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Jesus’ Anger in Mark 1:41


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! Other 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 […]

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September 23, 2013

The Messy World of Second Century Gospels


This thread has taken several detours (never mind the mixed metaphor), and I want to end it where I had planned to take it all along.   What’s been going on in my mind has been an issue that I raised in one of the posts, about how we are to conceptualize the situation of first and early second century when it comes to our Gospels.   I’ll talk about it with reference to Papyrus Egerton 2, about which I’ve only said a few things – lots more there to talk about.  (But I’ll be moving on after this.)  Before doing so let me recap the situation: 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 else was dependent […]

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September 25, 2013

Early Gospels: A Messier Scenario


In my last post I was trying to imagine what the situation was with the first and second century Gospels, and proposed a Scenario One in which there were set Gospels, some earlier than others, with later ones using earlier ones for some of their information, along with other information from other Gospels (and oral traditions) that no longer survive. I guess that’s how I tend to view the situation some of the time. But I wonder if in fact the reality was a lot messier than that (I call the first scenario messy because it is *not* the simpler view that a lot of people assume: that there were basically four Gospels from the first century and in the second century the Gospels either borrowed from those Gospels or made things up; that’s a pretty “clean” view of the situation. But I don’t think it’s plausible).   Scenario Two: Much Messier without Fixed Boundaries I have begun to suspect that the real situation was even messier than the first option I sketched. What if, […]

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But Did It Really Happen?


During my recent posts on the story of Jesus and the leper in Mark 1:40-44, I got a number of comments from readers that made me realize that I wasn’t being at all clear about what I was talking about. For a professional communicator, that is, well, an unsettling thought! These comments came from people who appear to have understood that I was talking about what really happened (historically) in the episode. Did Jesus really get angry or did he really feel compassion? Some of these readers stressed that what really mattered was not his emotion but the fact that he did what he did; some others wanted me to know that it didn’t matter to them which emotion was ascribed to Jesus, because in their opinion the whole thing never actually happened at all. Both of these views (they’re obviously at the opposite ends of the spectrum) thought I was discussing historical realities. But that’s not what I was talking about. I too don’t believe the episode “actually” happened (i.e., that it’s a historical […]

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September 26, 2013

Jesus at the Movies: Infancy Narratives


I’m having a terrific time with my undergraduate course this semester, a first-year seminar that I call “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.” Last month I posted my syllabus for the class on the blog. This past week was the first time we’ve done any film in the class, and it was very interesting. For the class I had the students do a writing assignment, in which they compared the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke in detail (Mark and John, of course, don’t *have* anything about Jesus’ birth). They were to find both similarities and differences, and then they were to decide if any of the differences were irreconcilable. This was to set up what they were going to see in the film clips that I was set to show. The similarities are pretty interesting if you come up with a full list: Jesus is born in Bethlehem; his mother Mary is a virgin; after his birth he is visited by a group of men (shepherds in Luke; wise men in Matthew) who have been […]

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September 27, 2013

Jesus Position Papers


Several readers have asked me about the weekly papers that I assign for my undergraduate seminar on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.” I call these “position” papers because the students are required to stake out a position on a controversial topic. There are no (absolutely) right or wrong answers. The point of the papers is to get the students to think about a topic before we have a discussion about it in class, so that when we do talk about it, we’re not simply pooling our ignorance.. For that reason I don’t actually grade the papers, at least in any regular way. Instead. if the student has clearly thought about the question, answered it clearly, and shown that they have invested some time reflecting on it, I give the paper an S (= Satisfactory); if they have not, I mark it a U (= unsatisfactory). All the papers are to be two pages, double-spaced. Here are the instructions for this term’s papers. (The students write other papers as well: they are writing a book review […]

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October 1, 2013

Bill O’Reilly’s Jesus


Several people have (urgently) asked me to write up a review of the new blockbuster hit, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus.   So, my short answer to the request is that, well, I haven’t read it.   It did just come out after all!   But I see it is – from the get-go – the #1 book (in the world!) on Amazon.  I will obviously have to read it:  just as I have to read Reza Aslan’s Zealot.   The latter I will be reading over the next month or so in conjunction with my course on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film,” since otherwise I won’t be able to grade my students’ book reviews of it!   But I will not be assigning O’Reilly, since it just came out and I won’t be changing my syllabus. I’ve ordered the O’Reilly book (against my wishes; I really don’t want to “contribute  to the cause.”  But I obviously have to read it) and will be able to give an evaluation soon enough.   For now I should make just a couple of comments. […]

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October 2, 2013

Killing Jesus is Killing Me….


I received my copy of Killing Jesus in the mail today and started to glance at it.  I know I said I would read it, but I’m just not sure I can bring myself to do it. The opening “Note to Readers” makes one’s heart sink.  We are told that this will be a “fact-based book.”  Oh, that’s good, the reader thinks: it won’t be biased but will be objective, based only on facts.   Until you begin to read the opening page of ch. 1 “Heavily armed solders from the capital city of Jerusalem are marching to this small town, intent on finding and killing the baby boy.  They are a mixed-race group of foreign mercenaries from Greece, Gaul, and Syria….” Oh dear.  So, for our FOX historian of antiquity writing this account – the Gospel according to Bill – who is giving us only “facts,” it turns out that the “slaughter of the innocents” in Bethlehem, taken from Matthew’s infancy narrative, is a factual, historical account.  We not only know it happened, we know […]

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October 3, 2013

Riled by O’Reilly


OK, I know I promised to read and review Killing Jesus. But I’m not sure I can do it. It’s just so aggravating. Pointing out its flaws is like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ll make one general comment in this post and in the next one mention one of the leading themes of the book to show why its so problematic and then, unless I have a complete change of heart or people ask me pointed questions, I think I’ll just let it go. For now, a general comment. I was one of the 4893 people who wrote a book *about* the Da Vinci Code (Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine, 2004). The other 4892 people, so far as I know, were religious – usually religious scholars – who were afraid that Dan Brown might lead the faithful astray by his wild claims, and for religious reasons wanted to set the record straight. As an agnostic, that was nowhere […]

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October 4, 2013

Follow That Star!!


In a post a couple of days ago I mentioned that if the wise men were following the star to Bethlehem, they would be walking in circles. When asked about it by several people I explained that since the earth is not “fixed” — it rotates and is in orbit around the sun — stars are never in the same place in the sky, so “following” one would take you all over the place. Here’s a hilarious illustration of what would happen if the wisemen followed a celestial body to find Jesus. I have borrowed this (no permission required, only acknowledgment) from here: http://what-if.xkcd.com/25/ Acknowledgement is here: http://xkcd.com/license.html ***************************************************************************************************************** Three Wise Men The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed? What path would you trace on the Earth? Does it converge to a fixed cycle? —N. Murdoch If the wise men leave Jerusalem and walk toward the star Sirius, day and night, even when it’s below the horizon, this is the […]

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October 5, 2013

Jesus as a First-Century Tea-Partier


I have decided not to provide a full and detailed review of O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus.  It doesn’t really deserve it, and much more of what I have indicated before – on which see my previous posts.  I will say that the book is extremely well written and easy on the eyes.   It is entertaining.  A lot of human-interest material, which is both its strength and its very great weakness, as almost all of this, as I’ve mentioned before, is simply MADE UP, even though it is presented as if were historical fact.   There is page after page after page of that kind of thing.   This is not a research book written by a scholar and his writing buddy — with, for example, footnotes indicating where they got their information from.  It can’t be that, since almost all of the details didn’t come from ancient sources but from their own fertile imaginations   And since that is the main source for the Gospel according to Bill, and since most of us know what Bill’s imagination spends its […]

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October 6, 2013

Colbert on his Hero O’Reilly


OK, this really is my last post on O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus.   It’s not much of one!   But today is the day I normally take “off” from the blog.  Monday’s are my day from hell:  a three-hour undergraduate seminar (“Jesus in Scholarship and Film”) in the morning (today: students compared all the accounts of Jesus’ Passion in the four Gospels, seeing if there were any differences they thought were irreconcilable; we discussed it all; and then we watched four movie clips – Passion scenes from the 1925 silent Ben Hur; the 1959 Ben Hur; the Greatest Story Ever Told; and the 1977 Zephirelli Jesus of Nazareth – in order to see how directors chose what to include, what to exclude, what to do when different Gospels relate different stories, that sometimes really can’t be easily reconciled, etc.   Great stuff) and then a three hour seminar (“Early Christian Apocrypha”) in the afternoon (today: The Coptic Gospel of Thomas – -when was it written? Where? In what language?  Is it dependent on the NT Gospels?  Is it Gnostic?  […]

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October 7, 2013

My New Course for the Great Courses


Among other things, this semester I’m working on a new course for The Teaching Company (also known as The Great Courses). This will be my eighth course with them. The other seven have all (with one exception) been 24-lecture courses, with each lecture at 30 minutes. So too will this one. Doing these courses is a great privilege and a terrific experience. What I especially appreciate about them is that they reach many thousands of people who may not otherwise have expert-level access to the material covered in them. And I think that when it comes to issues related to religion – and Christianity in particular – that’s really important. We have enough ignorance in the world as it is, and anything that we can do to combat it is all to the good. If you aren’t familiar with the Great Courses, you would do yourself a great service to look them up. http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/search/search.aspx?searchphrase=erhman I myself have watched a number of courses in other fields (e.g. The History of Rome, How to Understand and Appreciate […]

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October 8, 2013

Widespread Misconceptions about the Council of Nicea


One of the reasons I’m excited about doing my new course for the Teaching Company (a.k.a. The Great Courses) is that I’ll be able to devote three lectures to the Arian Controversy, the Conversion of the emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nicea (in 325 CE). It seems to me that a lot more people know about the Council of Nicea today than 20 years ago – i.e., they know that there *was* such a thing – and at the same time they know so little about it. Or rather, what they think they know about it is WRONG. I suppose we have no one more to blame for this than Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code, where, among other things, we are told that Constantine called the Council in order to “decide” on whether Jesus was divine or not, and that they took a vote on whether he was human or “the Son of God.” And, according to Dan Brown’s lead character (his expert on all things Christian), Lee Teabing, “it was a […]

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October 9, 2013

More Conspiracy Nonsense


Poor Hercules, trying to fight the Hydra. Once he lops off *one* head…. So I’ve received several emails over the past couple of days about the breathtaking new announcement to be made on October 19 (assuming the world still is functioning after October 17!) in London by “American Biblical scholar” Joseph Atwill (whom – I have to admit – I have never even heard of, to my recollection) In this announcement Mr. (so far as I can tell, from his blog, he is not a “Dr.”; in what sense is he a “scholar”? Is it because he’s read a bunch of book? Hmm….) Atwill will “prove” that “the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they fabricated the entire story of Jesus Christ.” In other words – brace yourself – Jesus is in fact a myth. Has anyone heard this before? For the full story, go to http://uk.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11201273.htm Atwill is a different breed from most mythicists. That’s probably good and bad. Good because, well, you wouldn’t like to be like the others. […]

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October 10, 2013

Constantine and Christianity


One of the readers of this blog pointed out to me in a comment a *third* thing that is commonly said about the emperor Constantine and the council of Nicea that is also wrong (the first two being the ones I mentioned: that at the council they [or even he, Constantine!] decided which books would be in the canon of the New Testament and that it was at the council that a vote was taken on whether or not Jesus was to be considered the Son of God. Wrong, wrong, wrong – both of them). It is widely believed (for some inscrutable reason) that Constantine made Christianity the “state religion” of the Roman empire. This too is wrong. So just a very brief bit of background, which will involve another (more or less unrelated) bit of misinformation that is commonly held having to do with the history of Christian persecution up to Constantine’s time. Many people appear to think that Christianity from the very beginning was an illegal religion that was constantly persecuted by the […]

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October 11, 2013

Some Blog Self-Scrutiny


I’ve spent the past day or so thinking about the Blog.   By many standards I think it is going very well.   As I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, we managed to raise $37,000 last year for the charities that the blog supports, all of them dealing with hunger and homelessness.  If we do that for a number of years – we’re talking some serious money!  Most of that amount came from membership fees; a good chunk came from extra donations, some of them extraordinarily generous.  I anticipate that we will have an even higher total this year, although it is yet to be seen.  In any event, we are slightly ahead of where we were last year at this point. But I never seem satisfied!  Maybe it’s my driven personality.  But I wonder how we can do better.   Much better. Some things we simply can’t do *more* of.   I already post about six times a week, and I try to mix up what I do: some posts are “public interest” items (like O’Reilly or that  […]

October 13, 2013

Jesus Books


QUESTION/REQUEST: You did mention one thing above that I think would be good to expand on: What are good books to read about the life of Jesus (and related issues) based on scholarship but intended to the general, but intelligent, reader. I would like you to consider someday to publish here a list of solid books (from various points of view), other than what you have written since most of us are likely familiar with your work, about the life of Jesus, the growth of Christianity, solid theology from various perspectives, the history and description of first century life in the Roman world and other issues that are written based on valid historical and textual research that are intended for readers like me…well educated but not a scholar.   RESPONSE: What follows is a bibliography just on the historical Jesus that I published once, over ten years ago now, supplemented with a few of the most significant works to appear since. The list is highly selective – mainly books that I think are either good […]

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October 14, 2013

Podcast on My New Course


Here is a link to a podcast that just came out from The Great Courses that deals with my (relatively) new course “The Greatest Controversies of Early Christianity.” http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/Courses/PodcastEpisode.aspx?eid=4&id=-50645312&ai=87987&sa=MH57&cm_mmc=email-_-Podcast104ActCT20130927-_-body-_-listen&cmp=email It has the virtue as well of including conversations (after mine) with two other professors and their courses as well.   In any event, if anyone has wondered a bit what my course is actually about, this is a fairly painless way to find out.

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October 15, 2013