A Perennial Digression

The Bible is not unified in its understanding of what happens to people at death, but contrary to the often-heard dictum that the Hebrew Bible has no afterlife, the people who wrote and read the texts of the Bible very much thought something happens to us at death. In Ancient Israel and Judah, the broad belief of the Near East was normative: there is an underworld, t...

Last Thursday, I gave five reasons for why I think Luke is second century. Here, I give five more for why I think John is also second century.

Brian Copenhaver makes the good decision in his The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment to consistently translate Moses’ מַטֵּה or ῥάβδος as his “wand” rather than his “staff,” as most traditional translations have it. Attention is first drawn to the item in the Exodus story when Moses meets God on Mt. Sinai, in which, I would argue, the staff decidedl...

I have gotten on more than one occasion now a request for a shorter, more concise case for why I think the Gospel of Luke was written in the second century rather than the mainstream moderate dating to sometime in the 80s or 90s CE, at the end of the first century. In this post, I’m going to offer five reasons. Next Thursday, I’ll offer another five for why I think John is al...

Καὶ ἦλθον εἰς τὸ πέραν τῆς θαλάσσης εἰς τὴν χώραν τῶν Γερασηνῶν. καὶ ἐξελθόντος αὐτοῦ ἐκ τοῦ πλοίου εὐθὺς ὑπήντη...