James Tabor and the Mainstream Paul

James Tabor recently wrote two guest posts on Bart Ehrman’s blog in preparation for an academic conference on the historical Paul. One is better than the other, but both are illustrative of everything right and wrong about biblical studies as a...

Justin Brierley on Jesus

Justin Brierley starts his discussion of the historical facts of Jesus by quoting H.G. Wells (p. 94), someone who had no degrees in history, and only remarked upon the historical effect on Well’s era of the literary character of Jesus, and merely presuming the...

Crucifixion Quake! An Unusual Movie about an Unusual Passion

Years ago I sat for a day of interviews for a film by Marco Bazzi about a geologist obsessed with the alleged earthquake at the time of Christ’s death. The resulting movie is now available (you can find it in most of the usual places, including Amazon Prime or...

Why the Smart Money Is on the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife Being a Forgery

I was going to do a news roundup of several new developments in ancient manuscript studies, until one of them turned out to be a roller-coaster ride down a rabbit hole filled with all manner of twists and turns. The subject? The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. The other...

The Historicity of Paul the Apostle

I am often enough asked what evidence there is for the historical existence of Paul that a summary write up would be handy to refer people to. This also has use as some scholars ignorantly claim that any standard that would deny the historicity of Jesus would entail...

The Jesus Tomb and Bayes’ Theorem

Finally, a mathematician actually gets the math right on the Jesus Tomb hypothesis. Conclusion? We have not found the tomb of Jesus. For those who already know the backstory and want to jump right to it, read Bayes’ Theorem and the “Jesus Family...

Ehrman Trashtalks Mythicism

Yesterday Bart Ehrman posted a brief article at the Huffington Post (Did Jesus Exist?) that essentially trashtalks all mythicists (those who argue Jesus Christ never actually existed but was a mythical person, as opposed to historicists, who argue the contrary),...

Amazing Proofs of Jesus!

There seems to be an odd rise the last year or so in forgeries or other bogus claims of “archaeological” finds attesting to first century Christianity. In actual fact, we have no (that’s zero) archaeological evidence pertaining to Jesus or Christians...

Behold Babylon USA!

No. This isn’t an article about the U.S. Supreme Court allowing Presidents to break the law (you can find my thoughts on that here and here). Nor is it about that cute little town in southern New York. Rather, this is an article about How We Are All...