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Why Would Jesus Get Angry at this Poor Leper?


So far in this thread I have argued that Mark 1:41 originally said that Jesus got angry when the leper asked him to heal him; and I have shown that elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel Jesus gets angry in context involving healing. And so: if Jesus got angry when the leper asked for healing in Mark 1:41 – what exactly was he angry about? Over the years numerous interpretations have been proposed, and some of these explanations are highly creative. Some interpreters have argued that Jesus became angry because he knew that the man would disobey orders, spreading the news of his healing and making it difficult for Jesus to enter into the towns of Galilee because of the crowds. The problem with this view is that it seems unlikely that Jesus would be angry about what the man would do later — before he actually did it! Others have suggested that he was angry because the man was intruding on his preaching ministry, keeping him from his primary task. Unfortunately, nothing in the text says […]

September 30, 2023

The Gospel according to Mel (Gibson)


As I’ve indicated, this semester I’m teaching my course on Jesus in Scholarship and Film; in it we read and analyze a number of Gospels (the canonical four and six others); we discuss how scholars have reconstructed the life of Jesus; and we seen how Jesus has been portrayed on film.  One of the ultimate goals of the class is to show that every Gospel, every scholar, and every film presents Jesus in a *different* way.  There’s not One Jesus out there, but a large number of Jesuses. Most of the students have not seen any of the films we’re discussing in class (from Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings up to Jesus of Montreal).  And they will have an assignment to write a film critique of other films we don’t deal with directly.  I give them the choice of Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ or Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”  If experience is any guide, most of them will choose Gibson.  And most of them will find it deeply moving.  It certainly […]

September 21, 2023

The Messy World of the Early Christian Gospels. Who Is Copying What?


Many people who think about how the Gospels circulated in early Christianity have a pretty simple — or rather, overly simplified (in my view) — understanding of how it all worked.  I include among those “many people” a number of Gospel experts.  In fact, including a lot of the top experts.  The issue is this: what earlier accounts of the life, sayings, deeds, death, and resurrection were in circulation and used in the production of later accounts (say at the end of the first and into the second century).  I’ll talk about it here with reference to Papyrus Egerton 2, about which I’ve only said a few things. Scholars have traditionally thought of the four canonical Gospels as THE Gospels that were available, so that when a new Gospel like the Unknown Gospel in Papyrus Egerton 2 appeared the question always was: WHICH of the canonical Gospels was the author familiar with (and which did he use).   I challenged that view in my earlier post.   We shouldn’t think that there were basically FOUR, and everything […]

October 1, 2023

The Creation Stories in the Hebrew Bible (outside of Genesis!). A Lecture You May Be Interested In


Are you interested in the Creation account in Genesis 1?  Did you know there are *other* creation accounts in the Hebrew Bible?  Different ones?  Want to hear about them?  And about how they relate to other creation accounts in the ancient world? On October 19, 8:00 pm, my colleague Joseph Lam, professor of Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East will be giving a remote public lecture:  “Beyond Genesis:  The Many Creation Stories of the Bible.” Below you will find a short video that I did with Joseph to explain the event, and a link to sign up for it. This lecture is NOT related to the blog, but it IS a fundraiser for my department (I’m mentioning it here on the blog only because many of you are interested in the topic).  The donations will go to the departmental efforts to fund graduate students for research trips for their dissertations and professional conferences to present the results of their research. Both are crucial features of a graduate education, unusually important for anyone who wants […]

October 2, 2023

What the Jesus “Mythicists” Say About the Brothers of Jesus


Ten years ago on the blog when I was discussing the Proto-Gospel of James (the current subthread within a thread), I received an intriguing question about this issue, addressed in the previous post, about the brothers of Jesus and how “mythicists” — those who claim there never was a historical Jesus whatsoever but that he was completely made up (a “myth”) — dealt with them.  Here’s the question and my response.   QUESTION: Since you’ve brought up the subject of Jesus’ family perhaps it won’t be too far off the subject to ask this question. Mythicists are forced by their arguments to deal with Paul’s encounter with Peter and James in Galatians 1:18–20. They claim that when Paul refers to James as “The Lord’s brother” he does not mean that James is Jesus’ biological brother (which of course would mean that Jesus actually lived) but that he was using the word “brother” in the sense that all the disciples were “brothers” i.e., metaphorically. What about this? Is the word translated as “brother” in English that […]

October 15, 2023

Our Most Important Discovery of Ancient Christian Writings: The Nag Hammadi Library


The most significant discovery of Christian manuscripts (ever) was the Nag Hammadi Library, popularly (and a bit inaccurately) known as “the Gnostic Gospels.” One of the intriguing features of the discovery is that no one is quite sure how it happened.  When I was in graduate school, everyone heard a standard tale that we then passed along with some glee to our students.  But now that story is in a bit of disrepute — thanks in large part to that destroyer of New Testament Scholarship Orthodoxy, my friend and colleague, Duke professor, Mark Goodacre, as you will see in subsequent posts.. Just to be clear: the discovery itself was definitely made.  We have the books of the Nag Hammadi Library, readily available in English translations.  And I want to talk about a few of them.  But first I want to talk about what we know and don’t know about the discovery itself. I’ll start, in this post, by giving the popular tale that, until relatively recently, just about everybody knew.  This is how I laid […]

October 18, 2023

What Is Actually In the Nag Hammadi Library?


For near fifty years now the “books that did not make it into the New Testament” have been a source of fascination, not just for scholars but for regular ol’ folk intrigued by the idea that there may have been alternative forms of Christianity, a wide range of seemingly bizarre beliefs and practices out there in the early centuries of the church. In my previous post I gave the standard tale of how the most significant discovery of such books occurred in 1945 somewhere near the village of Nag Hammadi Egypt (and therefore called the Nag Hammadi library).  The story I told has fallen into some disrepute over the past decade, for reasons we’ll see in the next post.  Before dealing with that issue, however,  it’s important to see what this library/collection of books actually is.  Here is how I describe it in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press).  ****************************** What was this ancient collection of books?  The short answer is that it is the […]

October 19, 2023

Why We Might Doubt the Story of the Discovery of the Gnostic Gospels: Guest post by Mark Goodacre


A few days ago I posted about the Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, giving the remarkable story that scholars — for as long as I myself have been a scholar — have been telling about how it happened.  I also mentioned that my New Testament colleague at Duke, Mark Goodacre – who is on this blog and who has an important blog of his own – has written an article calling this story into question. Years ago when I was discussing this matter on the blog, I asked Mark if he would be willing to summarize his objections to the story as it is typically recited, and he did so in the following post.   He’s asked me to add a couple of links at the end in case you want to look more deeply into the matter. ****************************** Five Reasons to Question the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery  I am grateful to my friend and colleague Bart Ehrman for mentioning me in his blog in connection with the fascinating and compelling story of […]

October 21, 2023

Are There Really Good Reasons to Doubt the Story of the Discovery of the Gnostic Gospels? My Response to Mark Goodacre


A couple of days ago we enjoyed a guest post on the blog by Mark Goodacre, Professor of New Testament at Duke University.  In this post Mark provided five reasons for doubting if the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library – as that story has been recounted by scholars for many years – is in fact accurate.  Mark’s post was a summary of a longer, more detailed, and scholarly article that he has published on the subject. In 2015, when I first discussed this issue on the blog, I asked Mark’s permission to respond to his five points, and he gladly agreed; I in turn agreed to let him respond to my responses.   Rather than asking you to reread his post, I have reproduced each of his five reasons here, and then dealt with them one at a time. Let me say that I really don’t have a horse in this race, and my sense is that Mark doesn’t either.  We would both love to be able to keep telling the story, […]

October 22, 2023

Misquoting Jesus Podcast: Special One-Year Anniversary Edition


As some of you know, I do a weekly podcast (unrelated to the blog) called “Misquoting Jesus.”   My co-host is Megan Lewis, a terrific interlocutor who is an expert on ancient history (she’s actually an Assyriologist!  And trained in classics), who asks terrific questions.  Basically, she interviews me on a different topic each week, the sorts of issues we deal with here on the blog, but in a recorded interview style.  You can get it on Youtube (to my surprise, that’s where by far most people get it) or on any podcast app. This coming Tuesday, October 17, will be our one-year anniversary of doing the podcast, and I thought you might be interested in knowing about it.  This time rather than a back-and-forth with Megan it will be a live Q&A, with previously submitted questions by listeners.  Megan will MC it, but the questions we have selected will actually be asked by the person who proposed them. If you’re interested, check it out live or catch it later, either on Youtube or wherever you […]

October 13, 2023