong, who was an unusual figure in numerous ways, most famously because he was both highly skeptical about the reliability of the New Testament AND a long-time bishop in the Episcopal church. How does that work? Well, work it did. He had a deservedly huge [...]
Questions on Proving the Resurrection and Sundry Other Things
Readers have given me some tough nuts to crack: Problems with proving the resurrection and with knowing if books of the New Testament may have been scissored and pasted together. Here are intriguing and important questions I've received, with my attempts to answer them. QUESTION: When I first began to read Bart’s Blog, he was just pointing out textual errors. Now it seems he is trying to destroy Christianity. Christianity lives or dies by the resurrection. That is our hope. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have no hope. In those days, history and events were passed down [...]
These Are Weird Parables. Do They Make Sense?
There are passages of the New Testament that I’ve always found puzzling and have left it at that – not digging in deep in order to try to understand them. That may be kinda weird for a NT scholar, but it is just as common as it is weird. Some of these puzzlers involve the parables of Jesus. Recently I’ve decided to put in the brain work to figure them out, and I have – to my own satisfaction, at least. And hey, who else do I need to satisfy? Here are two examples. I have long thought neither [...]
Did the Doctrine of Predestination Lead to Capitalism?
In my previous post I gave a brief overview of the doctrine of predestination, especially as developed by the great 16th century Protestant Reformer John Calvin and his followers. I ended the post by indicating – surely this is a surprise for many people – that one of the most interesting and formative understandings of modern capitalism is that its has it can be traced back in its origins to Protestant views of predestination. How does that work exactly? The key text is Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (NY: Scribner, 1958; German [...]
Predestination! What do you think?
What do you think of the idea of predestination? That only those who have been predestined by God (from eternity past) can be saved: but not anyone else. The doctrine can be found or at least intimated (possibly: depending on how you interpret them) in a few – though not many – passages of the Bible. The following are three that seem the clearest (key words highlighted; these translations are from the NRSV ue): Romans 8 28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he [...]
Categories on the Blog
Click on a category for the full archive, arranged by date.
- Anniversary Post #3: My Response to an Ill-Tempered Richard Carrier April 12, 2026
- Anniversary Post #1: Defending Misquoting Jesus April 9, 2026
- Can We Trust You When You Say “Most Scholars” Think Something? May 3, 2025
- A Really Scathing Review of My Book on Suffering March 31, 2024
- Making the Gospels Say What You WANT Them To Say March 30, 2024
- Dealing With Reviews of My Books By People Who (Apparently) Haven’t Read Them March 28, 2024
- But Your Own Teacher Bruce Metzger Didn’t Think That! November 21, 2023
- Why Do Some (Many?) Scholars Not Treat the Bible Like Other Ancient Sources? August 26, 2023
- Anniversary Post #5: Why I Was Reluctant to Write The Triumph of Christianity April 15, 2026
- My Next Book: Creating the Bible — How We Got the Canon of the New Testament September 7, 2025
- Jesus as God in the New Testament October 24, 2024
- Oral Traditions and the Dates of Our Gospels October 23, 2024
- Suffering. Is It Really Worth Talking About? Doesn’t the Bible Give the Right Answer? October 20, 2024
- The Problem of Suffering? So What’s the Problem? October 17, 2024
- How Can We Imagine That God is Active in Our World? (A genuine, not rhetorical, question) October 16, 2024
- Hurricanes, Suffering, And My Loss of Faith October 15, 2024
- What Are the Chances? The Logic of “Intelligent Design” February 28, 2026
- Pubs and Churches on Christmas Eve December 24, 2025
- Reflecting on the Christmas Tree and Faith December 23, 2025
- My Birdbrain View of Agnosticism December 11, 2025
- Am I? AI? What do you think? August 9, 2025
- Should We Keep “Slaves” in the New Testament? July 6, 2025
- How Athens Made Me Rethink…. May 20, 2025
- Two Fundamental Questions: How Do You Date a Manuscript and How Do you Know the Meaning of a Word? April 2, 2025
- Does the Book of Hebrews Indicate Jesus Ever Came To Earth? A Response to Richard Carrier. July 26, 2025
- Did Jesus Exist? Why I Don’t Enjoy Reading the Mythicists July 12, 2025
- More About My Book “Did Jesus Exist” September 25, 2024
- My Book “Did Jesus Exist” (an answer to the mythicists) September 24, 2024
- Nazareth in the Time of Jesus: the Archaeological Record December 27, 2023
- Did Nazareth Even Exist? December 21, 2023
- Would I Be Personally Upset if the Mythicists Were Right (That Jesus Never Existed)? October 8, 2022
- Richard Carrier: A Fuller Reply to His Criticisms, Beliefs, and Claims about Jesus April 25, 2022
- Pro-Roman Jews in First-Century Palestine? Guest Post by Christopher Stanley July 1, 2026
- The Execution of Pontius Pilate for Killing Jesus (!) June 27, 2026
- July 2026 Gold Q&A Announcement June 26, 2026
- A Blog Dinner In Central London July 15. Wanna Come? June 26, 2026
- Did Pontius Pilate Write a Letter Explaining Why He Crucified Jesus? June 25, 2026
- How Do You Publish a Book for a General Audience? June 23, 2026
- The Realities of Publishing a Scholarly Book June 21, 2026
- Memory of My Past: My First Girlfriend and Jesus June 20, 2026
- Jesus and the Gospel of John: Some Readers’ Good Questions June 24, 2026
- The Parable of the Sower as Advice for Capitalists June 16, 2026
- The Capitalist Parables of Jesus June 14, 2026
- More Criticisms of the Criticisms of the Gospel of John (by John! Spong) June 10, 2026
- Controversies About the Gospel of John: The Views of John Spong June 9, 2026
- These Are Weird Parables. Do They Make Sense? June 4, 2026
- Some Important Readers’ Questions on Some Gospel Head-Scratchers May 12, 2026
- Anniversary Post #8: When Is a Contradiction Not a Contradiction? April 21, 2026
- Eyewitness Accounts of Miracles March 14, 2026
- A New Proof of the Resurrection. What Do YOU Think? March 10, 2026
- Fundamentalist Apologists, Christian and Mythicist July 13, 2025
- More on the Initial Debacle on First-Century Mark (in relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls) July 20, 2024
- The Debacle Over the First-Century Copy of Mark July 18, 2024
- Toe-to-Toe with Evangelical New Testament Scholar Peter Williams: Can We Trust the Gospels? June 19, 2024
- A High-level Intellectual with an Infuriating “Solution” to Why There is Suffering May 7, 2024
- A Self-Evaluation of My Self-Debate: Is the Book of Acts Historically Reliable? March 24, 2024
- A Common But Lousy Argument That We KNOW What the NT Originally Said: Anniversary Post #14 May 5, 2026
- Anniversary Post #9: Misquoting Misquoting Jesus April 25, 2026
- Anniversary Post #1: Defending Misquoting Jesus April 9, 2026
- Has Luke Gotten Rid of the Idea That Jesus Died for Your Sins? February 19, 2026
- The Controversy Over Jesus’ Last Supper in Luke (Did He Speak of Dying “For you”?) February 18, 2026
- The Weird Textual Variant of 1 John 4:3: False Teachers Who “Loose” Jesus? September 16, 2025
- Interpolations and Textual Variants in the New Testament April 17, 2025
- Two Fundamental Questions: How Do You Date a Manuscript and How Do you Know the Meaning of a Word? April 2, 2025
- How To Figure Out If a Miracle Happened… Questions from Readers June 11, 2026
- Questions on Proving the Resurrection and Sundry Other Things June 6, 2026
- Doesn’t Goodness Point to the Existence of God? And Gospel Perplexities. Good Readers’ Questions May 31, 2026
- Different Words, VERY Different Theologies, and Understanding Which Words They Were. Readers’ Questions April 23, 2026
- Understanding the Gospels, Jesus, and the Spread of Christianity: Great Readers’ Questions April 5, 2026
- Readers’ Questions on the Accuracy of the Gospels March 25, 2026
- Paul’s Lost Letters March 17, 2026
- Interesting Questions from Readers (Including on the Consistency of Mark and the Reality of Suffering) February 26, 2026
- Unpacking 1 Enoch, the Apocryphal Writing Quoted by Jude October 1, 2025
- 1 Enoch: The Scripture Quoted by Jude September 30, 2025
- Why Wasn’t Peter’s Apocalypse Included in the New Testament? September 9, 2025
- The Transformation of Paul’s Teaching: The Apocalypse of Paul July 15, 2025
- Paul’s Vision of Heaven and Hell July 10, 2025
- What About People Who Come Back From the Dead in the Hebrew Bible? April 17, 2024
- More on Sheol: Was it an Actual Place? April 16, 2024
- What Is Sheol in the Hebrew Bible? April 14, 2024
