Search
Advanced search
Fiction and Fact, Legend and History. Is it Either / Or?
This now is the 7th of 10 parts of my interview with Ben Witherington on my book Did Jesus Exist. Here there are two interesting questions, both focusing on the relationship of legend and history in ancient stories about Jesus. Part of the question is whether the Gospel writers were simply riffing on (or, more cynically, ripping off) earlier stories of other amazing figures when talking about Jesus; the other is whether that has a significant bearing on how we understand what he said and and did — or on whether we think he even existed. Q. Robert Price’s argument that the stories of Jesus are a giant midrash on OT stories about Moses and others, and so are completely fiction seems to ignore the fact that midrash is a hermeneutical technique used for contemporizing pre-existing stories. Talk briefly about the difference between how stories are shaped in the Gospels and whether they have any historical substance or core or not. (N.B. It appears that Crossan has recently made the same kind of category mistake arguing […]
June 26, 2021
The Issue of “Tenure” for Professors
You probably have heard about the extraordinary case of Nikole Hannah-Jones at my university (UNC-Chapel Hill). Offered a prestigious chaired position in the Department of Journalism, a chair that has always brought with it “tenure,” the university Board of Trustees, comprised, of course, of people who are not academics with expertise in journalism, chose not to grant her tenure, even though the department itself strongly advocated for it. I have never heard of that happening before. Of course, given the fact that the Board has to give its approval before tenure is granted, it was completely within its legal right not to give its approval. But no one on the planet thinks it is an accident that Hannah-Jones – who is 20-year veteran journalist with the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism (!), and winner of the (incredibly prestigious) MacArthur Genius grant – is famous for her work developing the “1619 Project” avidly promoting an alternative understanding of American history in light of the history of slavery and the contributions made by […]
June 13, 2021
Final Live Lecture on Jesus as The Christians Saw Him: SATURDAY!
This Saturday at 3:00 p.m. I will be giving a live lecture (via Zoom) on an intriguing topic that very few people I”ve ever met (including New Testament scholars) have ever delved into: What did early Christians think Jesus was doing between the time of his death and his resurrection. This is the third and last lecture in my series on Jesus according to the Christians. You do not have to have been at either of the others to come or to understand this one — it is a stand alone lecture, with a good ole Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. All the funds we bring in will go to help pay for blog expenses, so we can continue to give every dime of membership fees and regular donations to the charities we support. The fee for the lecture, if you have not already paid for it, is $10. We accept more than the requested fee of course! This week’s event will last for about 75 minutes. I will lecture for 45-50 minutes and then […]
June 11, 2021
Other Gods Who Died and Rose from the Dead?
Here I continue with the Q&A I had years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, focused on my book Did Jesus Exist. I think I can say with relative confidence that this is the ONE book of mine that evangelicals on the whole were (mainly) pleased with. A nice change! And why do they like it? Because I argue there must have been a man Jesus. OK, then! Doesn’t seem like a lot to be grateful for, but I’ll take what I can get. Ben’s questions were more astute than that, dealing with some of the key issues at a scholarly level. Here are two more of them, and my responses. Q. It appears that mythicists have not read Jonathan Z. Smith, and do not realize that there is no unambiguous evidence for the historical argument that ancients believed in dying and rising gods before the time of Jesus, and that therefore the story of Jesus is just a historicized version of that myth. Why do you think this theory of dying and rising […]
June 30, 2021
Gold Q&A for June!
You are unauthorized to view this page. Username Password Remember Me Forgot Password
June 12, 2021
Was Jesus Like One of the Pagan Fertility Gods?
Lots of people (esp. on the Internet!) say that the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection were modeled on widespread beliefs in the pagan world of “fertility” gods, whose life-cycle dictates the fertility of the earth. They are born (spring); they become productive as the earth becomes fertile (summer); they become ripe for harvest (autumn); and then they die (winter). But they “rise again” (spring) and the pattern then repeats itself. Wasn’t Jesus like that? That is the question I was asked in this final segment in my interview with Ben Witherington, a prominent evangelical biblical scholar. Ben and I don’t agree about a lot when it comes to religion, and have crossed academic swords in public contexts. But we have an amicable relationship and agree on some very basic things. For example: Jesus existed! Hey, it’s a start. And we agree a lot on the relationship of Jesus to Judaism and the need to situate him in his own Jewish context (rather than some mythical pagan context). And so, here is the final question […]
July 1, 2021
My Mentor Bruce Metzger
Many years ago on the blog I was asked about my relationship with my mentor Bruce Metzger, an internationally famous scholar of the New Testament who is generally acknowledged as the greatest expert on biblical manuscripts in America, ever. He was also a devout Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister. I, obviously, am not. (Though I was very much a committed Christian when I first met him.) Here is the question and my initial response. QUESTION: Hey Bart, I know you studied under Bruce Metzger and my question is how did he feel about your skepticism toward the trustworthiness of the N.T? RESPONSE: Bruce Metzger and I had a long and very close relationship. I was his student for seven years and his research assistant for the New Revised Standard Version (he was the chair of the translation committee) for a couple of years. He directed my masters and PhD theses; he helped me break into publishing; he worked to get me into editorial positions for journals and monograph series; he guided my research […]
July 3, 2021
Memories of Bruce Metzger: When I First Realized I Couldn’t Write
In my last post I started to resume my recollections of my mentor, the great textual scholar Bruce Metzger. In this post I recall when he first showed me I was a lousy writer. In graduate school different professors have different approaches to evaluating and grading term papers. Some professors are completely anal about it and insist on correcting every mistake, rewriting every sentence, and reformulating every idea. Not many are that way, thankfully, since doing all this takes an enormous chunk of time (and a very large ego). I never had a professor like that, but I have known some over the years. Others make extremely judicious and helpful comments, sometimes at great length. My teacher Paul Meyer was like that at Princeton Seminary. The comments he made on our papers were in depth, always on target, and superior in quality to any of the scholarship we read all semester in the class. Meyer never published much himself – he threw himself into his students instead; we used to threaten to extract his comments […]
July 4, 2021
The Book of Revelation and the END. Starting at the Beginning.
The Book of Revelation! I am ready now to start a new thread on my thoughts on the book, as I get serious about writing about it for a general audience. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (see blog for June 20) that I had changed my mind rather radically about what my book was going to cover. I’ll explain the current plan (hopefully the *final* plan) in later posts. For now it would be important to start at the beginning so we are all on the same page. And so in this post I want to review – or introduce, in case you’re not familiar with it – the contents of the book of Revelation itself, more or less free of interpretation. It’s not a long book, and can be read in one sitting. (Twenty-one chapters, but most are very short.) If you’re interested, go ahead and read it (for the first time or again!). You’ll pick up something new every time. Or at least I do, now in my 50th year of […]
July 6, 2021
The Reconstruction of Q: Platinum Guest Post by Steve Sutter
You are unauthorized to view this page. Username Password Remember Me Forgot Password
Tags: Platinum
June 19, 2021
Apocalypse (the genre) and Apocalypticism (the worldview)
I have started to give some background on the book of Revelation, to help set the stage for my new understanding of it as it has developed over the past year. Much of what I think now is what I’ve thought for 45 years. But the deeper I’ve dug, the more I’ve seen and the more I’ve come to realize that my older perspective (a widely held one among scholars) has some serious flaws (as others too have seen). But none of these new insights affects my basic view, that to understand this mysterious book we have to do what almost NO ONE in the modern world does (except scholars): understanding it in its own historical context in light of what we know of its historical and, especially, literary context. If you change the context, you change the meaning. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the book of Revelation. In the last post I summarized the narrative (urging you to read it for yourself) (if you prefer to listen to it, make sure […]
July 7, 2021
How I Take Notes When Doing Research for a Book
A couple of weeks ago when I first talking about my work on the next book dealing with Revelation, I was asked how I actually go about doing the research — in particular, how I take notes on what I read. It’s a big deal for any author: how does one keep track of the research? I discussed the issues a few years ago right after I had finished drafting my book Heaven and Hell, and thought it might be worth reposting now. Here ’tis: ****************************** Now that I have finished writing the draft of my book on the afterlife – which I’m tentatively titling “Heaven, Hell, and the Invention of the Afterlife (that will be the title until my publisher changes it!!) – I have received several questions from blog members about aspects of the writing itself. One reader wanted to know how I keep track of all the things that I read in preparation for writing a book like this (or like anything else). Here is how: When I decide what the […]
July 8, 2021
My Mentor Bruce Metzger and the Infamous Squirrel
I often get asked about my relationship with my Doktor Vater Bruce Metzger, an unbelievably knowledgeable textual scholar and Bible translator. In response I’ve started re-posting some recollections I have. I was his final PhD student and, I daresay, had a closer relationship with him than probably any other. In this post I talk about the most famous anecdote about him that floated around Princeton for decades. As with all great men, Metzger was widely talked about among those who knew and revered him. There were lots of stories told about Metzger at Princeton Seminary. Someone should probably collect and publish them. I was especially interested in the stories, since I came to Princeton in order to study with him. Most of the stories were meant to be funny, and we always wondered which, if any of them, were “true” (in the sense that they really happened). Far and away the most commonly told and best known story was the one I heard when I first arrived at the seminary in 1978. It is the […]
July 10, 2021
Metzger, the Squirrel, and Me (…and Jesus).
In my previous post I talked about the locally famous story about (my teacher) Bruce Metzger and the dead (dying?) squirrel. Here I continue the story to show why in fact is has some relevance to the New Testament! As I indicated, for years friends of mine were eager for me to find out whether the story about Metzger and the squirrel really happened. They wanted me just to ask Metzger. But there were problems with that. Among other things, if it had happened, he almost certainly wouldn’t remember, since it would have simply been something that happened with no significance to him – only to the one who thought it was very odd that Metzger would happen to know the Greek word for squirrel and that he would volunteer it at that rather inauspicious moment. Moreover, there were aspects of the story that did not “ring true.” Metzger was not heartless toward other living beings and he was not one to boast about his knowledge about Greek — or about anything else. Years later […]
July 11, 2021
Is the Book of Revelation a Revised Version of a Non-Christian Apocalypse? Guest Post by James Tabor
Here now is the second guest post by my friend and cross-state colleague, New Testament scholar James Tabor. Other scholars have suggested Revelation started out as a Jewish text that was later “Christianized” by an editor who produced the version we have today. Here James embraces that view and mounts an argument for it. See what you think! James originally posted this on his own blog. Check it out! Can A Pre-Christian Version of the Book of Revelation Be Recovered? Can A Pre-Christian Version of the Book of Revelation Be Recovered? APOCALYPTICISM FEBRUARY 22, 2017 The thesis of this post is a simple one. Behind the New Testament book of Revelation, formally called “The Revelation of Jesus Christ,” (Rev 1:1), is an older Jewish apocalyptic document that had nothing to do with Jesus or the early Christian movement. The question is, can such a older text be recovered, given the overtly Christian editing? In my post titled “The Destruction of Pompeii and the New Testament Book of Revelation,” on the destruction of Pompeii by the volcanic eruption […]
July 20, 2021
Does Revelation Contain an Eyewitness Account of the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius? Guest Post by James Tabor
As I continue to work on my book on Revelation, I thought it might be interesting to ask my friend and fellow NT scholar, James Tabor, who has done guest posts before on the blog, to provide a couple more. James has written and thought about Revelation for many years, and he has intriguing and controversial views about it. He will be providing two posts for us. In this one he argues that part of the book of Revelation is based on an eyewitness report of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, which the author understood to be an indication that the end of time had now come. Intriguing stuff.This was first posted on James’s own blog. Be sure to check it out: https://jamestabor.com/ The Destruction of Pompeii and the New Testament Book of Revelation APOCALYPTICISM DECEMBER 20, 2015 Nine years, almost to the day, after Roman legionaries destroyed God’s house in Jerusalem, God destroyed the luxurious watering holes of the Roman elite. Was this God’s revenge? That’s not exactly the question I want […]
July 15, 2021
Understanding Revelation: A Sine Qua Non (Overlooked by most readers)
I am at the beginning of my thread on the book of Revelation, and am giving the background necessary to make sense of how I now make sense of the book, which is different from how I’ve made sense of it most of my life! But one thing I wholeheartedly agree with myself on from earlier days: you HAVE to understand the book in its own historical context or you will completely misconstrue its meaning — as almost everyone does, since they think it is a book written for the 21st century instead of the 1st. That’s a big mistake if you have any interest in what an author of the 1st century was saying to his audience of the 1st century. You have to understand the literary conventions and historical realities of their time. Seems obvious, but, well, I guess it’s not to most readers…. In my previous post I began to stress the importance of knowing what an “apocalypse” is before trying to interpret any one particular apocalypse. Today I pursue that a […]
July 13, 2021
Interested in Hearing Three of My Lectures? Jesus according to the Early Christians
Two months ago I did a three-part lecture series on Zoom as a fundraiser to help defray the expenses of the blog. I recorded the lectures and have now decided to make them available — still as a fundraiser — to anyone who would wants to hear them. For details how to get access to them, see further below. The lectures all discussed stories involving Jesus that are not widely known to the world at large. Or to *Christians* at large. Or to *Blog Members* at large. I’m pretty sure you didn’t hear *these* growing up…. Want to hear them? These are the titles and topics: Lecture One. Jesus and the Other Divine Men Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God people know about today, but in antiquity there were others – “Divine men” who were miraculously born, who could do miracles, and then, at the end of life, ascended to heaven to live with the gods. How could anyone think such things of mere mortals? And is there anything that makes […]
July 18, 2021
Comments on Blog Comments!
In this post I would like to address some questions I have received about blog “comments” and in so doing reaffirm the blog’s policies and procedures. As all of you know, blog members at the Silver, Gold, or Platinum level are allowed to make comments on posts and respond to comments of others. The limit is 200 words for a comment and only two per day are allowed. These limits are designed to help commenters keep their remarks direct and on point, and to make the entire enterprise manageable for the one person who manages them (yours truly). A lot of the comments the posts invoke involve a question for me and I try to respond to each and every one. Since we began the blog in 2012 we have had over 112,000 comments and I have written some 37,000 responses. Ouch. Most of the time, commenters give a remark or reflection on a particular post. You can ALWAYS do so on an old post, no problem. I’ll post it/answer it no matter how old […]
July 14, 2021
The Historical Background to the Book of Revelation
Now that I have said something about what’s in the book of Revelation and about how we need to study it in light of its literary *genre* (“apocalypse”) I can begin to discuss something about its historical context. As you know, one of the overarching themes of this entire blog is that if you take something out of its context, you change its meaning. If you want to know what the author of Revelation might have actually meant and how he would have been understood by his real-life audience — the Christians in the seven churches of Asia Minor he was addressing – you have to put the book and its author in their own historical context (not in our 21st century context). Here are some of the most important points about that, as I make them in my textbook on the New Testament (The New Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction; Oxford University Press, 7th ed.), edited slightly here. ********************************************** The Revelation of John in Historical Context I have already pointed out that […]
July 17, 2021