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How Do We Explain Human Moral Codes: So Similar Yet So Different?
Here is another selection from the draft of my book, which, at this still early point, I am calling The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. This bit is the introduction to my chapter 6, which deals with how the early Christians began to change and soften Jesus’ ethical teaching soon after his death.I’m calling the chapter: “Transforming the Ethics of Jesus: Moral Discourse in Early Christianity.’ Let me know what you think.
November 14, 2024
What Do You Really Want in Life? And How is that Related to Altruism?
Some readers have wondered why I’m calling my book “The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.” (At least I’m calling it that at this point). Are you saying Jesus invented altruism? What?? Hasn’t every ethical teacher from the very beginning stressed that we have to balance “what we want” with “what would be good for another”? And isn’t that always part of religion: behaving well toward others as a kind of divine mandate? Answer: well, yes and no. This will take a few posts to explain. As it turns out, and to the surprise of many moderns, ethics did not play a large role in ancient pagan religions. Worshiping the gods normally did not involve any public recognition of bad social behavior or feelings of guilt for mistreating another with requests for forgiveness. If someone had neglected the god, then apology or confession might be in order; but the gods were not focused on how humans treated one another, not all that concerned about whether you […]
November 17, 2024
How Can We Be Happy? An Age-Old Question.
In my previous post I began explaining why I’m calling the teachings of Jesus the “origins of altruism.” Aren’t people naturally altruistic to some extent? Didn’t ancient Greek (and then Roman) cultures – the context in which Christianity emerged — understand how we ought to behave to others, and insist people needed to be “good to others”? I started to answer by discussing Aristotle (don’t worry, it’s not boring), and his point (if you have trouble buying this, read the post!) that what people *ultimately* want is not good friends and family, wealth, meaningful employment, material possessions, or a really good blog; in the end, all of these things are simply means to our ultimate desire, to be “happy.” If Aristotle is right on this point (I happen to think he is), the clear implication is that we need, each of us, to figure out how we should live in the world, what we should do, and how we should be in order to attain that state of “happiness.” Not in the simplistic, surface sense […]
November 19, 2024
Isn’t It Good Enough to Help Family, Friends, and Community?
I’ve been discussing Aristotle (really, it’s interesting!) and what he thought it took to be “happy” – not the giddy fleeting emotion but have a satisfying sense of contentment and fulfillment in life. For him, it means having the most “excellent” life you can and that requires being the most “excellent” person you can and that means having full amounts of the various kinds of human “excellences.” In English translations of Aristotle, “excellences” are usually rendered “virtues” (that’s because our English equivalent of the Greek word he uses comes to us from Latin rather than the Greek, and the word “VIR” in Latin means “man.” The excellences of a VIR are his VIRtues). For Aristotle, “virtues” require a good life in community with others. So the virtues involved how to make life good in the socio-political context one inhabits, which for Aristotle was the “polis” – the Greek term for the city (since there were not empires or national governments connected with Greece; it was ruled city states). And that means that
November 20, 2024
Intriguing Questions and Attempted Answers!
Here are a couple of the tricky and interesting questions I have received lately on the blog, along with my answers to them. They seem important enough to me to share more broadly for everyone’s benefit. As you’ll see, they cover a range of topics. ****************************** QUESTION: I was wondering if in Paul’s letters themselves, if there is any concept of Jesus worship like we see in the gospels? Many examples including the word proskuneo (προσκυνέω) where it is argued Jesus is being worshiped in the New Testament; are these present in Paul’s letters? MY RESPONSE: PROSKUNEO is a tricky word in Greek. It is a compound verb formed of KUNEO, which means to “kiss”, and PROS which means “before” and is generally used in the sense of falling down in reverence before someone and/or to show humility in their presence (by kissing their feet?).
November 21, 2024
Does this World Make Any Sense? The Ancient Stoics
From my earlier posts on altruism in the ancient world before Christianity, a number of blog readers have asked me to say some things specifically about ancient Stoics. Didn’t they urge altruistic behavior? Once again, the answer is, well, yes and no. This will take several posts to explain. Stoicism was by far the most widespread moral philosophy at the time of early Christianity. It was named not after its founder (as was, say, Platonism and Epicureanism) but after the place where he taught. The movement began in the wake of Aristotle, with the teachings of a teacher named Zeno (333-261 BCE). Zeno regularly gathered his students in the large “painted portico” (= stoa) centrally located in the Athenian forum. The portico was a long and spacious building open on one side of its length to the outside, lined with columns to support the roof overhead. Since these philosophers and wannabe philosophers could regularly be seen in the stoa they were called Stoics. Over time their movement spread throughout the Greek and then the later […]
November 23, 2024
How Not To Be Bothered When Bad Things Happen: The Stoics
Here I continue trying to explain the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, and to show how it related to their views of ethics – especially with respect to questions of altruism. It is a little difficult for many moderns to get their minds around the Stoic idea that “reason” is a divine quality that infuses the world; it is possibly even harder to understand how this divine quality relates to the gods. Do they “have” it in greater quantity than us? Is Reason itself actually a distinct divine being of some kind? The problem is exacerbated by the Stoic writings themselves, since often an author, say Epictetus, will speak of “Reason” and sometimes of “Zeus” (the head of the gods) and sometimes of the “gods” — and in each instance appear to be referring to the same thing. The “Reason/Logos” that infuses the world can be thought of as the sensibility of the world; it can be “the reason” something is or happens as it does; it can be “human reason”; and it can be personalized […]
November 24, 2024
How to be Content with Life Even When It’s Rotten: The Stoic View
How can you be satisfied and content with life? Even when it seems rotten on the whole? With this post I conclude my thread on the ancient Stoic view of life and how to live it. Thus, Stoics understood that the way to live – and to live with eudaimonia (recall: that means a kind of “happiness,” in the sense of a full satisfaction and contentment about how one’s life) – was to focus on personal choice, freedom, and avoidance, choosing not to be disturbed by things we cannot control, even if everyone around us thinks that hardship, pain, and suffering create ultimate misery. They don’t. Or at least they don’t need to. In the end, they are not the things that matter. We need to train ourselves to be “indifferent” to them. And indifference cuts both ways – we should not be wrought by things we can’t avoid and we should not be desperate to obtain what we don’t have. One of the key terms among Stoics was adiaphora, literally “things that make no […]
November 26, 2024
Jewish Sects in the time of Jesus: Pharisees and Sadducees
I am in a short thread discussing Judaism just before and at the time of Jesus. In that connections, I often get asked about the different Jewish sects in the period. So I’ll devote two posts to the question, lifting the discussion from my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ****************************** THE FORMATION OF JEWISH SECTS It was during the rule of the Hasmoneans, and evidently in large measure in reaction to it, that various Jewish sects emerged. As we have seen, the Jewish historian Josephus mentions four of these groups; the New Testament refers to three. In one way or another, all of them play a significant role in our understanding of the life of the historical Jesus. I should emphasize at the outset that most Jews in Palestine did not belong to any of these groups. We know this much from Josephus, who indicates that the largest sect, the Pharisees, claimed 6,000 members and that the Essenes claimed 4,000. The Sadducees probably had far fewer. These numbers […]
November 28, 2024
Judaism 200 Years Before Jesus: The Maccabean Revolt
I often get asked about what Judaism was like in the time before and up to Jesus. It’s a vital question, since whatever else you might want to say about Jesus, he was definitely Jewish and the Judaism he was born into, raised in, and accepted was the Judaism of his time (not medieval and not modern!). Here’ I’ll say something about a major period in the history of the history of Judea over the four hundred years from approximately 540 BCE, when the Persians were in control, up to 63 BCE, when the Romans came in and took over. I’ve taken the sketch from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ****************************** The Later History of Judea In the Persian period (starting in the late 6th century BCE), the land of Judah came be a province called Judea. This will be its name in the time of the New Testament. So too, as we have seen, inhabitants of this land, and descendants of former inhabitants who maintained their ancestral religious and cultural traditions, […]
November 27, 2024
Jewish Sects at the Time of Jesus: The Essenes and the Fourth Philosophy
In my previous post I talked about two of the known Jewish sects from the days of Jesus in Palestine. The idea that there are specifically four sects comes to us from the late-first-century Jewish historian Josephus, whose many volumes of writings (e.g., on the Jewish War and on Jewish Antiquities – the latter a history of the Jewish people from biblical times up to his own day) are our principal source of information about Judaism at the time. In addition to the Pharisees and Sadducees, Josephus mentions the “Essenes” and a “Fourth Philosophy.” Here is a summary of what these groups stood for, again taken from my introductory textbook on the New Testament. ************************** The Essenes are the one Jewish sect not mentioned in the New Testament. Ironically, they are also the group about which we are best informed. This is because the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were evidently produced by a group of Essenes who lived in a community east of Jerusalem in the wilderness area near the western shore of the […]
November 30, 2024
Jewish Disagreements About the Afterlife: Pharisees and Sadducees
In previous posts I have discussed the different Jewish sects that we know about from the first century, at the dawn of Christianity (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Fourth Philosophy). In the post I indicated that (a) there were different understandings of the afterlife among them, but (b) there was a belief in a future resurrection of the dead attested in at least two of the groups: the Pharisees and Essenes. We don’t know what the eschatological views of the Fourth Philosophy were; possibly different Jews who wanted the violent overthrow of the Roman overlords had various expectations. We really don’t know. One reason we don’t know is that we don’t have any writings from any of them. On other hand, that’s true of the Sadducees and the Pharisees as well. That may seem weird, but it’s the case. We have no clear and certain writing from any Sadducee in all of antiquity that explains what it is they thought and believed. Even more strange, from all of antiquity up until the time of the Jewish war, […]
December 1, 2024
Readers’ Questions and My Responses (11/2024)
I have received some more interesting questions in the comment section of the blog, and thought I should published them more broadly, along with my responses. Here goes! Question: What are your views on what Jesus is communicating in the ‘Whose Son Is the Messiah?’ story in the synoptics where Jesus references Psalm 110:1. Response: It’s a great passage (Mark 12:35-37). It occurs in the midst of a series of dialogues/controversies Jesus is having with his Jewish opponents in Jerusalem, in which Jesus repeatedly confounds and maligns them. In this one he does so by asking them a question that he knows they won’t be able to answer without contradicting something they already think. He asks them how “the Christ can be the son of David if in Psalm 110, written by David, he says “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand….”?? That is, if David calls the messiah “My Lord,” then how could he be his “son”? The scribes are apparently flummoxed and can’t answer, and the crowds […]
December 3, 2024
Destroying Mummy Masks
Is it OK to destroy ancient mummy masks in hopes of finding yet something more valuable out of them? I have just returned from my annual professional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, where thousands of biblical scholars come to read academic papers to one another, sit on panels to review books or discuss topics, and, well, schmooz. These days I mainly schmooz. But I did go to a few sessions, including one particularly intriguing panel discussion of a fantastic new book on the corrupt ways manuscripts are allegedly discovered these days, written by papyrologist (expert in the study of ancient papyri manuscripts) Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts Among the intriguing topics that come up in her full-scale attack on scholars who rely on the black market to get their “ancient manuscripts” was the issue I’ve dealt with before on the blog, the case of the “first-century Gospel of Mark” (which was decidedly not from the first century, we found out) said to be […]
December 4, 2024
Can We Defend Destroying Mummy Masks?
Here is my second re-post from 2015 about destroying ancient mummy masks in hopes of finding manuscripts. In yesterday’s post I cited an article by Mary-Ann Russo that explained the situation about the mummy masks that were being destroyed in order to acquire papyrus fragments of the New Testament. The scholar mainly cited in that article as being involved in that process was Craig Evans, a friend of mine with whom I have had several public debates. Craig feels that he has been somewhat misrepresented in this article, and sent me a clarification. I have asked and received his permission, and this is what he says: (NOTE: after this paragraph is a lengthier explanation and justification of what they are doing when destroying mummy masks):
December 5, 2024
A True Expert Speaks About Mummy Masks and Papyri
In our age of the superiority of non-expertise, occasionally an authority speaks out who reveals the truth. Here is a case in point, when a true expert on ancient papyri explains what’s going on with those mummy masks I’ve mentioned in earlier posts. Again, this is from 2015; things have changed in terms of the specific case, but not necessarily in terms of the frauds that some people are willing to engage in for the sake of their historical and religious claims. Here is what I said about it nine years ago.
December 7, 2024
Final Reflections on Mummy Masks and Manuscripts
OK, I am at the tail end of this thread on mummy masks and the alleged discovery of a first-century fragment of Mark’s Gospel. This thread was first posted in 2015. Here is how I ended it then. But I did want to provide access to an interesting article and penetrating set of questions on the issue published a week ago on CNN by my friends Candida Moss and Joel Baden (they crank out a lot of articles on issues in biblical studies, especially as items appear in the news). Candida is a Professor of New Testament at Notre Dame and Joel is a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale. I’ve re-posted this article with permission. It comes from CNN: Was oldest gospel really found in a mummy mask? ****************************** (CNN) Media outlets have been abuzz this week with the news that the oldest fragment of a New Testament gospel — and thus the earliest witness of Jesus’ life and ministry — had been discovered hidden inside an Egyptian mummy mask and was going to […]
December 8, 2024
The Low-Down on That First-Century Gospel of Mark
Several people have asked about what ever happened to that so-called first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark that I mentioned in my just-finished post on mummy-masks. I explained what happened when the mystery finally got solved about five years ago. Here’s what I said then. (It gets even more bizarre later, as I’ll explain in the next post that was published about a year after this one.) ****************************** [Originally published October 15, 2019] There’s been a new and rather astonishing development in the story involving the so-called “First Century Gospel of Mark.” If you recall, a few years ago some textual scholars began to claim that we now have in our possession the oldest copy of Mark (by a long shot) ever to be discovered. The existence of the manuscript was first announced in 2012 by Prof. Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, in a public debate he was having, as it turns out, with me at UNC Chapel Hill. Until now, our first fragmentary copy of Mark could be dated to around […]
December 10, 2024
The Hobby Lobby, the Museum of the Bible, and Incredible Academic Fraud
It’s amazing how much fraud goes on in the study of ancient manuscripts, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars, often, these days, oddly, in highly religious circles. Here’s the final part of my discussion of fraud connected with New Testament fragments from about five and a half years ago (May, 2020). ****************************** An article appeared in The Atlantic this past week that exposes academic fraud at the highest levels, involving millions of dollars, unscrupulous scholars, and evangelical Christians so intent on proving the truth of the Bible that they were willing, even eager, to engage in unethical and fraudulent activities to do so. It seems weird, but the case involves Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The article was written by one of the country’s best investigative journalists, Ariel Sabar, who earlier had exposed for once and all the modern forgery known as “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” in another article in the Atlantic (I’ve blogged on this forgery a number of times as the story unfolded; just search for “Jesus’ wife” on […]
December 11, 2024
A Cruise This Summer: From Athens to Venice. Interested?
I’m happy to announce another trip I’ll be doing come summertime, June 5 – 14, 2025, a cruise that goes from Athens to Venice. Wanna come? It’s an unusually good itinerary to some incredible spots, and I’ll be lecturing and hanging out with everyone who comes. The brochure for the trip is below, and here is what I say about it there: This summer I will be giving lectures on a cruise to some of the most gorgeous places on the planet, starting and ending with two of the amazing cities in the world – Athens and Venice – and stopping along the way in spots I’ve long been eager to see, including coastal villages and towns of Montenegro and Croatia. Are you interested in joining me? Europe – Greece and the coast of Montenegro and Croatia – is incredibly rich in ancient and medieval art, scenery, and charming towns and villages. For the voyage we will be tracing the storied coastline through the Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, sailing from the heart of […]
December 13, 2024