Biblical Historians Archive
Joseph ben Matthias ha-Cohen, commonly known as Josephus, was a Jew, born in A.D. 37 to an aristocratic priestly family. His native language was Aramaic, although he would have known Hebrew well, and all of his surviving writings are in Greek. At different times, his religious interests led him to study or affiliate with the Sadducees, Essenes, and Pharisees, the three major Jewish factions. A general during the early days of the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66-73, he was captured by the Romans at the siege of Jotapata in Galilee and promptly changed sides, becoming a client of the future Flavian emperor Vespasian, receiving Roman citizenship, and taking the name Flavius Josephus.
His literary works include Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, Against Apion, and an autobiography. The first two are frequently read by students of the Bible because of information they provide about Jewish history and events surrounding the life of Christ and the apostles. Jewish War, however, is primarily a work of classical... Read the rest of this entry »
A Targum (plural Targumim) is an Aramaic translation and/or paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible. They are known from the Medieval period, but with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the twentieth century which included some Targumim (4QtgLev, 4QtgJob, 11QtgJob, and 6Q19), scholars have turned their attention to these important texts in an effort to discover something about how Jews living in the first century BC and first century AD interpreted the biblical text.
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All four gospels agree that Jesus Christ was born prior to the death of Herod the Great (died March 13, 4 B.C.) and died when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea (A.D. 26-36). The challenge facing any reconstruction of Jesus‘ life, the duration of which lasted almost exactly thirty-four years, is allowing sufficient time prior to Herod’s death for the early events of Jesus’ life to have taken place while at the same time having a death date of Friday on the day before Passover (Matthew, Mark and Luke) or the day of Passover (John).
Historically, scholars have assumed that the Christians assimilated their celebration of Jesus Christ‘s birthday to either the celebration of the Roman winter festival of Saturnalia, the natal day of sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) at the winter solstice, or the birthday of the Eastern god Mithras, whose birthday was celebrated on December 25. For centuries, scholars have suggested that pagans who had converted to Christianity were... Read the rest of this entry »
Jesus of Nazareth, a phrase occurring seventeen times in the New Testament, has identified a small, unwalled town in southern Galilee with Jesus for all time. Located some fifteen miles west of the Sea of Galilee and twenty miles east of the Mediterranean Sea, Nazareth had a population between two hundred and four hundred people at the beginning of the first century. An obscure town, Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, by Josephus, or in the Talmud. It is situated in the hills four miles southeast of Sepphoris, Herod Antipas’ early capital.
Nazareth’s archaeological record indicates that the inhabitants exploited the soft limestone in the area to build basements, cisterns, grain storage facilities, and olive and wine presses, reflecting its main economic enterprise-agriculture. Nazareth had no palaces, bathhouses, or paved streets, indicating that the people lived in humble homes that spread across a south-facing slope. It was an all-Jewish village that was... Read the rest of this entry »
Bethlehem (Hebrew for “house [or place] of bread”) was the birthplace of King David (1 Samuel 16:1-4). An unwalled village about five miles south of Jerusalem with little more than a hundred persons during the Herodian period, it was, nevertheless, the prophesied place of the Messiah’s birth (Micah 5:2-4). Joseph, Mary, and perhaps their parents were possibly born in Bethlehem before migrating north into Galilee. Matthew and Luke mention Bethlehem in the birth narratives (Matthew 2:1, 5-6; Luke 2:4, 15). The phrase “because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7) may better be rendered “because there was no space in the room,” indicating that Joseph and Mary may have found shelter in a relative’s home at the time.
Although the New Testament does not mention a cave, a second-century source states that Jesus was born in one. Many homes in Bethlehem were built in front of caves, so we can easily envision Joseph and Mary seeking... Read the rest of this entry »
Early Christian interest in the birth, infancy, and childhood of Jesus Christ was surprisingly only a peripheral concern for the writers of the New Testament. Only Matthew and Luke record any of the details of Jesus‘ birth, whereas Mark, John, Paul, and others pass over that period in Jesus’ life with absolute silence. One of the key features of the earliest accounts is the events they record are bound directly to the eyewitness tradition; therefore, the events that were witnessed by the disciples or others are the ones reported by the evangelists. Only in a limited number of instances do the Gospels Interest in other events appears to have developed only in the second century, attested in part by the fact that early Christians celebrated the date of Jesus Christ‘s baptism (January 6) before they celebrated the date of his birth. However, in the second century and later, Christian authors began reporting the legendary accounts of otherwise unknown acts and deeds of... Read the rest of this entry »
The Jewish scriptures (the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) were not finalized in its current form until the end of the New Testament period, about A.D. 90. Before this time, various Jewish groups or sects held differing views about which of the Jewish writings were authoritative. Virtually all groups accepted the five books of Moses, known as the Law (Torah). However, the Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees, also accepted the books that constitute the “Prophets” and the “Writings,” books such as Esther, the Psalms, and Job. Jesus Christ refers to this threefold division-Law, Prophets, and Psalms-during a post-resurrection appearance (see Luke 24:44).
Outside Jerusalem, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews read their sacred writings in translation. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew bible, eventually played a much more significant role in the early Christian church than it did in Judaism. It contained more material than what is found in the Hebrew texts. The... Read the rest of this entry »
Some of the material connected with New Testament books in modern editions of the Bible was not part of the autographs, or original compositions, by the authors. Instead, these materials are translations of scribal additions and commentary and include titles, postscripts or subscriptions, and glosses.
When the writings of the New Testament began to be gathered and copied in groups-such as a codex of the four Gospels or a collection of Paul’s letters-or when a variety of gospels became available to a single congregation, it became necessary to identify books by titles. These titles were written as superscriptions above the beginning of the text being copied. For the four Gospels, all of which are internally anonymous and never explicitly name their authors in their texts, these titles represented early Christian traditions of who wrote the Gospel. Because they came to be seen as different versions or understandings of the same Gospel, each was entitled simply “according to,”... Read the rest of this entry »
A growing number of scholars are advocating that we replace the New Testament Gospels with some recently discovered texts from antiquity, primarily the Nag Hammadi codicies discovered in Egypt in 1945. They argue that these texts predate the canonical Gospels. The discovered texts from Egypt are important because they provide a window on the world of the second and third centuries A.D.
Even though the canonical texts are ostensibly our earliest sources for the study of Christianity in the first century, some scholars have advocated increasingly early dates for some of these newly discovered texts. If, for example, some text from Nag Hammadi predates our canonical Gospel, then we could rewrite Christian history from another perspective-namely, the perspective of Gnostic Christianity. The claim that a certain text promises to rewrite Christianity is continually used as a selling point for many of these textual discoveries.
Surprisingly, some texts in the New Testament itself-the pastoral... Read the rest of this entry »
Of the four gospels, only Matthew and Luke give an account of the Jesus Christ‘s conception and birth. Written from two different perspectives and containing different details, these two narratives complement each other and together paint an important picture of the nativity, including that Jesus‘ mother was named Mary, that she lived at one time in Nazareth, that he would be born near Jerusalem, and that his conception was a divine miracle.
Although Matthew testifies that Mary conceived by the power of God, he emphasizes that Jesus Christ was the son of David by the genealogy at the beginning of the birth narrative and by his focus on the role of Joseph, Jesus’ legal father. Through dreams, Joseph received instructions to wed Mary, accept and name the infant Jesus, and move the family when threatened by Herod and then his son Archelaus. Through the use of quotations from the Old Testament, Matthew further demonstrates how Jesus Christ’s birth fulfilled messianic... Read the rest of this entry »
