Do not Leave the Path
By Birger A. Pearson When novelists and screenwriters try to insert something salacious into the life of Jesus, they focus on one woman: Mary from Magdala. Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute? Was Mary Magdalene the wife of Jesus? Birger A. Pearson addresses these popular notions in the article “From Saint to Sinner” below. As Pearson notes, …
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Geza Vermes on the transition from Jewish Christians to Gentiles By Noah Wiener October 20, 2020 A turning point in the Jesus movement, Peter baptizes the Roman centurion Cornelius, the first non-Jewish Christian, in Jerusalem (Acts 10), as shown in one of five baptism scenes on a 12th-century baptismal font in St. Bartholomew’s Church in …
By Ariel David Apr. 21, 2021 Among the biggest open questions about the Dead Sea Scrolls are who wrote them, and where. Were these 2,000-year-old manuscripts penned by a single group in the Judean desert, perhaps the enigmatic sect known as the Essenes? Or did they originate in different places and within various Jewish religious …
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When a historian of Israelite religion talks of the origin of God, she certainly doesn’t mean ontology. Proofs for the existence of God are above the historian’s pay grade. Moreover, historians of religion are not systematic theologians who weave all data into a unified whole. Even our skilled biblical redactors knew better when it came …
What was King Hezekiah’s reform like on the ground? David Rafael Moulis July 24, 2020 3 Comments 12801 views Share One of the most significant changes in the religious life of ancient Israel occurred during the reign of the Judahite king Hezekiah, in the late eighth century B.C.E. The Hebrew Bible provides us with this image: “He removed the high places, broke …
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Jonathan Laden DNA analysis, from bodies found at several sites, explains more than half of ancestry. After examining the DNA of 93 bodies recovered from archaeological sites around the southern Levant, the land of Canaan in the Bible, researchers have concluded that modern populations of the region are descendants of the ancient Canaanites. Most modern …
By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor The discovery of an Iron Age temple near Jerusalem has upended the idea that the ancient Kingdom of Judah, located in what is now southern Israel, had just one temple: the First Temple, also known as Solomon's Temple, a holy place of worship in Jerusalem that stood from the 10th century B.C. until …
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Prof. Israel Knohl The Elephantine Stele and the Great Harris Papyrus both describe Pharaoh Setnakhte’s war against the Levantine usurper Irsu in 1186 B.C.E. Reading these accounts together with Manetho’s story of the war against Osarseph offers us a possible historical context for what eventually became the Bible’s story of the exodus of Israel from …
By Martin Leuenberger In the last two decades there has been a massive revival of religious-historical approaches to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, including the study of archaeological evidence and cultural history. One of the more controversial issues concerns the origins of Yhwh, the god of the Bible The importance of this question is obvious, since it …
It’s been said that the first chapter of Bereishit (Genesis) contains polemics against just about every worldview common in the ancient world. I want to focus here on just one of those worldviews: the notion of destiny, that a person’s fate is written in the stars. Au contraire, says the Torah: as soon as humans enter the …
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