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The Distinctively Jewish Roots of Jesus’ Ethics
One of the points I try to emphasize in my book Love They Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West is that Jesus’ teachings were not made out of whole cloth but are deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible and teachings of other Jewish teachers of his day. Here is one place in my book where I try to stress the point. ****************************** Throughout the prophets of Hebrew Scripture (Isaiah, Amos, etc.) we find a recurring emphasis that God is concerned for the poor, the outcast, the vulnerable – and he expects his people to be actively concerned as well, helping rather than exploiting those in need. Living centuries later and dealing with different situations, Jesus frequently aligned himself with such prophetic teachings. He shared their assumptions about what it means to live as God wants – above all, to care for others and especially those in need, rather than for one’s own life and desires. Jesus was not alone in this; similar views could be found in […]
April 7, 2026
You’re Invited: The Blog Turns 14
I started this blog back in April 2012, and here we still are: fourteen years, thousands of posts later, a few million comments (some of them even on topic!), and over $3 million donated to charity later. I have to say, I never saw this coming. To celebrate, we’re doing something we’ve never done before: a live cocktail hour. No lecture or slides or Q&A. Instead, bring whatever you drink when you’re about to engage in a lively debate (wine? whiskey? sparkling water? coffee? a nice bourbon if you’re feeling Pauline…) and join me on Zoom for an evening of questions that are too fun for a formal course and too academic for normal dinner conversation. We’ll be tackling some of the most pressing hypotheticals in early Christian scholarship, such as: Which biblical figure would make the best Misquoting Jesus podcast guest, and who would be a disaster? Which biblical figure survives a modern 24-hour cable news cycle, and who is completely destroyed by day two? The early church has to survive one family-style holiday […]
March 30, 2026
Anniversary Post #1: Defending Misquoting Jesus
Here I begin my 14-post “anniversary” series with the very first post that appeared on the blog (April 3, 2014). Recall: this thread will consist of 14 posts from each of the 14 years of the blogs life, one per year, 13 of them from … April of that year. (Not this year’s, since if you follow the blog, they are still fresh in your mind. This first one is rather telling. Among other things, it tells how much more thin-skinned, snarky, and combative I was in the days of my youth (fourteen years ago!). Hey, go for the jugular! Even so, since it was post #1, it simply has to start the thread. ****************************** Probably more than any of my other books, Misquoting Jesus provoked a loud and extensive critique from scholars
April 9, 2026
Anniversary Post #2: Why Were the Gospels Written Anonymously?
Here is the second of my “Anniversary Posts” given in celebration of the fourteenth year of the blog. Unlike the snarky first in the series, this one is meant to be strictly informative, on an issue that I regularly get asked about by people who come to realize that the Gospels were not originally circulated in the names we now know them by. But they weren’t called something else. They were anonymous. But why? Here was my answer from April 2013, and it’s pretty much what I think now in April 2026! ****************************** It is always interesting to ask why an author chose to remain anonymous, never more so than with the Gospels of the New Testament. In some instances an ancient author did not need to name himself because his readers knew perfectly well who he was and did not need to be told. That is almost certainly the case with the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. These are private letters sent from someone who calls himself “the elder” to a church […]
April 11, 2026
Celebrating The Blog’s 14th Anniversary! Do You Have a Favorite Post?
Want to help celebrate the beginning of year 15 of the blog? Choose one of your favorite posts (even if you started, say, last week) for us to revisit (see belowe for details) We celebrated our 14th anniversary on April 3 (this year, 2026). Whoa. Never saw that coming. We’re gonna keep celebrating for a while. First I should say that this longevity entails some interesting numbers. We have had 4300 posts (most by me; but some by guest scholars and occasionally Platinum members); on average that means about six a week. These posts have generated about 165,710 comments from readers, so around 228 per week; and about 55,000 of those are my replies to questions, so about 75 per week. OK then. More important, we have raised a boatload of money for our charities, nearly $3.5 million since we started; with the last three years being by far the best for our, nearly $1.5 million combined. The vast chunk of that has come from membership fees — that is, from your generous decision to […]
April 8, 2026
Anniversary Post #3: My Response to an Ill-Tempered Richard Carrier
Here is the third post in my series celebrating our 14th blog anniversary, a post from each of our 14 past years. This is the one I’ve chosen from April 2014; it’s another one that involves a response to a rather spirited attempt to show that I’m an idiot. I tried not to respond TOO much in kind, but, well, I guess it is a bit feisty…. ****************************** Sometimes I think that if I’m “getting it from all sides,” I may be doing something right. The religious conservatives seems to be up in arms about my book How Jesus Became God – both conservative evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics like the Very Reverend Robert Barron. In fact, as I’ve said, I do not think anything in the book is inimical to Christian faith, unless it is completely committed to a view of the infallibility of the Bible and its full, historical accuracy. The Christianity I admire is not
April 12, 2026
Anniversary Post #4: Why Gospels Matter Even Where They Are Not Historical
If the Gospels are not historical, why should they matter?? Here is my anniversary post from April 2015; in it I expostulate on the importance of the Gospels even if they are not historically accurate, and challenge the idea that history is all that matters. (It’s longer than my typical post.) It is taken from the ending of my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne) based on feedback / pushback I was getting from some readers, and explains why “memory” is just as important (more?) as history. ****************************** Like most authors, I get a lot of email from people who have read my books. I find one of the comments I repeatedly receive somewhat puzzling and even disheartening. To explain it, I need to provide a bit of background. When I discuss historical understandings of the New Testament and of the historical Jesus, I frequently refer to the problems of our sources. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death by people who were not eyewitnesses and had probably never laid eyes on an eyewitness. […]
April 14, 2026
Anniversary Post #5: Why I Was Reluctant to Write The Triumph of Christianity
My book The Triumph of Christianity was (by far?) the most difficult book I’ve written for a general audience (difficult to write, not to read). And it was the most learned in many ways, as well as the one I learned most from by writing it, because of the range of informatoin I had to deal with. Here is my Anniversary Post #5, published in 2016, before I was fully committed (that is, under contract) to write it, explaining why I knew it would be unusually hard. ****************************** When my agent Roger and I decided that we might want to explore the possibility of going with a different publisher, the first step was to come up with a book proposal to shop around. For ten years or so I had been wanting to write a particular book, but had always put it off because it had seemed like such a MAJOR undertaking. I came to think that this was the perfect time to pursue it, to propose doing a new book on a completely new […]
April 15, 2026
Celebrating our 14th Anniversary! Check Out the Unusual Q&A!
As you may know, this month we are celebrating fourteen years of the blog’s existence. The actual anniversary took place back on April 3rd, and to mark the occasion, we did something a little different. Instead of a lecture or formal Q&A, we hosted a live cocktail hour built entirely (okay, well mostly) around hypotheticals. We discussed the kinds of questions that are too playful for a classroom but still rooted in real historical thinking. I offered a few answers to get us started, but the real fun was hearing yours. It turns out that even the most offbeat questions can open up genuinely interesting ways of thinking about the past. If you missed it, here’s the full recording.
April 19, 2026
Anniversary Post #6 Is Mark’s Seemingly Simple Gospel Unsophisticated?
On the surface, Mark’s Gospel seems straightforward and simple, a kind of nuts-and-bolts account of Jesus’ life from his baptism to the empty tomb. But is it just that? Here is my Anniversary post #6 celebrating our 14th Blog anniversary, taken from April 2017, where I dealt with this issue in response to a reader’s question: ****************************** This post focuses on the literary artistry of the Gospel of Mark – is it a fairly unsophisticated account of Jesus’ life and death? The question itself will require a bit of set-up and explanation. In an earlier post I argued that
April 16, 2026
Anniversary Post #7: Doing a Graduate Degree in Early Christian Studies
It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to get a PhD in New Testament/Early Christianity, right? It ain’t quantum physics! How hard can it be? This is an issue I addressed in April 2018, which I present here as my Anniversary post #7. ****************************** I often get questions from people who have been in a career for a while who want to know if it is feasible for them to go back to school and get a PhD in my field of New Testament/Early Christianity. In most cases it is not feasible at all, simply because it is way too complicated and involved — and takes way more time than one would think.
April 18, 2026
Anniversary Post #8: When Is a Contradiction Not a Contradiction?
How can you debate about whether there are contradictions in the Bible if you don’t agree on what contradictions are? In this Anniversary POst #8, taken from April 2019, I deal with this issue. At the time we were doing a blog fundraiser involving a debate between me and an Oxford-trained theologian named Matthew Firth, who insisted the Gospels have no contradictions of any kind. I, well, disagreed with this view. What ensued was a multi-post back and forth that you can still see (either go posts from o April 2019 or do a word search for Firth). Here is my preliminary post about the issue of “contradictions,” exploring what the term means and does not mean, in my view. ****************************** As many of you know, Rev. Matthew Firth, an Anglican rector trained in theology at Oxford, will soon be participating on the blog in a fund-raising event, for which many of you, bless your souls, have already donated. This will entail a debate with me over whether there are contradictions in the Gospels. The […]
April 21, 2026
Bad Bible Jokes. (And do you have any?)
I’m visiting my daughter and her family up in New Hampshire just now, and the 16 year-old is reading A Children’s Bible, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet, for her English class. But it’s filled with biblical allusions from the book of Genesis and elsewhere, so over dinner last night I decided it was time to tell some Bible jokes. You hear a lot of these if you go to Bible college, trust me. And maybe otherwise! Here are four of the classics. Do you have any? Let’s hear ‘em. Where is baseball first mentioned in the Bible?
April 22, 2026
Different Words, VERY Different Theologies, and Understanding Which Words They Were. Readers’ Questions
Here are several recent questions I have received that are oddly (and by serendipity) closely related to each other and connected with knowing the New Testament writings said and meant. QUESTION: Don’t you think NT scholars need to stop calling people raised from the dead back to mortality “resuscitations” (e.g., those in 1 Kgs, 2 Kgs, various NT scenes, and Hellenistic traditions)? These aren’t resuscitations (from an almost dead state), they are real “resurrections” from a truly dead state! NT scholarship has co-opted the word “resurrection” to mean raised from the dead back to immortality, but that’s not what that term means, it just means raised from the dead. In truth, Jesus was both resurrected AND made immortal, and one needs to explain why Jesus’ followers thought both of these things about Jesus. RESPONSE: I’d say
April 23, 2026
Anniversary Post #9: Misquoting Misquoting Jesus
Nothing is more frustrating than writing a book and having people — friends and foes — misread and misunderstand it and think it’s about something it’s not. (OK, I think I just lied. There are more frustrating things. It was more frustrating when the the “f” and “b” keys on the keyboard on my laptop stopped working. I had to copy and paste the letters in for weeks) (Well, actually, now that I think about it, there are lots more frustrating things. But still…) That’s the topic of my post done in April 2020, which I give here as one of my favorites, Anniversary Post #9, on misunderstandings of my book Misquoting Jesus ****************************** Misquoting Jesus is my most widely read book. And I continue to be a bit amazed and dismayed at how widely it is misunderstood. The book was meant to deal with one very specific issue connected with the New Testament, and people who have read it – let alone the people who have not – often assume it’s about some *other* […]
April 25, 2026
A Letter Written by Jesus!? Anniversary Post #10
I sometimes get asked if Jesus ever wrote anything. Well, it depends whom you ask. As it turns out, we do have a couple of ancient writings claiming to be written by Jesus himself. Here is the most famous one that we still have that I blogged about in April 2022, as our Anniversary Post #10. ****************************** In an earlier post I talked about whether Jesus could read, and came up with the definite answer:
April 26, 2026
Active Pastors Who Have Lost Their Faith: Anniversary Post #11
Here’s a post that covers a topic many of you may have wondered about, others of you have asked me about, and yet others of you may never have much thought about! Pastors in the pulpit who are no longer believers. Whoa. This is Anniversary Post #11, from April 2023. ****************************** Are you curious about Christian Pastors who have lost their faith? You may not know this, but if you’re in a Christian church – whether it’s a traditional Roman Catholic church, Episcopalian, Southern Baptist, Independent-Bible-Thumping-Fire-and Brimstone-Fundamentalist – your priest/pastor may be losing his/her faith, or already lost it. And yet still be in the pulpit. There are some times when you might suspect something was up. Other times, you’d have no clue. I’ve been there, on both sides of that equation. I won’t talk about the loss of faith on the part of pastors who were preaching in front of me every week. But I can say something about myself, in the pulpit, desperately trying to hold on to my faith, and seeing it […]
April 28, 2026
An Amazing Fragment of a Lost Gospel: Anniversary Post #12
Did Jesus tell Peter that his “sheep” (followers) did not need to worry about being torn to shreds by the wolves (persecutors), since, well, when they were, they’d be dead anyway? Celebrating our 14th anniversary of the blog (starting April 2012), I have been posting 14 favorite posts from previous Aprils. This one is from April 2024, on one of my all time favorite Gospel fragments that may be from the otherwise-partially-known Gospel of Peter. It records an intriguing conversation between Jesus and Peter, if nothing else… ****************************** One of the most captivating tiny fragments of a lost Gospel discovered in modern times came from a trash heap excavated from the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, one of many thousands of manuscript fragments found there, some of them Christian but most of them non-Christian (most of which were non-literary texts, that is, personal letters, land deeds, divorce certificates, bills of sale, etc.). Did this fragment come from Gospel of Peter? The “Gospel of Peter” we have today, which was discovered in 1886, is, unfortunately,
April 29, 2026
Was Jesus the Incarnation of an Angel? Anniversary Post #13
A lot of people had trouble agreeing with the view I set out in this post from April 2025; most reading it now probably will still. But I stick by it! So here is Anniversary post #13. For many years I was puzzled by Paul’s Christology–his views of Christ. All the various things he said about it didn’t seem to add up to a coherent whole to me, even though I thought and thought and thought about it. But I finally found the piece that, when added to the puzzle, made it all fit together. I think now I can make sense of [pretty much] every Christological statement in Paul’s letters. This not because I myself finally figured it out, but because I finally read some discussions that actually made sense, and saw that they are almost certainly right. Here’s what I say about it in How Jesus Became God.
April 30, 2026
A Common But Lousy Argument That We KNOW What the NT Originally Said: Anniversary Post #14
Scholars sometimes make an argument that they themselves surely (surely!) know isn’t very good, but that certainly sounds convincing to audiences that don’t know the full picture and so have little way of evaluating it. I seem to run across that a lot. Here in my 14th and final Anniversary Post celebrating the blog’s fourteen years of mortal existence, I give one from the very first month of the blog, the final post of April 2012, which dealt with a particularly common instance of just such an argument. ****************************** I have had three debates with Dan Wallace (professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary and longtime friend) on the question of whether or not we can know for certain, or with relative reliability, whether we have the “original” text of the New Testament. At the end of the day, my answer is usually “we don’t know.” For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter. And if I had […]
May 5, 2026