I woke up this morning thinking I'd like to start finishing out this little mini-thread on Misquoting Jesus by talking about how I never thought of anything in the book being particularly controversial, even though it struck a lot of people that way.  I was going to call the post "On Being Controversial."  And then I thought Wait a minute: That sounds familiar!  And I checked it out, and I wrote almost exactly that post some three years ago.   So, rather than reinventing the wheel, I give it here. After this, in my next post, I'll explain how one claim that I do make about the manuscripts among the New Testament *is* controversial -- not one I make (to a general audience) in Misquoting Jesus but one I make in scholarly contexts, one that really irritates some (a lot) of my colleagues. ******************************************************************* In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection.   An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep [...]

In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection.   An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep referring to my work as “controversial.”    I hear this all the time.  And truth be told, I’ve always found it bit odd and a disconcerting.   This past week I’ve had two people tell me that they know that I “like to be controversial.”   That’s actually not the case at all.   One person told me that she had seen a TV show where someone had said that they didn’t believe that Jesus existed, and she thought that was right up my alley.   I didn’t bother to tell her that I had written an entire book arguing that Jesus certainly did exist.  She simply assumed that this was the sort of view that I myself would have and delight in making public. The reason I find that the idea I’m controversial is that my views about the historical Jesus, the authorship of the books of [...]