Was Christianity ultimately good for the world or bad? In the previous post I began to sum up the significance of my study of Jesus’s influence on our modern sense of morality; I ended by talking about how Christianity is often attacked for all the harm it has done, for example in pogroms against Jews leading to the Holocaust, the Crusades and the ongoing hatred of Muslims, the Inquisition – torturing people to death for believing the wrong things.  In addition to these major historical events, one also has to consider how it is that many Christians today advocate radical nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, the slaughter of civilians, and the burning of the planet—all claiming Christ is on their side. When other Christians say these views and actions are not “Christian,” I readily agree they are not consistent with the teachings of Jesus.  But they certainly are “Christian” – done by self-professed followers of Jesus often in his name. I pick up here by looking at the positive side, in one of those [...]

In my previous post I gave a taste of my new book Love They Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, by giving its Introduction.  I now give its Conclusion, which tries to explain why it matters, or should matter, in my view, for understanding the significance of Christianity to our world together, for both those of us who are Christians and those of us who are not.  This will take two posts: ****************************** Conclusion Altruism in the Conscience of the West The only time anyone in my family could remember hearing my devout grandfather use foul language was in August 1935, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. The act changed how the country dealt with those who needed assistance by providing federal aid to Americans in need: unemployment and health insurance, retirement benefits for the elderly, financial assistance for widows with children, support for the disabled. The benefits were funded through taxes: those with sufficient means would funnel some of their hard-earned [...]

My book, Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, is coming out this week (March 24) with Simon & Schuster.   You can get it most anywhere you get your books. I have started doing "book events" for it, where I explain it and read a few portions of it for 20-25 minutes or so before taking questions.  I decided that the best approach would be to read the beginning and end, while summarizing the far more extensive middle in my own words on the spot. And I thought blog readers would like to see what the beginning and end would look like, in case they're interested in seeing what lies in between in the book itself.   This will take three posts.  The first is the Introduction to the book (here below).  I did publish a similar post a couple of years ago, but I added some bits and edited it for the published version.  Here it is: ****************************** Introduction Strange(r) Altruism Most people I know are moved [...]

Next in this nutshell series on the Apostolic Fathers is one of the least known and studied/discussed, even among scholars, even though it is interesting and significant.  Among other things, it is the only “apologetic” work of the Apostolic Fathers outside of that one fragment of Quadratus (I blogged about earlier, if you want to look it up, and therefore one of the earliest Christian apologies known to exist--there are not any in the New Testament).  What I say here is based on what say about it in my edition in The Apostolic Fathers Vol II, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 2004), My favorite bits of this are at the end. What It Is and About The Epistle to Diognetus is one of the true literary gems of early Christianity.  It was first included among the works of the Apostolic Fathers by the eighteenth-century scholar Gallandi, who argued that it was written by none other than Apollos, the acquaintance of Paul mentioned in Acts and 1 Corinthians.  This view never gained wide [...]

Here are some of the intriguing questions I have recently received from readers, on Jesus' view of the law, the intriguing apocryphal Gospel about his father Joseph,  Christ's divine and human nature, and other things! QUESTION: Do you think Jesus taught complete pacifism in response to violence and a less legalistic form of Judaism? RESPONSE: I think he was a committed pacificist, yes.  And he certainly thought that the laws of Torah were to be observed -- they were what God commands.  But as with other Jewish teachers, he knew that sometimes a situation would arise in which someone would be forced to violate one law or the other because they espoused different principles of behavior that were at odds.  For example, if you were supposed not to work on the Sabbath but someone needed help that might entail “work” then you could break one law to keep the other.  In those cases Jesus thought that the "greater" laws (e.g. of love of neighbor and caring for those in need) were to take [...]

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was going into the debate on Jesus’s resurrection with Jonathan Sheffield last week (March 2; you can see it on Youtube).  I suspected that since he works in the legal field (I’m not sure in what capacity), he would probably be mounting a kind of “court case,” marshaling proof that Jesus had been raised from the dead that would be compelling to a fair-minded jury today. I was completely wrong about that.  As I indicated in my previous post, Jonathan went a different and rather unexpected direction. But because I suspected a “legal” approach, it did make me think in legal terms about the the “evidence” that apologists often produce to demonstrate the truth of the resurrection, on purely historical (not religious or theological) grounds. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it that way before, and it was interesting to give it a try.  In my head I came up with a comparable (hypothetical) modern legal case (thinking Jonathan would be appealing to [...]

How influential, actually, was Paul in his day?  And how much of what we read about him (and allegedly by him) in the New Testament is accurate and how much is slanted in one way or the other.  Indeed, how about later times?  How was he (mis)remembered? Just now I am in the process of preparing the third edition of my college textbook on the entire Bible -- Genesis to Revelation, including the “Old Testament Apocrypha.  I have asked Joel Baden of Yale University to co-edit it with me; he’s taking care of the Hebrew Bible parts and I the New Testament. That means I need to read through the whole thing again, of course, and, frankly, it is not generally exciting reading your own prose from some years ago.  BUT, pleasure does come from reading bits that you think are especially interesting, and I had that experience this morning, and thought I could share it with y’all here on the blog. It’s part of the introduction to ch. 24, on the [...]

In my previous two posts I showed why Papias is not a reliable source when it comes to the authorship of Matthew and Mark.   If you haven’t read those posts and are personally inclined to think that his testimony about Matthew and Mark are accurate, I suggest you read them (the posts) before reading this one. In this post I want to argue that what he actually says about Matthew and Mark is not true of our Matthew and Mark, and so either he is talking about *other* Gospels that he knows about (or has heard about) called Matthew and Mark, that do not correspond to our Matthew and Mark, or he simply is wrong. I’ll reverse the order in which his comments are given, and deal with Matthew first. In the quotation of the fourth century historian Eusebius, we read this:  And this is what [Papias] says about Matthew: “And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [Or: translated] them to the best of his ability.” [...]

In my previous post I stressed that, contrary to what you sometimes may have heard or possibly will hear, Papias is not a direct witness to what the apostles of Jesus were saying.  That is an important point because Papias gives a testimony that is often taken as hard proof that the second Gospel of the NT was written by Mark, the companion of Peter, and that the first Gospel was really and truly written by Matthew, the disciple of Jesus.  If these claims were right, they would be highly significant.  Matthew would have been written by someone who was there to see these things happen; and Mark’s account would be based on arguably the most important witness to Jesus’ life.. Here is what Papias says. Remember, when he indicates what “the elder” says, he is indicating what he has learned from a person who was allegedly “companion” of the elder; the elder was someone who allegedly knew the apostles.  And this is what the elder used to say, When Mark was [...]

In my previous post I gave a short introduction to Papias, one of the Apostolic Fathers, and the one -- oddly enough (since we don't have any of his writings, just some quotations of them) -- that has garnered the most attention among New Testament scholars over the past some decades.  Especially those interested in the question of who wrote our Gospels. More than anything, biblical scholars have latched onto Papias because it is widely thought that he provides direct evidence that the Gospel of Matthew really was written by Matthew, and the Gospel of Mark was really written by Mark. I’ll be dealing with the evidence from Papias on both matters in subsequent posts.   What is even more remarkable is that some conservative scholars have actually argued that Papias gives us evidence about Luke and John, even though in none of the surviving fragments does Papias so much as *mention* Luke and John!!   Scholars can be amazingly inventive sometimes….. Before discussing what Papias says about the two Gospel-writers that he does actually [...]

As many of you know, my new book, Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, will be published on March 24th. I have spent the last few years immersed in researching a profound shift that occurred in antiquity. In the Greco-Roman world, ethical obligations were largely confined to one's family, friends, and local community. The idea that you had a moral duty to help those in need who were not part of your family or circle of friends or potential friends, regardless of ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, or anything else, was simply not on the radar screen. That changed with the teachings of Jesus and the subsequent spread of the early Christian movement, which introduced to the world the revolutionary concept that everyone, regardless of their origin or status, is deserving of care, compassion, medical attention, and the resources to survive.. To celebrate the release of this book, I wanted to do something that takes this historical concept and puts it into immediate, tangible practice. Today, we [...]