What Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God” has been a source of debate among scholars across the academic and religious spectrum. For the past century or so, many scholars and historians have claimed that Jesus of Nazareth never intended to launch a movement or found a community at all, that he was an “apocalyptic prophet” who believed that the end of the world was coming in his own lifetime.

For these scholars, the “kingdom of God” that Jesus had in mind was a fiery cataclysm when God would kill all of the Romans, and anyone else opposed to Jesus, and establish Jesus as the ruler of all the earth. A recent example of this general approach was the international bestseller Zealot, written by a Muslim professor of creative writing, Reza Aslan, in 2013, which portrayed Jesus as a Jewish nationalist who at least sympathized with those elements of his society arguing for a holy war against Rome.

The idea that Jesus was an “apocalyptic prophet,” first popularized in 1906 by the medical missionary and scholar Albert Schweitzer, is still widely taught in many seminaries and Near Eastern Studies departments to this day. The most famous scholars upholding this increasingly challenged theory are Bart Ehrman and Dale Allison, a Christian professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. As proof that Jesus believed the world was coming to an end soon, scholars such as Ehrman point to sayings of Jesus such as Mark 8:38: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come in power.” This means, Ehrman says, that Jesus was a false prophet and clearly wrong about what God intended: the world did not come to an end, after all, and Jesus died on the cross a shocked and disillusioned failure.

But in recent years, even many secular New Testament scholars have rejected the idea that Jesus was an “end times” prophet proclaiming the imminent apocalypse.

Oldest Parts of New Testament Don’t Mention the End of the World at All

For one thing, many of the proof texts often cited, such as the one above, don’t actually mention the end of the world at all. The earlier scholars assumed, rather than proved, that for Jesus the “kingdom of God” and the Final Judgement were one and the same… when in fact they are clearly distinct.

The gospels do show that Jesus, like many Jews, believed in a Final Judgement at the end of time but he seems to have envisioned a lengthy period of time before the Final Judgement when the kingdom of God would “arrive in power.” Scholars such as Ehrman speculate that the gospel writers, such as Luke and John, altered Jesus’ sayings to reflect the fact that the promised apocalypse never arrived. They “de-apocalypticized” Jesus’ message.

Yet in the gospel of Mark, likely the earliest gospel to be written, Jesus insists that before the Final Judgment will occur “the gospel must first be preached to all nations (13: 10, emphasis added). In addition, in that part of the gospels many experts believe may be the very oldest of all – the sayings of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark, which scholars call Q – there is not a single mention of an imminent end of the world. Not one.

And so what was Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God?

According to the records we have, when Jesus spoke about the kingdom he said it was “good news” (Luke 4:43), “like treasure hidden in a field” (Matt 13:44), not bad news. He compared it to a wedding feast, not a cosmic artillery barrage (Matthew 22:2-14). Even more to the point, Jesus said that the kingdom he is proclaiming is already “in the midst of you (Luke 17:21)” and is “not coming in ways that can be observed (Luke 17:20).” He added the kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed that when planted, grows into an enormous tree that shelters all the birds of the air (Luke 13:19), or like yeast that when mixed with flour leavens all the dough (Luke 13:21). It is “like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind (Matt 13:47).”

Thus, in recent years many New Testament scholars – even very skeptical scholars at secular universities – have come to reject the century-old idea that Jesus thought the world was coming to an end in his lifetime. These scholars range from Christian experts such as the Anglican bishop N.T. Wright to more skeptical, secular scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, founders of the Jesus Seminar, and Richard Horsley at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Instead, these scholars now believe that Jesus was actually someone far more dangerous than a deluded millenarian prophet.

The post Why Jesus was Not an Apocalyptic Prophet Who Thought the World Would End in His Lifetime first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Politically active Catholics who take the teachings of their Church seriously often turn to the body of papal and conciliar teachings known as Catholic Social Teaching (CST).  While conservatives often emphasize the principle of subsidiarity found in these teachings – the idea that the organization closest to a problem is usually best able to solve it – the principle of solidarity is crucial as well.

Solidarity can be defined as the virtue or habit of recognizing our duties to the common good and arranging our social and political institutions so that basic human needs can be met.

One obvious example of how the principle of solidarity affects community life is health care.

In their landmark 1993 statement on healthcare reform and Catholic Social Teaching, A Framework for Comprehensive Health Care Reform, the U.S. Catholic bishops insisted that the principle of solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) requires that quality healthcare be available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

Basing their analysis on Jesus’ admonition to care for “the least of these (Matt 25:40),” the bishops insisted that “genuine health care reform must especially focus on the basic health needs of the poor…”  They even went so far as to say that the poor have a compelling claim to “first consideration” and access to “comprehensive benefits.”

These mandates do seem at least partially fulfilled by 2010 Obamacare system.

Yet others clearly are not.

Solidarity with our fellow humans also requires respect for life, the bishops said – and it was Obamacare’s provisions on abortion and birth control services that led the bishops to reluctantly refuse to endorse the system once it was finally passed.

Moreover, the mandate for serving the poor has to be balanced by other considerations of justice, the bishops said, including cost containment and controls and what they termed “equitable financing.”

“We have the best health care technology in the world,” the bishops observed, “but tens of millions have little or no access to it and the costs of the system are draining our nation, our economy, our families and our Church to the breaking point.”

Indeed.  In late January 2019, two weeks after the close of the Open Enrollment period for health care insurance, we received our dreaded annual notice from Anthem Blue Cross:  the monthly premiums for our family would increase 25% over the year before, from $1,445 per month to $1,800.

When the comically misnamed Affordable Care Act first went into effect in 2010, our premiums were $350 per month for a high-deductible policy ($5,000 per person) roughly equivalent to the Bronze Plan on most exchanges.

The new price of $1,800 per month represents a total increase of 414.2% — or about 22.7% per year over the past eight years.

This is a far cry from the $2,500 annual savings that President Obama promised.

Like thousands of others, my family is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place when it comes to health insurance:  we earn too much to qualify for Obamacare subsidies… yet the price of even the cheapest Obamacare plans are increasingly out of reach.

With five children and two in college, paying $1,800 per month means hard choices.

And we’re constantly told we’re actually lucky.

Were we to pay for one of the ADA-compliant policies on the exchanges, we’d be paying $2,500 per month in 2019 – or $30,000 per year.

That’s more than our mortgage.  And it’s a lot more than we pay in Social Security, State Income Taxes or even Federal Income Taxes.

Right now, health insurance is our single greatest expense outside of college tuition.

And to make matters worse, there is no escape:  in many blue states, such as California and Washington, the Democrat-controlled legislatures quickly outlawed the short-term and other co-called “catastrophe” plans that would allow families to access affordable coverage even temporarily.

This is a deliberate attempt to force everyone into a “one-size fits all” Obamacare system.

All this is further complicated by a healthcare delivery system built on outright greed:

The Democrats sold their healthcare plan to the insurance companies with the promise that it would mean billions in additional profits.

To pay for the uninsured poor, the Democrats promised a system that would force everyone to purchase the insurance companies’ products – with temporary cash infusions from the government until the insurance companies could raise premiums to a maximum level.

Since buying into the system was mandatory, the insurance companies had an artificial monopoly:  consumers could choose between two or three similar plans all equally expensive.

And the Democrats certainly delivered on their promises to the insurance companies:  Anthem’s Executive Chair, Former President and CEO Joseph Swedish, earned $18 million in 2017.

Long Beach, Calif.-based Molina Healthcare’s new CEO, Joseph Zubretsky, earned $19.7 million in total compensation the same year.

To be fair, Obamacare did result in extending healthcare coverage to roughly 20 million people who lacked coverage before – but at the cost of making healthcare insurance beyond the ability of many middle class families to pay.

Instead of funding coverage for the poor from general tax revenues, the Democrats created a new, regressive tax – a kind of second income tax — that specifically targets middle class families and allows the fraud, waste, overbilling and greed of the existing insurance system to remain in place.

Twenty-five years after the Catholic bishops outlined a statement of basic principles of healthcare reform based on Catholic Social Teaching, the cost of health care in the U.S. is still skyrocketing.

Worst of all, the burden of paying for health care increasingly falls disproportionately on middle class families who, increasingly, cannot afford it.

Many Americans now must deliberately reduce their work hours or incomes so they are eligible for Obamacare subsidies, making it difficult to save for retirement or send their children to college.

Even Americans who receive their health insurance through their employers often do so at the cost of stagnant or reduced wages and shortchanged retirement programs.

The lesson of the Obamacare disaster is that, if solidarity means anything, it means burdens must be shared equitably – not merely shifted from one group to another.

The post Skyrocketing Obamacare Premiums Forcing Many Middle Income Families to Make Difficult Choices first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I was listening to the mythicist blogger Richard Carrier on “Unbelievable,” the UK Christian radio show and podcast that brings together Christian and non-Christian thinkers to debate various issues related to faith.

Carrier, who has a Ph.D. in ancient history and is a very bright fellow, is one of the few credible members of the mythicist community, those who believe that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed at all and was simply a “myth” invented by early Christians, especially by the apostle Paul, and modeled on various Old Testament and mythological figures of that time.

Few historians or Biblical scholars take the mythicists seriously.  Even agnostic skeptics such as Bart Ehrman, who wrote an entire book debunking the movement, find most of their arguments silly.

And here’s an argument that Carrier made that I, as a popular writer, found implausible.  On “Unbelievable,” Carrier argued that the Gospels should not be taken seriously as history because they don’t “critically evaluate their sources” and, in effect, fail to provide footnotes for their assertions.

This is a remarkable claim… that only a Ph.D. academic like Carrier would make.  This is a personal issue for me because I, too, wrestle with the issue of footnoting.

My new book The Dawn of Christianity is coming out in March.  It’s a journalistic retelling of the first 20 years of the Jesus movement based on recent archaeological discoveries and new developments in New Testament studies.

The editors and I had an interesting debate on footnotes.  I argued that many popular histories and biographies are entirely devoid of footnotes — such as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm — yet they are very much striving for historical accuracy and are definitely not fictional.  They belong to the genre of “creative nonfiction.”  They avoid footnotes and the “critical evaluation of their sources” mostly because they want to be read by ordinary people — and nothing turns ordinary people off more than the kind of academic writing Carrier specializes in that says, “Von Hartman claimed this in his 1899 monograph… yet his views were refuted by Gelman who argued…” (I’ve done some of this myself and know it just makes people’s eyes glaze over.)

There is a place for such writing — “peer reviewed journals” read by six or seven scholars in obscure universities — but not if you want to get your story told.  In any event, my editors and I compromised:  I have endnotes but we kept them to a minimum in the interests of readability.

And this brings me back to Carrier:  The Gospels were meant to be read… not by academics… but by ordinary people.  And that does NOT disqualify them as being historically accurate — no more than it disqualifies Sebastian Junger’s excellent book, The Perfect Storm, from being historically accurate.  (The Perfect Storm tells the story of the sinking of the six-man fishing boat Andrea Gail in 1991 based on interviews with people who knew the crew.)

It dawned on me that this is actually a great description of what the gospels actually are:  creative nonfiction, history told in a novel-like format, the way The Perfect Storm is told in a novel-like format and based on interviews with real people and about real people.

It’s fine for Ph.D. historians to criticize popular histories like The Perfect Storm for a lack of footnoting or for failing to “critically evaluate” or even name their sources, but it’s simply not true that the genre of popular history itself means a work is not historical or not meant to be taken as historical.

The Perfect Storm is about real events and real people — just as the gospels are about real events and real people.

Of course, it’s fine for academics and others to challenge alleged facts or incidents in either the gospels or The Perfect Storm.  In both cases, the authors may have taken liberties with the facts… reordered events to make the story move smoother… or embellished certain aspects of the story for dramatic effect.  (I’m not saying either Sebastian Junger or the evangelists did this, only that it’s possible.)  It’s fair and legitimate to question any of that.  This is what academic historians do… and what New Testament scholars do with the gospels.

My only point is that the sheer readability of the gospels, their lack of footnoting or “critical evaluation of sources,” do not, in and of themselves, disqualify them as history.  It simply means they were intended for a large audience.  One definition I’ve read of creative nonfiction is that it’s “true stories, well told.”  Indeed.

The post Are the Gospels Best Understood as Creative Nonfiction? first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

It’s a warm, sunny day in northern Israel, and I am sitting on the railing of a fishing boat from Kibbutz Ginosar as we slowly make our way along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. Behind us, on the burnt-brown hills that rise up sharply from the lake, we can see the resort town of Tiberias, originally built by the first-century Jewish ruler Herod Antipas, with block after block of new condominium developments climbing like ivy up the ridges behind it.

In front of us, the Sea of Galilee remains the same as I remember it when I lived here decades earlier. In fact, the Kinneret, as it is known in Hebrew, looks like it couldn’t be all that much different from what it was like in the time of Jesus, although the shoreline of the lake has changed and some archaeologists claim the region was once much more lush than it is today.

The biblical village of Bethsaida, for example—the hometown of the apostles Phillip, Andrew, and Peter, now being excavated by Israeli and American archaeologists—was discovered about a mile inland from the Sea of Galilee’s current shoreline. No one realized the shoreline had changed that much.

In fact, the discovery of Bethsaida happened almost by accident. On the other hand, Capernaum, Jesus’ adopted hometown (Matt 9:1), is still found right on the shoreline of the lake. A new church (nicknamed “the spaceship” because of its ultramodern design) has been built directly over a first-century house that archaeologists are confident was the home of the apostle Peter and his mother-in-law, and where Jesus stayed on occasion (Mark 1: 29-30). Archaeologists have unearthed the rough stone insula, or housing blocks, where dozens of extended families lived, as well as a well-preserved synagogue from the fourth or fifth century AD.

I walk to the stern of the boat and talk to the captain. He is a wizened old kibbutznik with skin the color of saddle leather, dressed from head to toe in royal-blue work clothes.

“Mishahu amar lee shay-ain harbay dagim be-kinneret achshav,” I tell the captain in my rusty Hebrew. “Someone told me that there aren’t many fish left in the lake.”

He snorts derisively in traditional Israeli fashion.

“Whoever told you that doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the captain curtly replies. “As the lake recedes, the fish move into deeper water. The Kinneret is full of fish.” He adds that only two hundred fishing licenses are given out at a time, and that fishing is heavily regulated to maintain the fish population.

The Sea of Galilee is a decent-sized lake, about seven miles across and thirteen miles long, with a maximum depth of about one hundred thirty feet. The air is warm but the winds are remarkably strong, with small whitecaps buffeting the shoreline.

I can’t help but think of the scene in the gospels where the apostles are out on the lake, Jesus falls asleep, and a storm threatens to capsize the boat. At Ginosar, they’ve built a modern museum just to house the ruins of a first-century fishing boat, known as the Jesus Boat, discovered in the lake mud in 1986.

Looking back at the lush shoreline, I marvel at how much of the gospel story took place in this small, still quite rural area. The Mount of the Beatitudes, the traditional site of the Sermon on the Mount, looms directly above us, a small clump of trees on a brown ridge. Below that is Tabgha, the meadow area where local Christians believe Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes. Coming to Ginosar, I passed the new development of Magdala, likely the hometown of Mary Magdalene and where a first-century synagogue was discovered in 2009. Just north of the lake, up the Wadi Kerazeh, lies the biblical town once known as Chorazin, which Jesus denounced for its rejection of his message (Matt.11:21–24).

And across the lake, the Golan Heights loom. In the northern Golan lies Caesarea Philippi and the enormous rock cliff that was once the shrine of the Greek god Pan, where the gospels suggest Jesus proclaimed Simon bar Jonah the “rock” (Aramaic kepha) upon which he would build his new kingdom community.

Discovering the Carpenter of Nazareth

I’ve been fascinated by the person and adventures of Jesus of Nazareth my entire life. I always felt that there must have been a lot more to the story than we read in the gospels, not less. Whatever else Jesus may have been, I recognized a figure of enormous power and influence. When I was young, what I admired about Jesus more than anything else was his raw guts and fundamental decency.

I was particularly struck by the way he stood up to an angry mob that was about to stone a woman to death for adultery. I read this passage over and over, imagining the scene in my mind. I now know that this pericope (passage) is not found in the earliest Greek manuscripts we have of John’s gospel, and some translations, such as the scholarly New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), now include it only in brackets (8:1-11).

Nevertheless, it is so characteristic of Jesus that some experts believe it reflects a genuine event that was perhaps part of the Lukan source material and added to the text of John in the early third century. There are many learned monographs written on just this subject.

When I was twelve, however, I knew nothing of all that. I was just impressed by Jesus staring down the mob with the sheer force of human decency. So much of Jesus’ character, as revealed throughout the New Testament, is encapsulated in this brief passage: his concern for the oppressed and scorned, his willingness to forgive “seventy times seven times (Matt 18:22),” his courage, his readiness to stand up against unjust authority, his defiance of legalism.

This passage also had everything a young boy’s imagination could want: Sex (a woman caught in the “very act” of adultery). Defiance of authority. The threat of violence! Also, it made me curious. This wasn’t some boring minister droning on. Whoever this Jesus was, he was definitely different. What else did he say? What else did he do? I began to pay more attention—and I began to read. I wanted to know more about Jesus’ life and times—how he lived, where he lived.

I turned, first, to a sensationalistic novel by a writer of historical fiction named Frank Yerby. I am not particularly proud of the fact that my introduction to critical biblical studies came through the work of a pulp fiction writer, but God works in mysterious ways, so they say, and that was how he worked in my case. The name of the novel was Judas, My Brother. Published in 1968, when I was only eleven, Judas, My Brother was part of a century-old genre that attempted to reconstruct the events of the New Testament on purely naturalistic terms and to tell the reader what “really” happened. Around the same time, Irving Wallace published the steamy novel The Word, about the discovery of a “lost” Gospel that would ostensibly, as its cover jacket proclaimed, “blow the lid off orthodox Christianity.” It was The Da Vinci Code of its day.

Rather strangely for a novel, Judas, My Brother actually came with footnotes, and went out of its way to ground its many dotty historical assertions on something like scholarship—or what seemed like scholarship to a bright-eyed twelve-year-old. The book relied rather uncritically on the work of the early-twentieth-century Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner, but it introduced me, for the first time, to scholarly books and ancient sources about the life and times of Jesus—including the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, the Mishnah, Emil Schürer, and even, I am amazed to see now, the respected Jewish New Testament scholar Geza Vermes.

My fascination with the character of Jesus, as well as his life and times, continued throughout high school and into college. That is probably why I never really rebelled against Christianity, as is common among teenagers. How could you rebel against someone willing to stand up to a mob that is about to stone a woman to death? Rebelling against Jesus would be like rebelling against Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. You might decline to follow their example, to be sure, but who would rebel against what they stood for?

My path to the academic study of the New Testament was thus the opposite of many popular writers today, such as Bart Ehrman and Reza Aslan, who embraced fundamentalist Christianity as teenagers and then lost their faith altogether when they studied the New Testament as adults.

In contrast, I just accepted as a self-evident truth that at least some of the New Testament was legendary, that the tale grew in the telling, and that as the great German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann said, it was virtually impossible to know what really happened behind the preaching—the kerygma—of the early church.

I was taught in high school that the infancy narratives were theologoumena—legendary stories that conveyed important theological but not literal historical truths. I considered myself a faithful Christian, to be sure, and still do to this day. But the historical-critical study of the Bible that Ehrman and Aslan found so shocking in graduate school I just considered, well, standard operating procedure.

In the Land of Israel

All that changed for me when I moved to Israel to learn Hebrew after college. At that time, anyone could come to Israel and study Hebrew for free, provided you were willing to work a little. In exchange for four hours of work per day, usually on an agricultural settlement known as a kibbutz or moshav, the Jewish Agency would provide professional teachers and you would receive four hours of intensive Hebrew language instruction six days a week for five or six months. I did two Hebrew courses, first level Aleph and then, a year later, level Gimel. You didn’t have to be immigrating to Israel to participate; in fact, you didn’t even have to be Jewish. In my class of about thirty students, however, I would say only about four or five were not making Aliyah (immigrating). The rest were Jewish, moving to Israel permanently, and the ulpan course was the first stage of their new lives.

For the first time in my life, the world of Jesus and the gospels was not something I read about in books, but something I could see with my own eyes and feel etched in stones. The Bible really comes alive when you’re living right where it all happened. As I wandered the stone alleys of Jerusalem on my days off, or explored archaeological ruins in Caesarea or Nazareth, I felt like I was stepping back in time.

Suddenly, these ancient stories, characters, battles, place names, foods, plants, animals, genealogies, and even obscure biblical laws took on real meaning. Israelis are fanatical tourists both at home and abroad, and even the most secular of them frequently go on field trips to visit the various locations mentioned in the Bible. They often begin to explore their country while in the army and just keep it up for most of their lives.

As a result, I spent a lot of time exploring the biblical sites I had once only heard about from the pulpit—Megiddo, Mount Tabor (the traditional site of the Transfiguration), Ein Gedi, Mount Carmel, the Jordan River, Tel Dan, Beit Shean, Mount Hermon. My Israeli friends and I would set out in cars, or occasionally in small buses, and explore the countryside. On my second ulpan, I even shipped a motorcycle to Israel from Los Angeles so I could better explore the Galilean countryside.

I quickly saw how the biblical heritage is woven into daily life in Israel through the myriad practices and traditions of Judaism, but also through the geography and the language. Even something as simple as the Kabbalat Shabbat, the welcoming of the Sabbath, was quite moving. I remember sitting at a big table in the heder ha-ohel, the kibbutz dining hall during my first ulpan, while the text of Genesis 2:1–2 was read by a teenage girl (in fluent Hebrew, naturally): “Vah-yehulu ha-shamaim veh-ha-aretz” (“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done”).

Even these nonreligious socialist kibbutzniks kept the Sabbath, honoring the ancient commandment handed down through generations for literally thousands of years. This naturally made me curious about the other commandments, all those dry and seemingly bizarre laws.

One of my Hebrew teachers gave me a book about the mitzvot, the 613 commandments the Jewish sages find in the Torah, and I spent hours in a nearby town library reading about them—and about how they are put into practice in modern-day Israel. I learned about the Mishnah and the Talmud, the great encyclopedic commentaries on these laws, and the Shulhan Aruch. I learned that, long before there was the Way of Jesus, there was the way of halacha—the way of Jewish law.

When I returned to the United States, I began to read Jewish writers who were then re-examining the question of who Jesus was and what his relationship was to the various approaches to Judaism that existed in his day. I eagerly followed the twisting turns and amazing discoveries in historical Jesus research that were then unfolding. In the 1990s, as a popular religion writer, I occasionally wrote about these developments for publications such as Christianity Today. I was particularly interested in the work of Jewish scholars writing about Jesus, such as the famous Talmud scholar Jacob Neusner, because during my time in Israel I had become fascinated by the Jewish roots of Christianity.

Eventually, I became so interested in the topic that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in New Testament studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, an interdenominational evangelical seminary in southern California.

For eight years, after I had returned to the United States, I drove thirty miles two or three times a week to attend classes in Koine Greek, exegetical method, Near Eastern studies, systematic theology and other, even more arcane topics. My fellow students and I would struggle our way through large swaths of the New Testament, line by line in Greek, trying to untangle the meaning of these ancient texts.

Of course, all this only makes me a “semi-educated layman,” as my professors used to put it, not a real expert. However, in the past few years I’ve been amazed to discover that leading experts in the field of historical Jesus research have been drawing startling new conclusions that are dramatically at odds with the skeptical theories I was taught in college and then in graduate school – skeptical theories that often dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Even more startling to me was the fact that these newer conclusions were often not showing up in the media – even though in many cases they were being proposed by secular experts at top universities.

In the TV documentaries I watched and magazine stories I read, the reporters often seemed oblivious to these new developments and merely repeated the older, hyper-skeptical conclusions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – for example, that belief in Jesus as a divine being only emerged very late as the Jesus movement spread out into the pagan Greek world.

Yet every month, it seemed, archaeologists in Israel and Biblical scholars at major universities around the world were announcing new discoveries that, rather than undermining the basic portrait of Jesus in the gospels, were actually confirming it.

Jesus of Nazareth may not have been an illiterate peasant who expected the world to come to an end in his own lifetime, as so many contemporary authors claim.

He may actually have been a well-trained Jewish rabbi who had a very specific mission—a mission to save the human race from itself.

And therein lies a very interesting story indeed.

This is an excerpt from the book, Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson, 2015).

The post Searching for Jesus in the Land of Israel first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

An interesting article on textual variants in one of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels, Vaticanus:

Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34–5

It covers the old issue of whether Paul’s infamous admonition that women should be “silent” in assemblies of Christians (1 Cor 14:34-35) is actually a later scribal addition.  The authors write:

At least sixty-two textual studies argue that 14.34–5 is a later addition. ⁴⁶ J. Fitzmyer notes that ‘the majority of commentators today’ regard vv. 34–5 as a later addition. ⁴⁷ K. Haines-Eitzen affirms this of ‘[n]early all scholars now’. ⁴⁸ Verses 34–5 silence women in church three times without any qualification. Chapter 11, however, guides how women should prophesy, and chapter 14, vv. 5, 24 (3x), 26 and 31 affirm ‘all’ speaking in church. Popular resolutions of this apparent contradiction limit 14.34–5’s demand for silence only to disruptive chatter or, recently contrived, only to judging prophecies. These resolutions should be rejected since they permit speech v. 35 prohibits, namely asking questions from a desire to learn. In light of substantial evidence that vv. 34–5 were originally a marginal gloss and no evidence that any other block of text was added at this gap, ⁴⁹ these verses are the obvious candidate for the multi-word addition signalled by this distigme plus characteristic bar.

The post Is the Pauline admonition for women to be silent in churches (1 Cor 14:34-5) a later scribal addition? first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Going on the radio to promote a book is a weird experience.  One problem is that writers tend to immerse themselves in their topics and so fail to appreciate that other people don’t know anything about their subject… and don’t really care.

That’s even true when the subject is Christianity and Jesus of Nazareth.

For example, during my last book tour some of my media interlocutors were a bit shocked when I mentioned that the earliest report about Jesus’s resurrection dates to just a few years after the Crucifixion – say, circa AD 31 or 32.

They assumed, like most people, that the earliest reports are found in the Gospels, perhaps in the Gospel of Mark, which the scholarly consensus dates to around AD 70 – or 40 years after the Crucifixion around AD 30 or 33.  They’ve heard this like a mantra from Internet skeptics:  the earliest reports of the Resurrection date 40 or 50 years after the Crucifixion.

No, I’d say, that’s not true.

In fact, the earliest report we have is from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians – and that, in turn, is his recounting of what he himself heard right after his conversion on the way to Damascus.

I then quoted the passage in full:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,  and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me (1 Cor 15: 3-8, ESV)

This is the earliest report of the resurrection of Jesus – a creedal statement that Paul “received” not more than three years after the Crucifixion.

It’s not clear precisely when Paul received this summary account.  In his letter to the Galatians, perhaps written in AD 46 but probably later, Paul relates his visit to Jerusalem three years after his conversion when he “went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days (1:18).”

However, following his vision on the road to Damascus, he met with leaders of the Jesus movement in that city, and so he could have heard this report there.

Even skeptical scholars, with a few exceptions, accept that this early “pre-literary” report of the Resurrection dates to just a few years following the Crucifixion.  The exception to this are more radical critics, known as “mythicists,” who claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed at all – and that this passage was invented in the second century of the common era when pagan Greeks invented the “Christ myth.”

For most historians and skeptical scholars, however, Paul’s report in 1 Corinthians is just as it seems to be, the recounting in the mid-50s, when he likely wrote this letter, of reports he had heard very soon after his own vision of the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Of course, this early report has problems of its own for anyone who wants to harmonize all of the various resurrections accounts – as I do in my new book, The Dawn of Christianity. For one thing, there is no mention of an empty tomb, as in the Gospels.  Nor is there mention of the women who first found the empty tomb.  In addition, this report refers to individuals who saw the risen Jesus who are not mentioned in the Gospel accounts, such as the apostle Peter and James and the “five hundred.”

But what this very ancient passage does show is that the followers of Jesus believed Jesus rose from the dead very, very early.

One of the differences between the historians and scholars of today and those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that even many secular, agnostic, and even atheist scholars now accept that something extraordinary happened to Jesus’ earliest followers—something that led them to believe Jesus had come back to life after death.

Some of world’s most skeptical New Testament scholars now affirm this, including agnostics such as Bart Ehrman, Jesus Seminar skeptics such as Robert Funk,  and secular historians such as Marcus Borg  and E. P. Sanders.

“There can be no doubt, historically, that some of Jesus’s followers came to believe he was raised from the dead – no doubt whatsoever,” Bart Ehrman concludes. “… Jesus’s followers – or at least some of them – came to believe that God had done a great miracle and restored Jesus to life.”[1]  The secular New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders asserts that  it is a “fact” that the disciples did have genuine resurrection appearances, although he adds that “what the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.”[2]

[1]   Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 174.

[2]       E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 279–80.

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Some Catholic apologists are up in arms about the recent Hollywood film, “Young Messiah,” because, they say, it presents an “heretical” portrayal of the child Jesus as not being fully omniscient at age seven. I haven’t seen the film yet and so I don’t want to comment on the film itself. However, the question of what sort of knowledge Jesus had, and what his own awareness of his mission and status was, are very much of interest.

I like both of the Catholic apologists in question and have learned a lot from both of them. The lay Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong wrote about “Young Messiah” in his Patheos blog and concedes that many Catholic bishops were delighted with the film and found little in it problematic. Dave refers to the Catholic writer Brad Miner, editor of the blog The Catholic Thing, who says he found “Young Messiah” to be “appalling.”

Both of these writers refer to some Catholic (non-magisterial) statements on Jesus’ self-knowledge. Dave quotes, not official statements of ecumenical councils, but Dr. Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. In that classic text, Dr. Ott asserts that it is theologically certain that “Christ’s human knowledge was free from positive ignorance and from error.(Sent. certa.) Cf. D2184 et seq. (p. 165).”

Does that mean Jesus, the human Jesus, was omniscient at age seven? The Gospel of Luke says that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature (2:52),” which seems to imply that Jesus did learn as he grew. This is a very complicated question. IN the past, theologians would distinguish between Jesus’ acquired human knowledge (how to nail a board) and his divine knowledge of his own nature and mission (the beatific vision). They asserted that there is no contradiction between the two.

These are interesting questions because, first, they effect how we view the historical Jesus and, second, because they have an impact on how Christians go about apologetics and evangelization.

As most of my readers know, I think the only honest way to approach these issues, at least at first, is to acknowledge what we don’t know. We don’t know what Jesus knew. All we have are the writings of the New Testament and, secondly, the reflections of later Christians on what these writings tell us.

When facing the issue of miracles in the New Testament, Christians, I think, must be mindful of two dangers when they approach these texts. The first danger is to read more into the texts than the texts actually say.

The life of Jesus has been retold thousands of times over the centuries, in all sorts of media – from stained glass windows in medieval cathedrals to “rock operas” in films. Many times Christians interpret what the texts say in the light of these popular retellings even when a close reading of the text does not justify such an interpretation. This is particularly true of the various miracles attributed to Jesus.

For example, in the story of the feeding of 5,000 people – reported in all four gospels – we Christians naturally assume that Jesus miraculously materialized bread out of thin air, like the replicator on the old Star Trek TV show. That’s certainly possible.  But a close reading reveals that the text doesn’t actually say that. In Mark’s version, Jesus went off with his disciples to a lonely place but throngs of people discovered when he was and came there. Jesus felt sorry for them, because, he said, they were like sheep without a shepherd, so he taught them “many things.” But as the hour grew late, Jesus’ followers took him aside and told him to send the crowds away so they could buy themselves something to eat. Jesus replied, “You give them something to eat!” At that point, his followers protested, sarcastically asking if they should buy two hundred denarii of bread – that is, 200 days’ wages – and give it to the crowds.

As a result, Jesus asked his disciples how many loaves of bread they had. Mark reports that the followers took inventory and told Jesus they had only five loaves of bread and two fish. Now, here is what the Gospel text says next:

“Then he commanded them all to sit down by companies upon the green grass. So they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied.”

Note: no replicator so far. Jesus simply broke the loaves and fish and had them distributed.
Here comes the miraculous part, though: “And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.”

So, this is what the text actually says: (1) Jesus blessed, broke and distributed the five loaves and two fish; and, afterwards, (2) they collected twelve baskets of leftovers.

Still no replicator, not really. When I was in high school, my Jesuit teachers proposed a simple explanation for this. As Jesus took what little food he and his disciples had and willingly shared it with everyone, others, too, shamefully “discovered” that they actually had some food hidden in baskets and cloaks.

As the food was passed around, people began to add what they had – a half a loaf here, some olives there, maybe a package of dates. When everyone was finished eating, they discovered that the amount of food left over filled twelve baskets.

Was it a miracle that so many people were fed? Certainly. Does it require that we believe Jesus could materialize food out of thin air whenever he wanted to? No, it doesn’t. That isn’t what the text says.

I realize that this approach will strike many educated readers like the absurd rationalizations proposed in the 19th century by the early practitioners of “higher criticism.” The difference is that I am not saying miracles, as we commonly understand them, can’t and never happen. I am only saying that we shouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions that are beyond what the Biblical texts actually say.

This leads me to an even bigger danger that Christians face: the danger of heresy. Many modern Christians appear to be afflicted by the ancient heresy of Docetism – which is the doctrine that Jesus only appeared to be a human being.  Apologists like Dave and Brad are no doubt concerned about the opposite heresy of Arianism, that Jesus was in no sense divine.  But it’s possible, and I believe actually more likely, to fall into the heresy of viewing Jesus as in no sense really human.

In this view, Jesus pretended to be cold and hungry but wasn’t really. He pretended to fear death… but, being God, he didn’t really. In other words, Jesus was really Superman dressed up like Clark Kent. He wasn’t from heaven but from the planet Krypton. Jesus could never really be hungry or fearful because he could magically materialize any food he wanted. He didn’t really fear death because, being divine, he knew already that death would be only a brief instant.

This is a profoundly unbiblical doctrine because, if there is one thing that the New Testament teaches and reveals, it’s that Jesus was a very real man – like us in all things but sin, as the Catechisms put it. Yet we humans do get hungry. We do fear death. We can be killed. Jesus did fear death – and he most definitely was killed.

My point is simple: if Jesus did perform miracles as we commonly understand them – supernatural violations of the laws of nature – they were rare, highly unusual occurrences even for him. Out of the thirty-seven miracles ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament, fully twenty-five, or 67%, were miracles of healing.  Only twelve were non-healing miracles, and of these twelve at least six were likely “doublets” — the same event reported twice.  That leaves only six non-healing miracles.

Even more properly, Jesus himself likely did not “do” them because he, if he had, then he wouldn’t have been really human – because human beings can’t walk on water or raise people back to life. Of course, I realize that many contemporary Bible scholars don’t believe Jesus worked any miracles in the strong sense, that these stories are legends (theologoumena) not meant to be taken literally.

But that is not what I am saying. Since I wasn’t there, I can’t really say what “really happened.” All I can say with certitude is what the texts say… and the texts say that these supernatural events were rare. Miracles in the strong sense are violations of the laws of nature that only an all-powerful God could be capable of – and indeed, that is precisely what the New Testament (mostly) says. Usually whenever a “big” miracle happens – like, say, Jesus raising Lazarus back to life – Jesus doesn’t perform the miracle. Instead, he prays and asks God to – and God answers his prayer.

For the first thousand years of Christianity, of course, the greatest minds in Christendom pondered what it could possibly mean to say Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. How would that work exactly? If Jesus was fully divine in the sense of omnipotent divine power, then he couldn’t be really human. And of course, the New Testament itself insists that Jesus didn’t have super powers: in Philippians 2, St. Paul says that “though [Jesus] was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” All sorts of complicated theologies have been developed to try to explain how this divine-human matrix could be explained or at least imagined. Theologians speak of the “two natures” in Christ, one human and one divine, but united in one person (homoousios).

The upshot for scripture scholars trying to make sense of the biblical texts was that Jesus’ mind and will appeared to have been united with God – he willed what God willed – without himself having omnipotent physical and mental powers.

Again, if he did have omnipotent divine power – the power to walk on water at will, the power to materialize anything he wished – then I don’t see how he could have been really human.  Human beings can’t walk on water, at least not without help.  Thus, the way I think about this is that Jesus, as God’s son, knew what God wanted but was as limited as any real man. He “increased in wisdom and in stature,” as Luke put it (2:52). If this were not true – if Jesus had, for example, omniscient divine knowledge of the future – then he wouldn’t have feared death.

Some theologians say that Jesus was omniscient, that he feared only the pain of crucifixion, but that doesn’t seem to fit what the biblical texts say. According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus cried out on the Cross, as any real man might have, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (15:34)” Yet if Jesus possessed total divine omniscience, he would have known that God had not abandoned him, that within moments he would be glorified and “all power on heaven and earth” would be given to him.

I realize that these are difficult topics that are hotly debated in Christian circles. Many Christians really do think of Jesus as a kind of Jewish Superman who only pretended to be like an ordinary man. He could really have waved his hand and made anything he wanted to happen. I think this is Docetism, personally, but it’s a fascinating topic to debate.

I only bring this issue up so non-Christian readers and modern skeptics can understand how Christians wrestle with these issues – and with the New Testament texts. We certainly shouldn’t read more miraculousness into the miracle stories than is actually in them – and should accept as at least possible natural explanations whenever they seem plausible. For example, I have no problem seeing the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand as involving Jesus’ ability to soften people’s hearts more than a Star Trek-like replicator, magically making loaves appear out of thin air. It’s possible that this is actually what happened – I wasn’t there and anything is possible – but that isn’t strictly what the texts actually say.

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The entrance to the Mary of Nazareth International Center in central Nazareth doesn’t look like much. It’s just a simple doorway off narrow Casa Nova Street, a few hundred yards from the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Yet inside this recently built Catholic evangelism center lies an amazing discovery that has sent shockwaves through the world of Biblical archaeology: the remains of a first-century stone house reliably dated to the early Roman period in Palestine.

The Nazareth excavations are the first concrete archaeological proof that Nazareth was settled in the time of Jesus – and, judging from the limestone cups found at the site, almost certainly by observant Jews.

This shoots down one of the central arguments used by those who claim that Jesus never existed and that the Gospels are entirely fiction: that we know Jesus of Nazareth never existed because there never was a village called Nazareth.

Incredibly, the archaeological excavations at Nazareth are merely one among dozens of startling recent discoveries that are forcing many secular, Jewish and agnostic scholars, at top universities all over the world, to re-think old skeptical ideas about who Jesus was and what he was trying to achieve.

Many people in the pews, however, haven’t heard about these amazing, very recent discoveries.

Experts in the media are still repeating the same century-old, increasingly discredited theories that date to the late 19th and early 20th century – for example, that Jesus was an “apocalyptic prophet” who believed the world was coming to an end in his lifetime or that he was a revolutionary “zealot” who plotted a violent overthrow of Roman forces.

Nevertheless, recent dramatic archaeological discoveries and developments in New Testament studies are challenging these older, now obsolete theories:

Discovery No. 1: The people and places mentioned in the Gospels really existed.

Like most figures of ancient history, there is little archaeological evidence for many New Testament figures, including Jesus. However, in just the past few years archaeologists have uncovered some astonishing finds – including the burial box (ossuary) of the high priest Caiaphas and, perhaps, that of James the Just, the brother, step-brother or close relative of Jesus.

Experts widely believe the Caiaphas ossuary is genuine. While there is fierce debate about the James ossuary, it’s possible that it too is authentic. Dated to the first century, it has inscribed on its side the words in Aramaic, Ya’akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua (James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus).

Some archaeologists believe that the ossuary and the words “James, Son of Joseph” inscribed on it are authentic, dating back to the first century, but that the words “brother of Jesus” were added later by a master forger.

If all of it is genuine, however, as some evangelical scholars such as Ben Witherington III argue, then it represents the first ever archaeological confirmation of Jesus.

Along with these finds are numerous recent archaeological discoveries of places mentioned in the Gospels – such as the dramatic 2009 discovery of a large and remarkably ornate first-century synagogue at Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus almost certainly preached.

Discovery No. 2: Jesus’ followers didn’t make up the idea of a messiah who would suffer and die.

For more than a century, many academic Bible scholars have claimed that the Jews in Jesus’ time had no concept whatsoever of a suffering messiah, let alone a messiah who would actually die.

Therefore, they suspected the whole idea was invented by the early Christian community and put into the mouth of Jesus decades later, by the evangelists. The Jews in Jesus’ day expected the messiah to be a military leader and king, the argument goes, so obviously a suffering messiah is just a Christian apologetic device created after the fact to explain away the scandal of the cross.

But in 2008, Israeli archaeologists announced the discovery of a first-century stone tablet, written in ancient Hebrew, that mentioned the angel Gabriel and a messianic figure who would suffer, die and perhaps rise again in three days.

Known as the Gabriel Revelation, this was dramatic confirmation of other textual discoveries that suggested many Jews in the first century were expecting a suffering and dying messiah.

This is important because it shows that this theme – that of a suffering messiah – wasn’t just “made up” by the early Christian community as a way to explain the scandal of the cross, as literally generations of scholars have claimed for over a hundred years.

Discovery No. 3: Jesus’ earliest followers – Jewish followers – came to see him as in some way divine very early, perhaps within a year or two of the crucifixion.

Through a variety of methods, including identifying Aramaic phrases embedded in the Greek texts of the New Testament, scholars have identified the very earliest parts of the New Testament writings.

Much to their shock, however, it looks as though it was the Jewish followers of Jesus who proclaimed him “son of God” and “standing at the right hand of God,” not the pagan Gentile followers who joined the movement in the decades after the crucifixion.

This flies in the face of a century of scholarship that believed the opposite, that claims to divinity only arose as the Jesus movement fanned out into the pagan Greek. Even skeptics such as New Testament scholar and bestselling author Bart Ehrman now concede that belief in Jesus’s divinity arose very, very early.

In addition, some Jewish scholars now argue that the idea of a divine-human savior was a thoroughly Jewish concept… rooted in the Biblical prophets. These scholars point to the biblical book of Daniel, as well as intertestamental Jewish writings known as apocalypses, as evidence that some Jews in Jesus’ day could expect “one like a Son of Man,” as Dan. 7:13–14 puts it, coming on the clouds of heaven.

It was only later, as Judaism reacted to the rise of Christianity, that such ideas became forbidden among Jews.

Discovery No. 4: The Gospels are almost certainly based on eyewitness testimony – and, at least partially, written sources.

The whole idea of a “creative” and exclusively oral transmission of traditions about Jesus – as opposed to written sources based on eyewitness accounts – is now questioned by many top secular scholars.

The skeptical New Testament scholars of the early 20th century based their much of their theory of oral transmission on German folk tales that evolve over centuries, such as the Brothers Grimm. The idea was that the “tale grew in the telling,” like the “telephone game.”

“The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next about Jesus’ words and deeds,” explains skeptic Bart Ehrman in his 2014 book, “How Jesus Became God.”

The implication is often that the gospels are more myth than history, and certainly not reliable records of what actually occurred.

But increasingly, leading New Testament scholars reject this unproven theory altogether. Some argue that the Gospels, including the Gospel of John, show numerous signs of first-hand observations and written sources — and that those sources could well have been written while Jesus was living and preaching in Galilee.

The British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, author of the 2006 book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,” has forced a new debate on the existence of eyewitness testimony in the Gospels.

In addition, many Jewish scholars now believe the Gospels preserve accurate traditions about Jesus from people who saw and heard Jesus first-hand.

As the Israeli scholar David Flusser put it, who believes the Gospels were based on written sources, the synoptic gospels “preserve a picture of Jesus that is more reliable than is generally acknowledged.”

Discovery No. 5: The Gospel of Mark, widely considered to be the first gospel written, may have been penned only five or 10 years after the crucifixion, not 40 years later as scholars have thought for over a century.

Many (but not all) modern scholars believe that the gospel of Mark was likely written first, probably in Rome in the late 60s or early 70s AD, followed by Luke in the mid-80s, Matthew in the 80s, and then by John sometime after AD 90.

The reason is due to passages in the gospels where Jesus seems to be predicting the fall of Jerusalem (such as Mark 13:2, where Jesus refers to the temple and says, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another”).

The idea is that the writers of the gospels, living after the Jewish War began in AD 66, simply put words in Jesus’ mouth predicting the coming catastrophe—words that he didn’t actually say. Scholars call this “prophecy after the fact.”

But recently James Crossley, a secular British New Testament scholar at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, has challenged this idea.

In a fascinating 2004 book, “The Date of Mark’s Gospel,” Crossley defies more than a century of New Testament scholarship to argue that the gospel of Mark, far from being written in the late AD 60s or even early 70s as older scholars have long believed, could well have been written as early as the mid 30s—perhaps just five to ten years after Jesus was crucified.

He insists that the “desolating sacrilege” mentioned in Mark 13 that would be “set up” could very likely refer to the statue of the Emperor Caligula that the mad emperor attempted to have erected in the Jerusalem temple in AD 39-40.

If he’s right, and Mark was written in the late AD 30s, that means that some of the earliest source material for the gospels was put to paper within five to ten years after Jesus’ crucifixion—and not thirty, forty, or sixty years, as previous scholars believed.

This strengthens the argument, therefore, that the gospels are likely based on eyewitness testimony, even if that testimony was often rearranged according to the editorial decisions of the different evangelists.

Discovery No. 6: Jesus was not an “illiterate peasant” but likely well trained in Jewish law and scripture.

In the past few decades, Jewish scholars have taken a closer look at the debates in the Gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees.

For much of the 20th century, skeptical New Testament scholars claimed that these debates were not historical – that the reflected the conflicts the early church was having with Jewish authorities in the 80s and 90s and not what Jesus said and did in the 20s.

But many Jewish experts now deny this. In addition, some Jewish scholars argue that the Gospels prove that Jesus had a thorough command of Jewish legal reasoning.

According to Orthodox Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, when Jesus is criticized for healing a crippled man on the Sabbath (John 5:1-47), Jesus quotes a legal precedent preserved in the Talmud to prove that his action is justified.

Boteach explains that the Torah commands that a male child be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, but if that day happens to fall on the Sabbath, the circumcision is still allowed even though it is “drawing blood.”

The Talmud draws from this exception the notion that medical procedures can and must be done on the Sabbath. According to Tractate Yoma, “if circumcision, which concerns one of the 248 members of the body, overrides the Sabbath, shall not a man’s whole body override the Sabbath?”

Boteach then points to the nearly identical reasoning used by Jesus for his justification of healing a crippled man on the Sabbath, recorded by John: “Now if a boy can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the Law of Moses may not be broken,” Jesus says, “why are you angry with me for healing a man’s whole body on the Sabbath? (7:23 NIV).

This suggests that Jesus was not an “illiterate peasant”—as many contemporary authors claim—but a highly trained rabbi fully conversant with the complex legal and religious debates in his day.

Conclusion

In the end, there has been a veritable revolution in New Testament scholarship over the last 10 or 20 years yet few experts in the media seem to know about it.

The foundational assumptions that guided a century’s worth of skepticism towards the New Testament have been under relentless assault – and often by secular, Jewish and agnostic scholars at top universities around the world.

The new discoveries discussed above are causing some experts to wonder if the basic portrait of Jesus in the gospels is far more plausible than the elaborate reconstructions created by academic skeptics over the past 150 years.

In other words, the New Testament may be truer than scholars once thought… and Jesus of Nazareth, rather than being smaller than the gospels portray him, may actually be much bigger… and far more interesting.

The article was originally published on TheBlaze.com

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In the 1980 film The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfus and Amy Irving, there is a scene that has always been a metaphor, for me, for how Christians come to know Jesus Christ. Sounds strange, I know, but bear with me a moment.

In the film, Richard Dreyfus plays a talented but not quite top pier pianist desperate to win a major competition so he can become a professional musician. He does everything right: Practices compulsively, really knows his stuff. Living with his parents, now well in his twenties, he travels all over the country to compete in regional and national competitions… and yet he never quite wins. At one competition, he meets a fellow competitor, played by Amy Irving, and they begin a romance that Irving’s stern teacher, played by Lee Remick, is determined to thwart.

At one point in the film, Remick’s character run downs Amy Irving’s musical pedigree to explain to Dreyfus’s character why he is basically outclassed.

“Ludwig Von Beethoven taught Carl Czerny,” Lee Remick’s characters says slowly, lighting a cigarette. “Who taught Leschetizky… who taught Schnabel… who taught Renaldi… who taught me. And now the sixth pianist in a direct line from Beethoven is standing here staring at me in her Jordan Marsh mix-and-match.”

In other words: The music that Amy Irving plays is handed down in a kind of apostolic succession… from one generation to the next… a living tradition passed on, master to disciple, over centuries.

You can read all the biographies of Beethoven you like…you can study music theory to your heart’s content… and yet, if you stand outside of that direct teaching line, that “hands on” instruction, you probably won’t be able to play the piano as well as Amy Irving’s character does. You won’t really hear the music.

Well, learning Jesus, and discovering the truth of his kingdom, is a lot like learning music: you have to learn it in person, not just from books.

This isn’t a pitch, by the way, for the Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox understanding of Apostolic Succession over and against the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scripture… although there is a tie-in.
Instead, I am simply making an historical and sociological point: that, as the saying goes, Jesus is more “caught than taught.”

For most of Christian history, the followers of Jesus learned his story, absorbed his teaching and committed their lives to his service not through academic study… not because they weighed the historical evidence for the resurrection and decided it was probable… but through a quasi-mystical encounter with Jesus’ outsized, cosmic personality in the communities of believers he left behind. They meditated on the events of his life, heard second-hand, depicted in medieval passion plays and modern rock operas, and decided to say a resounding Yes to his call to be part of his kingdom.

In the earliest age of Christianity, there was no Christian Bible to study. Even if there had been, few people could have read it. The overwhelming majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate.
People learned about Jesus through the preaching and teaching of Jesus’ early followers, almost always oral, and through the sacraments, rites and customs of the early Church, especially the “thanksgiving rite” celebrated every week (known in Greek as the eucharist). “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am.” After encountering the Risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, his disciples realized that they had “recognized him in the breaking of the bread.”

When you think about it, that’s still true today.

Most people who are Christians today are Christians because they were born into Christian families, or because they encounter Christian disciple groups that intrigue them enough to learn more. They learn about Jesus Christ and discover his continuing presence in the world through personal testimony, the example of other people.

Indeed, most of what we know about Jesus and his teaching comes not from academic Bible study, as valuable as it is… but through preaching in churches… medieval passion plays… scenes depicted in stained glass windows or in bas-relief Stations of the Cross… Nativity pageants… and, in our time, televangelists… Vacation Bible School… Campus Crusade for Christ meetings… and films like “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

With all due respect to the fine work of Christian apologists, I would argue that very few people convert to Christianity because they’ve studied textual variants in the Gospel of Luke and concluded that, on balance, we have the original text. Instead, they become Christians first… because they encounter the personality of Christ reflected in the lives of his modern-day followers and decide to say Yes to his call to be part of the Kingdom. Only later do they read the Bible in depth… and only later still, if ever, do they engage in an academic study of Biblical origins, sources, and textual variants.

“Jesus is most fully and consistently learned with the context of the believing community of the church…” writes Luke Timothy Johnson, who teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, in his wonderful book, Living Jesus. Johnson is a professional New Testament scholar who spends all his time in academic study of the Bible… yet, he insists, true knowledge of Jesus Christ does not come primarily through such study. For people who have “entered into the energy field that is Jesus’ continuing presence in the world,” that is, believing Christians, knowledge of Jesus comes from other sources than history.

In his book, Jesus, Interrupted, New Testament scholar and scourge of conservative evangelical Christianity, Bart Ehrman, marvels that more Christians in the pews don’t know about the details about contemporary New Testament scholarship, textual criticism and so on. He suspects that it’s a conspiracy among ministers to keep their gullible congregations in the dark. But the real answer is: Ministers and preachers rarely expound on the latest theories of Bible scholars because they’re really not all that helpful…. or relevant to the lives of real people. What’s more, they change frequently and often conflict with one another.

Of course, I am not saying that academic Bible study is not worthwhile. I spent a large chunk of my life engaged in it… and many of my personal heroes are academics, like Bart Ehrman, who master the details of the historical-critical method in search of any new discoveries or insights about Jesus and his kingdom. I think most people could benefit from at least introductory classes on the Bible and the latest research and methods used by Bible scholars.

No, what I am saying is that academic Bible scholarship rarely if ever threatens Christian faith directly… because Christian faith is not based on historical reconstructions of what “really happened” when Jesus walked on earth.

If that were the case, the only true Christians would be Bible scholars and historians… and I don’t think most of them would say that.

This is the basic mistake that fundamentalism makes. It is, at root, a denial of faith as it is actually experienced in the Christian community… which is the experience of the Risen Christ through word and sacrament.

The doctrine of what’s called the verbal or “plenary” inerrancy of scripture leads, almost inevitably, to assertions that the historical truths embedded in the Gospel texts can be “proven” true – when, in fact, they cannot be. If they could be proven, then Christian faith would not be faith at all but history, scientific knowledge. At best, an historian or secular Bible scholar deals in probabilities, guestimates, hunches even. But faith in Jesus is not a judgment of probability: it’s a response to a call from a real human being.

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