The authorship, history, and content of 27 early Christian texts.
Whenever violence erupts on the international scene (and even sometimes when it doesn’t) we hear claims that the portents of doom announced in the pages of the New Testament are coming to fruition. “Wars and rumors of wars” (Mark 13:7) draw the attention of many to what the earliest Christian texts had to say about …
Continue reading End of the World Scenarios in the New Testament
Unfortunately, there are too many interpreters who read the New Testament as supporting the notion that Christianity (never mentioned in the NT) was intended to replace Judaism as God’s saving religion and Christians were intended to displace Jews as God’s favored people. After all, as some still claim, “the Jews killed Christ.” Doesn’t that warrant …
Continue reading How did Paul Understand the Fate of His Unbelieving Fellow Jews?
It may come as a surprise to many, but Christianity, if we define it as a religious movement intentionally separate and distinct from Judaism, is not apostolic. Let me state my thesis a bit more fully and then provide the evidence. First, to remind readers of the obvious, all of the apostles were Jews. Historically, …
Among the earliest messengers (Greek = apostolos) proclaiming the messiahship of Jesus were the twelve specially chosen disciples and, later, secondary followers of Jesus who learned about him from those who knew him. Initially, these messengers limited their target audience to Jews; after all, the Jewish messiah had come; they based their belief on prophecies …
Continue reading The First “Apostle to the Gentiles”? The Possessed Man from Gergesa
There are precious few stories in the gospels in which Jesus converses with women. Even fewer are those that grant the woman conversant a voice. Among the latter examples are the conversations between Jesus and the sisters Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42; John 11:21-27, 32). The conversation we are interested in today is the one …
Continue reading The Underappreciated Story of the Samaritan Woman
In this series of posts, we will explore the history of Jesus’s closest followers as recorded across numerous ancient Christian traditions. Along the way, we will find that these traditions are often confused, contradictory, or seriously lacking in details. Nevertheless, we will attempt to distill all the historical data possible and, at times, risk delving …
Getting as close to the historical Jesus as possible has been a preoccupation with biblical scholars since at least the 18th century. Many questions must be asked. For example, which of the Jesus-traditions (sayings and stories) now appearing in the New Testament and elsewhere are the oldest? Which are most likely historical? Which gospel was …
Our sources of information about Jesus are almost entirely limited to the four New Testament gospels. There are also certain non-Christian reports that help to confirm a few of the events in Jesus’s life including especially his crucifixion. Biblical historians, however, maintain that the gospels were written decades after Jesus’s death. That being the case, …
Continue reading The Human Jesus: How Much Do We Really Know About Him?
In some of my university classes on Christian origins we discuss Jesus and the gospels. A number of my students are nonplussed to find that historians do not automatically add Jesus’s miracles to the historical data bank of all the things that Jesus likely did. “All the gospels,” they correctly claim, “present Jesus as a …
At this time of year throughout Christendom churches and homes (no longer, it appears, governmental institutions, at least in the U.S.) recreate for display the scene of Jesus’s birth. Actually, they depict not the birth itself but a moment in time afterward. How long afterward? That is a question that cannot be satisfactorily answered. The …
Continue reading Elements from the Christmas Nativity Display: What Gospel Does That Come From?
David Christian Clausen 