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Jesus and Marriage: An Actual Argument!

So far I have pointed out that it is flat-out wrong to say that every Jewish man in the first century was married and was expected to be married. It is not only demographically impossible (there were not enough women to go around) but we know of Jewish men from the time of Jesus who were not married and were proud of it. Strikingly, they, like him, were apocalyptically minded Jews – such as the Essenes and the apostle Paul. I have also argued that whatever Mary Magdalene was to Jesus, she was not his lover and spouse, to the great disappointment of us all….. But is there an actual argument that Jesus was not married other than the silences? I think there is. And this is what it is. A good deal of Jesus’ teaching, of course, was ethical in nature, about how people ought to live and conduct themselves. Many people think of Jesus as one of the great moral teachers of all time, and I have no quarrel with that. But I [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T12:45:07-04:00January 27th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Jesus and Mary Magdalene

I pointed out in my last post that most people simply assume that Jesus was not married because there is no mention of his wife in any of our sources, or any mention that he ever had a wife. And so it is assumed that he did not have one. As Karen King pointed out in our discussion the other night at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, that is an argument from silence, and as such is not a very strong one – since, among other things, none of these sources indicates, either, that he was not married. And so this is not evidence in one direction or another. It’s a good point, but my own view is that the silence in this case is telling – though not for the reason people sometimes say. It is sometimes wrongly asserted – by no less authority than Dan Brown, in the Da Vinci Code – that if there was not claim that Jesus was not married that must mean that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T12:46:02-04:00January 26th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

Was Jesus Married?

I am en route just now, back from Las Vegas, where I participated in a discussion with two other scholars at the Black Mountain Institute on the question “Would It Matter If Jesus Were Married?” The Black Mountain Institute is part of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV); it sponsors events having to do with literature and history. Usually these involve two or more scholars, on stage, on chairs, with a moderator, discussing a topic of mutual interest. The moderator last night was Carol Harter, the former president of UNLV. The two other scholars were Karen King and Mark Jordan. Both Karen and Mark are very well known and highly respected scholars. Karen is a professor of early Christianity at Harvard, where she holds the oldest endowed chair, of any kind, in the country; her expertise is especially in early Christian Gnosticism, and she has become best known in the past few years for her role in publicizing the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” that I have blogged on before (search and see!). I’ve [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T12:46:37-04:00January 24th, 2014|Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Final Loose Threads on the Zealot Hypothesis

I think I’ve gone on about Aslan’s Zealot long enough. Maybe more than long enough, many of you may think. My plan is to make this the last post. Let me reiterate that I think it is an exceptionally well-written, engaging book, and we can all be thankful to Aslan for bringing important historical issues about Jesus to the public attention. I may think that he’s wrong about his central thesis, and I may recognize a lot of errors in his book (about history, about the NT, about early Christianity). But I appreciate very much that he has gotten people talking about Jesus from a historical perspective – something that I think is of utmost importance, especially in our American context where Jesus typically is only spoken of by believers who do not appreciate the importance of history for knowing, well, about the past! In this final post I want to speak about a couple of threads, loose traditions that are sometimes used to argue that Jesus was most likely a zealot, someone who was [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T17:36:17-04:00January 8th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Jesus Getting Angry

As often happens in this blog, I started down one path and have found myself on another. I began this thread by talking about the story of the leper in Papyrus Egerton 2. That made me want to say something about the healing of a leper in Mark 1:40-44. But to make my point I had to talk about a textual problem in v. 41. And that has gotten me to talk about Jesus’ getting angry. He does appear to get angry before healing the leper (as found in some of our ancient manuscripts). But what is he angry about? To answer *that* question one needs to consider what Mark says otherwise about Jesus getting angry – something that never happens in Matthew or Luke. But Jesus does get angry on several occasions in Mark’s Gospel. What is most interesting is that each account involves Jesus’ ability to perform miraculous deeds of healing. In Mark 9 we find the account of a man pleading with Jesus to cast an evil demon from his son, since [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:11:03-04:00September 21st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Speaking of Lepers

In yesterday’s post I mentioned the interesting story found in the Unknown Gospel (as it is called – even though part of it is now known!) contained in the second-century manuscript Papyrus Egerton 2. There’s an intriguing aspect of that story that I wanted to post on today, but I realized that to make sense of what I have to say would take *so* much background that – well, I should discuss the background instead of the point I want to make. So here’s the deal. There is an interesting textual variant in Mark’s story of the man cured of leprosy by Jesus – that is, some of our textual witnesses have one way of reading one of the verses, and other textual witnesses have a different way. And it really matters. Here is the passage (Mark 1:39-45) in a literal translation. The textual variant I am interested in is in v. 41 (there are lots of other textual variants among our manuscripts in this passage; this particular one is the only one I’m interested [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:11:11-04:00September 20th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Jesus?

This will be my last post for a while dealing with the question of whether Jesus’ ethics can be translated from his own mythological context of Jewish apocalyptic thought into the modern world that is based (for me at least) on a completely different view of life, meaning, and reality. In my last post I indicated that I thought that it was indeed possible to make this kind of translation if one wants to. But I ended by asking why one – or rather I – would want to. That is, why focus on Jesus in particular? I don’t think I want to do so because I think that Jesus is “the greatest ethical teacher of all time.” I have no idea if this is even a contest that can be won, and even if it is, I am not qualified to evaluate Jesus in relation to other great ethical teachers so as to declare him a winner. So that seems to me to be a dead end. So why Jesus? I don’t have a [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T00:22:00-05:00January 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Jesus Speak Greek?

Several of my recent posts have elicited comments from multiple participants (same comment, asked in a variety of ways). One of them had to do with the question of the language that Jesus would have spoken with Pontius Pilate during his trial. A number of people have asked “why not Greek”? The logic behind this question/solution is that Pilate as an educated Roman would have been fluent in Greek; and Jesus, living in “Galilee of the Gentiles,” where he probably engaged in a small business (carpentry) would have had to communicate with the non-Jews in his midst, and so probably could speak Greek as well. Moreover, he grew up in Nazareth not far from the urbane city of Sepphoris, and would have acquired Greek language and culture there. That is a common view among many students of the Bible. And so what’s wrong with it? As with most interesting questions, this one requires virtually an entire book to answer, so I will give only the short version, which is this: it is true that Pilate [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-20T01:04:49-05:00August 24th, 2012|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

A Final (for now) Post on the Resurrection

A final posting, for now, on the question I was asked on the resurrection. Most people – even those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection – never stop to think about what the idea of resurrection would have meant to first century Jews. Jesus’ followers, of course, were just that, Jews from Palestine in the first century. Today people (Christians) are so accustomed to thinking of Jesus’ resurrection that there is nothing odd about it – it fits directly into our (their) way of thinking about the world. But in fact the very notion of resurrection is a thoroughly Jewish notion with deep roots in the Jewish apocalyptic (as opposed, say, to the American capitalistic) world view. Throughout most of their earlier history, Jews did not hold to the idea of a resurrected afterlife. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), most authors (e.g., of Job and Ecclesiastes) think that death is the end of the story, so that there is no afterlife, or that if there is an afterlife it is a shadowy [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:46-04:00April 29th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

More on the Resurrection

As I pointed out in the previous posting, we cannot know that there was an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. We also cannot know which of his twelve disciples came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, or when they started to believe it. They later indicated that he was raised on the third day, as Paul, a later Christian who knew some of the disciples, tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. But Paul does not indicate that the disciples of Jesus started to believe that it was three days after Jesus’ death that his disciples started to believe he had been raised –only that that was the day on which he was raised. They may have come to realize it weeks later. The Gospels, written decades after Paul, indicate that the disciples came to believe on the third day. And it indicates that they all (except Judas Iscariot, of course) came to believe. I don’t know if that is historically right or not. There are a lot of Christian [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:55-04:00April 28th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Another Question on the Resurrection

[h3]EMAIL QUESTION[/h3] From all of my studies, I still have one open question about the resurrection…or the resurrection story. I do not understand how or why or when that story was invented. It is easy to understand the retroactive invention of the virgin birth stories and other theoretical miracles of Jesus, but it seems to me that no one would have gone to the trouble to create those prior stories if they had not believed sincerely in the resurrection. …but how did the resurrection story get started? Practically speaking, after Jesus’ crucifixion, I imagine the Disciples were terrified. My hunch is they wanted to get out of Dodge as quickly as possible. So, after the horror of the crucifixion…..what in the world triggered one of them to say…”you know, Jesus was really the Messiah…we have to spread his message…but nobody will believe us so how do we get the message across? O.K. Let’s make up a story about him being resurrected…and then we will tell everyone about that miracle and then certainly they will believe [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:46:04-04:00April 28th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

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