Jesus believed that destruction was coming for some people, and salvation for others. So did the author of Revelation. So what’s the difference? Big difference. In modern terms, Jesus' views of who would be saved were non-discriminatory. That is, they were not based on who [...]
I want to continue my discussion of the virgin birth in the NT, with a set of reflections that is pretty unusual: the views of the Virgin Birth in Mark and John (who do not narrate it!). I've talked about this on the blog before, [...]
We are moving beyond the Christmas season, but I did think it would be worthwhile responding to a couple of queries I've received about the stories of Jesus' virgin birth -- found only in Matthew and Luke. What did Mark think about it? Here, in [...]
Yesterday I answered a question about whether some of the discrepancies in Luke-Acts are due to the author having used a variety of sources that had different views. The blog member who asked the question also wanted to know if this happened in other books [...]
For the first time in forever I am teaching a new course -- one I've never taught before -- at UNC, a class for classics students (and others who already know Greek) on the Greek New Testament. It is obviously a very small class (6 [...]
I am set now to return to my thread on the changes in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament that were made in order to make the text more amenable to the theological agenda of orthodox scribes and to help prevent their use by [...]
I started this mini-thread by mentioning one of the now-lost documents of early Christianity that I would love to have discovered, the alleged “Signs Source” of the Gospel of John. Before giving the evidence that there may have been some such source, I went off [...]
It is interesting that our first canonical Gospel (which is our first Gospel, whether canonical or noncanonical), Mark, does not have the story of the Virgin birth and in fact shows no clue that it is familiar with the stories of the Virgin birth. On [...]
I have been posting some of the new “boxes” that will appear in the sixth edition of my textbook. These boxes are meant either to raise interesting historical issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion or to broach complex issues without easy solution [...]