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Were Jesus and Christ Two Different Beings?
As we have seen, the New Testament in places seems to indicate that of Christ was a human being who, in some sense, had been adopted by God and so made into the Son of God, a divine being. There were groups of Christians who continued to believe that for centuries. (Some still do!) Others had an opposite view, that Christ was completely God, so much so that he was not actually ever a full flesh-and-blood human being. There were lots of variations within these views, and there were other views as well, including one I call “separationism.” A separationist view is especially prominent among certain groups of early Christian Gnostics. (For a basic introduction to what Gnostics were all about, check out the lecture in the previous post OR do a word search for “Gnosticism” on the blog). Here is what I say about separationist Christologies view in my book How Jesus Became God, using as an example one of the most fascinating Gnostic writings to come down to us from antiquity, The Coptic […]
March 31, 2021
Fantastic Story. But History? Some Doubts about the Triumphal Entry
In my previous post I provided an excerpt from Jesus Before the Gospels where I summarized the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry.” Here is the second part of that two-part post, another excerpt, where I call this tradition into question, arguing that it cannot be right historically and that it must, therefore, represent a distorted memory. “Memory,” of course, is not simply a recollection of what we ourselves experienced (what you had for dinner last night; the name of your first-grade teacher; etc.). Memory involves anything that you “call back to mind” (the literal meaning of “remembering”). It can be factual information (what is the capital of France?), even of something you haven’t experienced (e.g., if you have never been to Paris); it can be a shared understanding of a person from the past (Einstein; Karl Marx), even if you never met them. And it can be a recollection of a past event even if you were not involved, such as the Triumphal Entry, to pick one example out of countless trillions. Christians […]
March 28, 2021
Two Live Lectures, Sunday March 21: The Death of Jesus and the Life of Paul.
This Sunday, March 21, I will be giving TWO live Zoom lectures for anyone who wants to come. They will be recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament and there will be a 30-minute Q & A to follow the second one. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a donation to the blog in exchange, if you can see your way clear to do it. If not, that’s fine – we all have our circumstances! But one of the main reasons I’m doing these lectures is to raise money for the Food Bank of North Carolina; as with all food banks right now, it is in desperate need. Your donation is completely tax deductible. To make a donation now, go to the blog home page and scroll to the bottom to find the blue “One-time Donation” button. Here is the info you need: Time: Sunday, March 14, 2:00 pm and 3:15 pm (EST) The Lectures will last about 50 minutes, with Q&A to follow the second. First […]
March 17, 2021
A Probing Interview on “When Belief Dies Podcast”
One of the readers for the audio versions of my daily blog posts is Sam Devis, who also runs a podcast called “When Belief Dies,” dealing with lots of intriguing issues connected with “faith, religion, and life.” Check out the podcast site (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-belief-dies/id1516058806) ; he’s had some terrific guests on, and is an extremely thoughtful interviewer. Sam asked me to do an interview, and I thought that the questions and issues were particularly penetrating. See what you think. Here it is.
April 1, 2021
When Belief Dies Guest Post by Sam Devis!
My previous post was an interview with Sam Devis for his podcast “When Belief Dies.” Sam is an active volunteer on the blog and has an interesting background. I thought it would be interesting to have him write up an explanation of why he does this podcast, where it comes from, and how he personally relates to it. As you can no doubt guess, he is indeed one for whom belief has died. Here is what he has to say: Sam Devis: When Belief Dies Bart has asked me to share a bit of my story in the hope that it casts a useful light on what I post on my blog, and why I started my podcast ‘When Belief Dies’. Essentially, I want to have honest conversations on faith, religion, and life. It kind of seems ironic to me that I am going to do this, as I am not sure I know ‘who I am’ most of the time. I will do my best to tell my story well. I was raised in […]
April 6, 2021
What Is Gnosticism? A Video Introduction
I am in the midst of a thread describing different views of Christ found among early Christian groups of the second century: some Christians thought Jesus was human but not divine; others that he was divine but not human; others (the side that ended up winning the debates) that he was somehow both (that may seem common sense today, but it did not to many of Jesus’ followers in the second century!). I haven’t begun yet to describe how that final view came about, and before doing so I need to explain a view different from all of these, one that maintained that Jesus Christ was actually *two* beings: one human and the other divine — distinct from one another, but temporarily united for Jesus’ ministry. It’s unusual, and not a view you find in a lot of pews these days. To make sense of how the view worked and why people held it, I have to put it in a broader context. There were a number of Christian groups who held the view, most […]
March 30, 2021
The Importance of What Is Lost: Paul’s Letters
In a previous post I began to answer the question of which lost books of early Christianity I would most like to have discovered, and I started my answer with the earliest writings of which we are familiar, the letters of Paul, most of which (presumably) have been lost. I would love for us to find some of them. I doubt if we ever will, but who knows? Maybe someone will announce that one is to be published later this year! Seriously, we would all love to have more letters from Paul, and not merely for sentimental reasons (Oh, wouldn’t that be *nice*?). Paul is without a doubt the most important figure in the Christian tradition next to Jesus himself. His writings have served as a basis for Christian ethical and theological thought for centuries. And yet we know so little about what he thought and taught. When people read Paul’s letters, they frequently neglect to realize that these are all “occasional” writings. By that I do not mean that Paul occasionally wrote letters, but […]
April 7, 2021
Are God and Christ the SAME Person?
In this thread on where the Trinity came from, I have been focusing on early Christology – the understandings of who Christ was. My reason for that is simple. The issue of the Trinity arose only because Christians said more than one being was God but that there was only one God. The “other” being at the outset, of course, was Christ. After his death his followers called him God. The Trinity doctrine, as I will now start to explain in greater detail, emerged by the problems that then arose: two beings who are God, but only one God. I will be getting to the Spirit later, but frankly there is not as much to say there. First I need to keep going on the idea of Jesus being God and God being God. The question that naturally arose among the Christians was how that could be the case: how could *BOTH* of them be God? In what sense? That’s an issue I dealt with in my book How Jesus Became God. Here I’ll provide some of […]
April 8, 2021
How The Afterlife Changed After Jesus’ Life
Easter celebrates the greatest irony of the Christian religion: those who worship Jesus do not believe what he taught but what his followers taught about him after his death. That is especially true about one key question the Christian faith addresses: what does it mean to be saved after we die? Around the world today, billions of Christians believe that Jesus died and then on Easter, was raised from the dead and taken up to heaven to live with God. As a corollary, they believe that when they die, they too will go to live with God. That is not at all what Jesus thought. Jesus did not believe a person’s soul would live on after death, either to experience bliss in the presence of God above, or to be tormented for sins in the fires of hell below. Jesus did not believe the soul would go anywhere after death. As a Jew of the first century he did not think the soul could exist outside the body. Christians two thousand years later do not […]
April 3, 2021
How Can the Father and the Son Be the SAME? Can Your Father Also Be Your Son?
In my previous post I summarized the view that God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit were actually one and the same – that they were three ways of God relating to the creation and the people who inhabit it – just as I am only one person but am both a father and a son and a brother, depending on whom I am relating to. That view has been given various names among historians of theology; here I am calling it “modalist” – God is one person who has three different modes of existence and ways of relating. Here I continue by discussing how the view came to be attacked by others. Again, this is based on the fuller discussion in my book How Jesus Became God. The attackers were fighting an uphill battle. As we have seen that the view was widely accepted at the end of the second and beginning of the third, even though it came to be rejected as a heresy. Two of the main opponents […]
April 10, 2021
The Earliest Views of the Trinity (Long after the New Testament)
In the previous post we saw how two important church fathers attacked the “modalist” view of the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, which claimed they were *one* person who relates to creation and humans in three different ways, with three modes of existence. God is both the Father of the Son and the Son of the Father. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the song, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” (If not, look it up; it’s a scream.) As in the song, it gets confusing. This modalist view came to be rejected by the likes of Hippolytus of Rome and Tertullian of Carthage. But what did they put in its place? How did *they* understand the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, if they wanted to insist that all three were God but there was only one God? Enter the doctrine of the Trinity. These relatively early thinkers did not have the fully developed view of the Trinity that came later, as we will see. But […]
April 11, 2021
Quotations of Non-Canonical Writings in the New Testament: Platinum Post by Douglas Wadeson
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Tags: Platinum
March 24, 2021
Was Marcion a Gnostic?
A number of readers have asked the same question based on my posts on Marcion: Was Marcion a Gnostic? Here’s one reader’s way of asking it, and my response. QUESTION: Marcion’s “previously unknown God” of Jesus vs Israel’s creator sounds a bit like some of the gnostic beliefs, particularly Jesus coming from the realm of Barbelo in the gospel of Judas. Was Marion an early Christian Gnostic? RESPONSE: Marcion was sometimes considered a Gnostic by ancient heresiologists (“heresy-hunters”), such as Irenaeus; and in modern times scholars used to consider him a Gnostic, or at least Gnostic-like. And one can see why. Like Gnostics, Marcion had more than one God, the Creator was not good, and part of the goal of the religion was to escape his clutches. But there are a lot more differences than similarities between them; the differences are so numerous and deep, that scholars simply don’t think of Marcion as a Gnostic these days. Was Marcion a Gnostic? I won’t review Marcion’s teachings at length here: for more information see these earlier […]
April 13, 2021
Is Jesus Yahweh?
Increasingly over the past couple of years I have heard people say that Christians think that Jesus is Yahweh. I suppose some do (in fact I’ve come to learn that some absolutely do). But I don’t think that’s what Christians have typically though over the years/centuries. I’ll be devoting two posts to the matter. First some background. In the Hebrew Bible, there are various ways authors refer to God, just as people today speaking English might say God, the Almighty, the Creator, The Sovereign of all, The Lord God Almighty, or if you’re into 60s and 70s theology, the Ultimate Ground of our being – all to refer to the same divine entity. In Hebrew the basic term for “God” is “El” or “Elohim.” The latter is the plural and is the much more common term. It is much debated why the plural is used; no Jewish or critical Christian scholar, I should stress, thinks that it is because ancient Israelites thought of God as a trinity. More likely it is a plural of majesty, elevating […]
April 15, 2021
Nope Jesus is Not Yahweh
In my last post, I pointed out that some conservative evangelical Christians (maybe others? These are the ones I know about) claim that Jesus, in the Bible, is actually to be understood as Yahweh. Jesus is not Yahweh, and in this post, I want to explain why. Again, if someone knows better than I do, let me know. But I’ve never even heard the claim (let alone a discussion of it) until very recently. I wonder if there are any early Christian theologians who have this view. Or even later ones, prior to recent times? It is not the view of traditional Christian theology, at least as I learned it once upon a time. It was certainly not the view of the earliest Christians and is not a view set forth in the Bible. The Bible, of course, does not have the Trinity, but when Christianity formulated the doctrine of the trinity, the Father was Yahweh, and Christ was his son. At least that’s what Christians who read their Old Testament said. Of course, the […]
April 17, 2021
Could Jesus Read?
Here’s a question I have gotten repeatedly over the years: Could Jesus read? I received a form of the question in a comment recently: QUESTION: My question is: Could Jesus read? I thought I had read in your books or heard in one of your videos that you thought he, along with his immediate followers, were illiterate. But recently in one of your Sunday lectures you either stated or implied that he could actually read, and at least some of the instances in the gospels where he was reading from “the scrolls” were likely true. Please straighten me out on this topic. RESPONSE: I’ll begin with something that I’ve talked about on the blog several times before literacy in Roman Palestine. The reality is that the vast majority of people then and there could not read or write. This comes as a surprise to many people who have heard the modern myth that all boys in Palestine went to Hebrew school and became literate there. Turns out, that’s not true. Could Jesus Read? My […]
April 20, 2021
Did Paul the Pharisee Learn about Christianity from his Relative, the Apostle Junia? Guest Post by James McGrath
Last week Prof. James McGrath, PhD in New Testament studies and long-time member of the blog, provided us a humorous guest post “50 Ways to Forge A Gospel.” And now he turns serious. James has just published a book What Jesus Learned From Women, and one of the women he discusses is Junia, mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:7. Paul calls her his “relative.” And says she was one of the foremost apostles. In this post James discusses an intriguing hypothesis that I had never heard before — mainly because he just came up with it while writing his book. It’s not only highly provocative but also … well, possible! Read and see what you think. James will be happy to respond to comments. ****************************** Seeking the Historical Jesus Through Women’s Eyes I’m delighted to have been invited by Bart Ehrman to offer a guest post on his blog. Bart and I share an array of interests in common, most if not all of them tied to Jesus in some way. Both of us care quite […]
Tags: James McGrath, Joanna, Junia, What Jesus Learned from Women
April 22, 2021
Do We Have Any of Jesus’ Writings? (The Answer May Surprise You!)
In my previous post I talked about whether Jesus could read. I came out with a definitely answer: Maybe. And that brought to mind a related question I often get asked: could Jesus write? I posted on this a few years ago, and thought it’d be relevant to do it again. This will take a couple of posts. I had been asked about ancient “forgeries” — when authors would write claiming to be someone famous. Do we have any ancient works that claim to be written by Jesus? Answer this time: Yes indeed, there is a one-time famous correspondence between Jesus and a king who lived in Edessa in Syria named Abgar. I translated it for the book I published (on all earliest Christian Gospels) with my colleague Zlatko Plese, called The Other Gospels. Here is what I say there about the letters (the one from Abgar to Jesus, then his response); at the end of the post I give my new translations of the two letters. ****************************************************************************************************** Jesus’ Correspondence with Abgar The apocryphal correspondence […]
April 21, 2021