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Does Papias Say Matthew and Mark Wrote OUR Matthew and Mark?
In my previous two posts I showed why Papias is not a reliable source when it comes to the authorship of Matthew and Mark. If you haven’t read those posts and are personally inclined to think that his testimony about Matthew and Mark are accurate, I suggest you read them (the posts) before reading this one. In this post I want to argue that what he actually says about Matthew and Mark is not true of our Matthew and Mark, and so either he is talking about *other* Gospels that he knows about (or has heard about) called Matthew and Mark, that do not correspond to our Matthew and Mark, or
March 7, 2026
A New Proof of the Resurrection. What Do YOU Think?
Last week (March 2) I did a two and a half hour debate on whether Jesus was raised from the dead with Jonathan Sheffield, who is not a scholar but a self-professed “Anglican Autodidact.” (He works in some kind of legal field but I don’t believe he’s a lawyer.) He debates a lot of people (someone provides funding for it I suppose): Mark Goodacre, Richard Carrier and others. I debated him some months ago on whether Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually wrote the Gospels. You can find the debate on YouTube. You can find last week’s as well. I’m afraid that I was a bit forceful at times and I hope he didn’t find me somewhat belligerent or rude, but, well, I can see why he might have. He is a good guy and we have some laughs together, but I don’t find his argument convincing. But it certainly was unusual. I’d never heard THAT one before! It took me about fifteen minutes before I understood what it was. Here I’ll describe it. I’d […]
March 10, 2026
A Legal Case for Jesus’s Resurrection
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was going into the debate on Jesus’s resurrection with Jonathan Sheffield last week (March 2; you can see it on Youtube). I suspected that since he works in the legal field (I’m not sure in what capacity), he would probably be mounting a kind of “court case,” marshaling proof that Jesus had been raised from the dead that would be compelling to a fair-minded jury today. I was completely wrong about that. As I indicated in my previous post, Jonathan went a different and rather unexpected direction.
March 11, 2026
Christ’s legalism, his divine and human nature, stories of his father Joseph — and other questions.
Here are some of the intriguing questions I have recently received from readers, on Jesus’ view of the law, the intriguing apocryphal Gospel about his father Joseph, Christ’s divine and human nature, and other things! QUESTION: Do you think Jesus taught complete pacifism in response to violence and a less legalistic form of Judaism? RESPONSE: I think he was a committed pacificist, yes. And he certainly thought that the laws of Torah were to be observed — they were what God commands. But as with other Jewish teachers, he knew that sometimes a situation would arise in which someone would be forced to violate one law or the other because they espoused different principles of behavior that were at odds. For example,
March 12, 2026
Eyewitness Accounts of Miracles
When thinking about my upcoming debate with Jonathan Sheffield about “proof” of the resurrection, since I anticipated he would take a “legal” approach to the question (since something connected with the law is his day job), I expected we would get into a discussion of the validity of eyewitness testimony. Hey, if all these people said they saw Jesus after his death, he must have been brought to life, right? I’ve always been struck by how conservative Christians find “eyewitness testimony” strong evidence for what they believe but of no value for what others in other religious traditions believe. One of my favorite instances involves a well-documented case in far more modern times that most people have never heard of, and when they do hear of it they simply dismiss it. It involves the 18th century founder of Hasidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov, often simply called Besht. I talk about the situation in my book Jesus Before the Gospels. (The specific issue is
March 14, 2026
While We’re Talking About the Reliability of Eyewitnesses…
After posting on the (surprisingly good) eyewitness testimony to the miracles of the founder of Hasidic Judaism (the Besht) yesterday, I couldn’t resist saying a bit more about it, not from a purely anecdotal perspective but from the academic perspective of scholars engaged in actual research on the matter, research that is virtually ignored by conservative Christian biblical scholars who have written entire BOOKS on eyewitness testimony but appear to know very little about it as a phenomenon. Here is another excerpt from my book devoted to the issue, Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). (the book includes footnotes/references I won’t include here for the post) ****************************** In the history of memory studies an important event occurred in 1902.
March 15, 2026
Paul’s Lost Letters
This past week I was in Clinton NY giving a lecture at Hamilton College (lovely place) (snowy place) hosted by my former student Ian Mills (who did his PhD at Duke but took courses with me). One of Ian’s current projects involves a once-famous now not-widely-known letter forged in the name of Paul, the Letter to the Laodiceans (found in a number of Latin manuscripts of the Bible), and we, naturally, had some good talks about “Lost Letters of Paul.” Then I remembered I had posted about this years ago, and thought it would be a good time to post some more — in response to a very good question I received, and receive several times a year (!): which of the lost early Christian writings would I most love to have discovered? (More than the letters of Paul: but here’s what I say about those in particular, in two posts. Here’s the first.) ****************************** QUESTION: What lost early Christian books would you most like to have discovered? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough […]
March 17, 2026
Why in Particular I’d Love to Get my Grubby Paws on Paul’s Lost Letters
In the previous post I began to answer the question of which lost books of early Christianity I would most like to have discovered, by discussing 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? I suppose we’d all love to have more letters from Paul, and not merely for sentimental reasons (it’s not that it “would 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
March 18, 2026
The Letter to Diognetus: An Unknown Gem among the Apostolic Fathers (in a Nutshell)
Next in this nutshell series on the Apostolic Fathers is one of the least known and studied/discussed, even among scholars, even though it is interesting and significant. Among other things, it is the only “apologetic” work of the Apostolic Fathers outside of that one fragment of Quadratus (I blogged about earlier, if you want to look it up, and therefore one of the earliest Christian apologies known to exist–there are not any in the New Testament). What I say here is based on what say about it in my edition in The Apostolic Fathers Vol II, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 2004), My favorite bits of this are at the end.
March 19, 2026
Advance Preview–How I Begin My New Book: Love Thy Stranger
My book, Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, is coming out this week (March 24) with Simon & Schuster. You can get it most anywhere you get your books. I have started doing “book events” for it, where I explain it and read a few portions of it for 20-25 minutes or so before taking questions. I decided that the best approach would be to read the beginning and end, while summarizing the far more extensive middle in my own words on the spot. And I thought blog readers would like to see what the beginning and end would look like, in case they’re interested in seeing what lies in between in the book itself. This will take three posts. The first is the Introduction to the book (here below). I did publish a similar post a couple of years ago, but I added some bits and edited it for the published version. Here it is: ****************************** Introduction Strange(r) Altruism Most people I know are moved […]
March 21, 2026
The Dark Side of Christianity: How I (Partially) End My New Book
In my previous post I gave a taste of my new book Love They Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, by giving its Introduction. I now give its Conclusion, which tries to explain why it matters, or should matter, in my view, for understanding the significance of Christianity to our world together, for both those of us who are Christians and those of us who are not. This will take two posts: ****************************** Conclusion Altruism in the Conscience of the West The only time anyone in my family could remember hearing my devout grandfather use foul language was
March 22, 2026
The Good Done By Christianity to Our World
Was Christianity ultimately good for the world or bad? In the previous post I began to sum up the significance of my study of Jesus’s influence on our modern sense of morality; I ended by talking about how Christianity is often attacked for all the harm it has done, for example in pogroms against Jews leading to the Holocaust, the Crusades and the ongoing hatred of Muslims, the Inquisition – torturing people to death for believing the wrong things. In addition to these major historical events, one also has to consider how it is that many Christians today advocate radical nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, the slaughter of civilians, and the burning of the planet—all claiming Christ is on their side. When other Christians say these views and actions are not “Christian,” I readily agree they are not consistent with the teachings of Jesus. But they certainly are “Christian” – done by self-professed followers of Jesus often in his name. I pick up here by looking at the positive side, in one of those […]
March 24, 2026
Readers’ Questions on the Accuracy of the Gospels
Among the questions I have received from readers recently have been a couple that deal with a crucial issue connected with both the canonical and apocryphal Gospels. How much of these accounts was simply “made up” – so they are interesting legends, perhaps, but not historical? And what sources of information did the authors have for their accounts? And is there some way to know the authors were reliable investigators and/or that their sources were accurate (think… the Gospel of Luke!) QUESTION (about made-up stories in the Gospels): Do you think some early Christians simply invented such stories, like the boy bitten by an asp and Jesus healing him, or did they evolve over time?
March 25, 2026
Early Christian Views of Judaism, In a Nutshell
It is not easy to understand the relationship between Jews and Christians in antiquity; Christianity starts out as a Jewish sect; there is conflict between most Jews and those few who claim Jesus is the messiah; soon more gentiles convert than Jews and many of them are not connected with Judaism or appreciate Judaism; there end up being additional conflicts; and different Christians have different views of Jews and Judaism, at times leading to hateful acts. Etc. I thought it might be useful
March 26, 2026
The Rise of Christian Anti-Judaism, in a Nutshell
In addition to the question I dealt with in the previous post of how Christians understood their new religion in relationship to Judaism in antiquity, there is another matter of importance for understanding ancient Jewish-Christian relations: what did Christians, broadly speaking, think about their relationship to actual Jews who did not believe? This is a completely different issue and raises the question of
March 28, 2026
Early Persecutions of Christians, in a Nutshell
Why were early Christians persecuted? How extensively? Were they early on seen as a threat to the state? In my previous two posts I discussed the relationship of Jews and Christians — and how Christians became anti-Jewish — in the early church. It occurred to me it would be good to talk about two other groups Christians had problems with early on, one from outside their ranks with persecutors (unofficial and official) and one with in their own ranks with “false believers” (heretics). This post will be a snapshot look at persecution in the early centuries.
March 29, 2026
Early Christian Reactions to “Heresies” in a Nutshell
In recent posts I gave brief overviews of issues from the earliest centuries of Christianity that would take (and have taken) entire books to cover in adequate length — Christian relations with Jews and their relationship to hostile outsiders (persecutions). In this post I deal with the third key antagonistic social situation that arose early on in the faith, the relationship of “orthodox” Christians with “heretics.” For long-time readers of the blog, this will probably be more familiar territory — I’ve dealt with related issues a lot; but whether you have a firm grasp on the matter or no grasp at all, here is a nutshell discussion to provide some of the basics one should probably know. Again, this is
April 2, 2026
When Emperors Became More Involved in Christian Persecutions
When did Christianity first become “illegal” in the Roman world? In my previous post I described the Christian persecutions in its early decades, including those under Nero in Rome in 64 CE and Papias in Bythinia in 112 CE. It would be useful to continue the tale, to see just what the known persecutions were about. This is worthwhile information for anyone interested at all in how Christianity started out and was received in the Roman world. There was no “official” persecution (pursued or permitted by a Roman emperor) for another half century. I’ll pick up the story from there, based what I say in my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster). This will take two posts, focusing on the emperors’ roles in each case. Part of the point will be that persecution rarely happened, at least at an emperor’s bidding, and Christianity was not declared in all effects illegal until the early fourth century – just a decade before the first emperor actually converted (Constantine, in 312 CE). ******************************* Marcus […]
March 31, 2026
The First Attempts to Wipe Out Christianity
Persecutions of Christians did not become “empire-wide” or generally threatening until the middle of the third century, over 200 years after Jesus’ death. It is a mistake to think all Christians had to go in hiding in the early years/decades/centuries of the church because they were seen by the Roman state as an impending threat. Here I continue with this short series describing the imperial persecutions of Christians, from my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster). ****************************** Valerian (ruled 253-60 CE) Two years after Decius
April 1, 2026
Understanding the Gospels, Jesus, and the Spread of Christianity: Great Readers’ Questions
Weren’t Jews trying to make converts? Did Christians really do it mainly by telling stories about Jesus through word of mouth? And what did Jesus mean when he was talking about the Son of Man? Here are some of the excellent questions I’ve been asked by readers recently. QUESTION: Bart, My understanding is that Judaism WAS a proselytizing religion between about 150 BCE and 100 CE., which spread Judaism all around Mediterranean and parts of eastern Europe. I got that understanding from the book Crossing Over Sea and Land: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (2010) by Michael F. Bird. Michael Bird is apparently a well-known New Testament scholar in Australia. Are you familiar with him or with that book? What is your rationale for thinking he is incorrect?
April 5, 2026