Q. In both the past and the present, people have often drawn parallels between Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana, a real person who lived some 50 years after Jesus’ day, and had a biography written about him by Philostratus which considerably post-dates our canonical Gospels. As you point out, even when we compare these two historical figures, or, for example compare Jesus to some of the lives of the Caesars, we have no stories in pagan literature about a virgin who becomes pregnant without sex or a story about a crucified messiah or divine figure. Why do you think it is that parallelomania seems to be such a popular modus operandi for mythicists who want to explain away the existence of Jesus, especially when various of the supposed parallels are in fact made up? And one more thing—- why shouldn’t we think that the pre-existing Gospel stories may have influenced the way the story of Apollonius of Tyana was later told, rather than vice versa?

A. There are several points that need to be made, I think, about all the parallels that exist between the stories of Jesus and other supposed “divine men” of ancient Greece and Rome. The first is that there were indeed a number of similarities between the ways Christians talked about Jesus and the ways pagans (and in some instances, Jews) talked about other “sons of God.” There is no point denying this (it comes as a huge surprise to my students). We have stories of other “divine men” from antiquity who were thought to have been supernaturally born; to have been preternaturally wise, religiously, while still youths; to have engaged in itinerate preaching ministries; to have done miracles such as miraculously feeding the hungry, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead; and at the end of their lives to have ascended to heaven. These other stories do exist (and not just about Apollonius of Tyana.)

But – the second point – the fact that Jesus was talked about in ways similar to how others were talked about does not mean that he (or they) did not exist. Some of these stories are told about figures who are absolutely and incontrovertibly historical (Alexander the Great; the Emperor Vespasian; Apollonius; and so on). If you wanted to tell stories about a figure you considered to be more than human, to be in some sense divine, these are the kinds of stories you told. That means that the stories about Jesus may well have been shaped by the expectations of the Jewish and pagan audiences to whom they were told, so that one needs to take that into account when deciding what actually happened in Jesus’ life. But as I indicated in my previous answer, this is unrelated to the question of whether Jesus actually existed.

And finally – my third point – it should be stressed that all of these figures about whom such stories were told were also different in key ways from one another. They were not all the same. The stories varied from one person to the next. The stories about Jesus are different in many ways from the others (just as each of them is different from the others). This is important to bear in mind because mythicists often claim that everything said about Jesus can be paralleled in the myths and legends told about other divine figures on earth. And that simply is not true. A number of the key stories about Jesus are in fact unique to him, including some of the most important.

Just to take two examples. As I spell out at greater lengths on one of my blog posts, even though there are numerous instances of divine men who are supernaturally born, there is no instance of a divine man being born to a “virgin,” as happens in the case of Jesus, for example in the Gospel of Matthew. The entire point of most of the pagan supernatural birth stories is that a (mortal) woman is made pregnant by a God, precisely by having sex with her (often in human form, though sometimes Zeus preferred being in the form of a swan, or a snake, or…. some other animal, for some odd reason). I don’t know of any instances in which a woman gives birth as a virgin. So too: the resurrection. The Gospel understanding of the resurrection is that Jesus came back into his body (a one-time corpse) which was then transformed and raised and exalted (explicitly in Luke-Acts) to heaven. This reanimation of the body type of resurrection is not attested, so far as I know, for any other divine man in antiquity.
This is an important point because mythicists want to claim that all the stories about Jesus were simply taken over from the pagan environment. And this is simply not true.

Q. It appears that mythicists have not read Jonathan Z. Smith, and do not realize that there is no unambiguous evidence for the historical argument that ancients believed in dying and rising gods before the time of Jesus, and that therefore the story of Jesus is just a historicized version of that myth. Why do you think this theory of dying and rising gods became so popular in the 20th century, and what caused its scholarly demise? Was there new evidence that Smith and others unearthed, or just closer reasoning about the existing evidence?

A. Yes, for a long time it was widely thought that dying and rising gods were a constant staple of ancient pagan religions, so that when Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they were simply borrowing a common “motif” from pagan religions. This view was first popularized by Sir James George Frazer at the beginning of the twentieth century in his enormously influential (and very large) book, The Golden Bough. (As I explain in Did Jesus Exist, Frazer did in his day what Joseph Campbell did in ours – popularized the view that at heart, all religions are basically the same).

This view was exploded by Jonathan Z. Smith in the late 1980s, chiefly in an article on the “dying-rising gods” in the scholarly and authoritative Encyclopedia of Religion. Smith showed that the notion that there was a widespread category of gods who died and rose again was, in fact, a modern myth, not based on a careful reading of ancient sources. In his own words: The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation , must be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts….

All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity. (Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. Lindsay Jones, (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005 [original: 1987]), 4:2535)

Smith’s findings were based not on new discoveries, but on a more careful reading of ancient sources. Unfortunately, even though these findings have made a major impact on the research of New Testament scholars and other scholars of Christian antiquity, they appear to be unknown to the mythicists, many of whom continue to make the now dated claim that the resurrection of Jesus was simply invented along the lines of the common pagan myth.

Q. In what way is the Jewish notion of a resurrection a different idea than either the fertility crop cycle idea, or what is sometimes said about pagan deities that either disappear or die?

A. One of the reasons for thinking that the belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection is not exactly like what you can find in pagan myths about their gods is that it is solidly rooted in Jewish apocalyptic beliefs of the first century. This should come as no surprise, since Jesus and his followers were not pagans with pagan views of the divine realm, but first-century apocalyptically minded Jews. In some pagan circles, there was a belief in fertility gods, who would spend some time in the underworld and some time in this world, alternating year after year. These gods were closely connected to the crops: they (both the crops and the gods connected with them) die in the winter and come back to life in the Spring. And they do that year after year. That obviously is not like the early Christian belief in Jesus, who does not go into the underworld then return to this world year after year. Instead, Jesus was believed to have gone to the underworld for three days and then to have been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven where he is to stay until he returns. This is not rooted in pagan mythology, but in apocalyptic theology.

To explain how “resurrection” is a Jewish apocalyptic idea, it is necessary to give a bit of background on Jewish apocalyptic thought. According to apocalypticists of ancient Judaism, this world controlled by forces of evil who were making life miserable for people, especially those who sided with God. That’s why there is so much pain and misery all around us. God is not doing it. The powers of evil are doing it (for example the Devil, the demons, the powers of sin and death). But God, these apocalypticists believed, was soon to intervene in history, overthrow the forces of evil, and set up a good kingdom here on earth. When he did that, he would destroy all people who sided with evil, and reward all those who sided with him. And this applied not only to people who were living at the time, but also those who had died. All people would be raised from the dead to face judgment, either eternal punishment or eternal reward. Moreover, this was to happen very soon – within their own generation!

Jesus himself preached an apocalyptic message of the coming judgment and the entrance of the Kingdom of God, to appear very soon. This would include a resurrection. Som time after Jesus was arrested, tried, and crucified, some of his followers (all of them? It’s hard to say) came to believe that he had been restored to live and exalted to heaven. They interpreted this as an act of God, and understood it to be a “resurrection.” The implications for them were clear and certain, and they are not the implications that Christians typically draw today. For these ancient Jewish apocalypticists, if Jesus was raised from the dead, that means that the resurrection – to come at the end of time – had already started. In other words, the kingdom was virtually here!

That’s why Paul calls Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection.” He was the first to be raised, and everyone else will soon follow suit, very soon, very very soon indeed. Paul expected to be alive when it happened.

This apocalyptic notion of resurrection is rooted in a belief that even though this world is filled with pain and suffering, God is ultimately sovereign, and he will have the last word. By raising Jesus, he has started the sequence of events that will transpire at the end. This is not a belief rooted in pagan ideas of a dying-rising god (if there ever were such ideas). It is a belief rooted in a Jewish apocalyptic worldview.

Q. The technique used by Frazier, and by later mythcists to reconstruct a pagan model of a dying and rising god which then is assumed to be the prototype on which Jesus is supposedly modeled has been called ‘the synthetic fallacy’. Whats wrong with the notion of cherry picking ideas from various ancient religious stories and then constructing a paradigm out of it which is supposed to be the basis for the Jesus story? To what degree do you think Frazier’s Golden Bough suffers from reading the pagan evidence on the basis of Christian views and assumptions, and so reading that evidence wrongly?

A. I’ve covered some of this in my discussion of Frazer earlier.

Q. The views of G.A. Wells seem in various ways to be different from other mythicists. He argues that Paul thought Jesus existed long before the first century, and that the Jewish personification of Wisdom was used to create the mythical Jesus. What’s wrong with this sort of reasoning about the historical Jesus? Why does it seem that persons like Wells and Doherty are prepared to grasp at straws or extreme arguments to prove their point, using an ‘any stick to beat a dog’ kind of approach to the Jesus question?

A. G. A. Wells is probably the best known mythicist of modern times, although, interestingly, he has shifted his perspective on the existence of Jesus. In his early writings Wells maintained the standard mythicist view that there never was a Jesus who lived. But as he did more research (he is not a New Testament scholar or a scholar of early Christian history; his field is modern German intellectual history) he came to realize that yes, there actually was a Jesus. Rather than completely backtracking on his earlier published views, however, Wells simply modified them so that he no longer said that Jesus did not exist, but that the Jesus who existed is virtually unrelated to the person we think of as Jesus of Nazareth. Specifically, for Wells (now), Jesus was not the Galilean preacher/healer of the first century. That figure is the creation of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was a completely unknown and obscure Jewish figure who lived over a hundred years earlier. Christ on the other hand was an invention of a Jewish sect of the first century, based on their understanding of Jewish myths about “Wisdom.”

These Wisdom traditions are based on passages such as Proverbs 8, where “Wisdom” is said to have been with God in the beginning and to have created the universe. The early Christians called Jesus God’s “Wisdom” (e.g., 1 Corinthians 1:23-24), and so had begun to imagine him as that one referred to in Proverbs. This was not in reference to the man Jesus who lived in almost complete obscurity a hundred years earlier, however. This was a myth that they invented about the divine Christ, God’s Wisdom.
This view is a bit complicated, but I spell it out in greater length in Did Jesus Exist. Among other things I show that the references in Paul to Jesus do not make sense if they are referring to a person who lived in obscurity a hundred years earlier, and that it is completely implausible that the entire “Christ myth” was invented on the basis of Jewish ideas about “Wisdom,” since Jesus was not primarily identified as Wisdom in the earliest traditions about him, but instead, precisely, as the Messiah – and a crucified messiah at that (Wisdom is never called the messiah in Jewish sources). This shows that Christians knew that Jesus had lived. Recently. And they knew that he had been crucified. But they called him the messiah anyway.

Q. On p. 180 you say that because the pericope about the woman caught in adultery is likely not an original part of the Gospel of John, that therefore it probably didn’t happen. Really? Why does that follow? Weren’t there many other things Jesus actually said and did that don’t make the cut of being included in this or that Gospel? Aren’t canonicity and historicity two separate issues?

A. Yes, good point. At that stage of my argument I was using a kind of short hand. The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is not in John (or any other Gospel), and does not start appearing in our Greek manuscripts until the fifth century. So if anyone thinks that it is a historical story, s/he has a lot of explaining to do! In fact, I think it can be shown that the story originated as two different stories that were in circulation, independently of one another in the second, third, and fourth centuries, until they were combined in our canonical version; there may be some historical merit in one of these two stories, but the other is almost certainly legendary. That takes a very long article to demonstrate, however, and I will not try to do so here.

What I will say is that just because the woman caught in adultery is such a great story and a favorite of many readers of the Bible does not mean that it’s historical, or that it should be given a privileged place among apocryphal stories that originated outside our earliest sources, later in the Christian tradition. It has to be judged on the same historical grounds as any other story – in this case having as one of its clear disadvantages that we do not have it in its present form until the fifth Christian century – and when it is judged on those grounds, at least in its present form, it does not appear to be historical. (If it was historical, one has to ask why none of our Greek witnesses seems to know about it in its present form until the fifth century.)

Q. You place a good deal of stock in the criterion of dissimilarity, in terms of its ability to validate that something probably happened or was said, but at the same time you stress that this criterion cannot be used to disprove that something was said or done, in the way Robert Price uses it. Explain what you mean by this. Isn’t it also true that scholars like John Dominic Crossan rely too exclusively on the criterion of multiple attestation to establish authenticity (which would eliminate things like the parable of the Good Samaritan automatically) without also using the criterion of dissimilarity to compile a list of probably authentic traditions? In your judgment what is the balanced of proper way to use a combination of such criteria for authenticity?

A. In my view, to establish a tradition about Jesus as historical requires the rigorous application of historical criteria. The three most commonly used include the two you mention: multiple attestation and dissimilarity. The first indicates, as I pointed out in an earlier answer, that any tradition found independently in more than one source has a greater chance of being historical than a tradition found in only one source (since if it is in only one source, that source could have made it up; if it is independently found in several sources, however, none of them could have made it up, and so it must go back to a stage or a tradition antecedent to all three). The second criterion, dissimilarity, acknowledges that the early Christians were modifying and inventing traditions about Jesus, and if so, and if there is a tradition that seems to run *counter* to what the followers of Jesus would have wanted to say about him (e.g., from my earlier answer, that he was a messiah who got crucified), then THAT tradition is more than likely historical (because Christians would not have made it up).

Both of these criteria are what I would call “positive” principles, because they show us what probably is historical, rather than what is not. That is to say, if a tradition is found in only one source (e.g., the parable of the Good Samaritan is found only in Luke), that does not necessarily mean that it is not historical; it means that we cannot establish that it is historical using this criterion. So too, if a tradition about Jesus does coincide with what Christians would have wanted to say about him (e.g., that he was concerned about the poor and oppressed) that in itself does not mean that the tradition is not historical. It means that if you want to show that the tradition is historical, you cannot do so using this criterion.
The traditions about Jesus that are the most plausible are the ones that pass both criteria. Jesus’ crucifixion, for example, passes both; so does his having come from Nazareth; and his having been baptized by John the Baptist; and – well there are others.

The third criterion is equally important, but is a NEGATIVE principle. It says that any tradition about Jesus that cannot plausibly be fit into a first-century Jewish Palestinian context cannot be accepted as historically reliable. The principle is negative because it, unlike the other two, does not decide which traditions are probably historical; it decides which ones almost certainly are not historical. And so, for example, in later Gnostic Gospels Jesus is shown elaborating on the Gnostic myths about where the divine realm and the world we live in came from. Such complex myths cannot be otherwise located in Galilee in the 20s CE. The conclusion is near to hand that Jesus did not really deliver discourses on them, even though the Gnostic Gospels claim he did.

It is a mistake to use the positive criteria in a negative way. If a tradition of Jesus does not pass independent attestation or dissimilarity, we may indeed be suspicious of it – and usually there are other grounds for being so – but it is difficult to make a final statement about it. It simply does not pass the criteria. It would also be a mistake to use the negative criterion in a positive way. If a tradition about Jesus can be fit in his own context, that does not necessarily mean it is historical – it just means it that it could be.
Robert Price, though, uses dissimilarity to rule out everything – almost literally everything – in the Gospels as unhistorical, on the grounds that just about everything could fit some kind of Christian agenda or another. I don’t think the criterion is best used that way.

Other scholars like Dom Crossan try to put to many eggs in the basket of one criterion (in his case, independent attestation). I think one needs to use all the criteria, rigorously, rather than just one or the other.

Q. You makes the case for the conclusion that one cannot simply dismiss a tradition as unhistorical simply because it is tendentious or includes legendary material in it. Why is that sort of all or nothing conclusion that the mythicists sometimes make about a tradition invalid?

A. I think I answered that question in my previous answer. At least I meant to do so.

Q. Mythicists seems to often uses the interpolation theory to explain away NT texts that are inconvenient to their agendas. Yet it is also true that some NT scholars use interpolation theories to the very same end, even when there is apparently no textual basis for the interpolation theory. Explain how the mythicists appeal to interpolation is special pleading, whereas it is not when some NT scholars resort to such a theory (take for example the case of 1 Cor. 14.33b-36, which is displaced in some manuscripts but to my knowledge there are no manuscripts that omit it altogether).

A. A theory of interpolation argues that there are passages in the New Testament that were not originally there, even though they are still found in all the surviving manuscripts. When a passage (whether several verses, a single verse, or part of a verse) is not found in one or more manuscripts, then the decision whether it was originally in the NT is based on textual criticism. Scholars have to decide then which manuscript(s) more likely presents the oldest form of the text. But when all the manuscripts agree, and one wants to claim that they are all wrong with respect to the oldest form of the text, that involves arguing that at a very, very early stage of the transmission of the text (when it was being copied), someone inserted a verse (or verses, or part of a verse) that came to be found in all our surviving manuscripts. That would be what we mean by an interpolation.
In my opinion, there is no reason, in theory, to deny that there could be interpolations in the New Testament – that is, places where all our manuscripts include a passage (a verse, part of a verse, several verses) that was not originally put there by the authors. This is especially the case in light of the fact that we don’t start getting relatively complete manuscripts of the New Testament until well over a century after the books of the NT were written. At the same time, I think that if someone thinks a passage was an interpolation, there needs to be very, very, very compelling reasons for thinking so.

In almost every instance in which scholars have suggested that there are interpolations, I think the evidence is not compelling. The one instance that I think is compelling is 1 Cor. 14:34-35. I don’t need to give the evidence here. But I find it completely convincing. I should say that whether the verses are original or interpolated does not matter much to me personally. And that’s precisely the problem with many instances of alleged interpolation: it often happens that the scholar who proposes an interpolation has a vested interest in the matter, because if the verses are in fact original, then his or her particular view of things/interpretation is more or less destroyed.

That happens to be the case with the mythicists, as I repeatedly show in my book. Whenever there is a passage that contradicts their views, they invariably claim that the passage is an interpolation. This is what I have called “interpretation by convenience.” If a passage contradicts your view, then the most convenient way to deal with it is by claiming that “originally” in fact it supported your view, but someone came along and changed it. And so, for example, some mythicists “take out” the references to Jesus in Paul, claiming they were not original. And on what grounds? Because Paul doesn’t mention Jesus! That, obviously, is circular reasoning. In any event, I cite a number of instances of this kind of proceeding Did Jesus Exist.

Here let me just say that every case of alleged interpolation needs to be considered carefully and on its own merits. In principle, none should be excluded. But to be accepted, there needs to be a LOT of compelling arguments.

Q. Mythicists seem not to take seriously actual archaeological evidence, for example the evidence that Nazareth did exist in Jesus’ day, rather relying on certain kinds of philosophical, logical, and history of religions kinds of arguments to make their case. This seems odd since they are trying to make historical points about someone not existing or something not happening in the past. In any case, you make the point that the historical existence of Jesus does not stand or fall on whether Nazareth actually existed. Can you explain why this is so?

A. Yes, whether or not Jesus came from Nazareth may be an important historical question, but unlike what some mythicists think, the very existence of Jesus does not hang on the answer. As background: many mythicists have claimed that the town of Nazareth in fact did not exist in Jesus day. On that ground, they argue that Jesus therefore must have been made up. But the logic of this statement involves a complete non sequitur. Look at it this way. Suppose the birthers are right and that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (I think they are way off base and my knee jerks all over the place when they go on and on about forged birth certificates and so on; but suppose they’re right) Would that mean that he does not exist? Or suppose someone could show that in fact I was not born and raised in Lawrence Kansas (where, in fact, I believe I was born, and I know I was raised). Would that mean I don’t exist? If Jesus did not come from Nazareth, would that mean he didn’t exist? It’s a non sequitur.

The other problem, as I spell out at length in my book, is that the mythicists who claim that Nazareth did not exist in Jesus’ day are completely wrong. It did exist. We have indisputable archaeological proof. Ask any archaeologist of Palestine –absolutely any of them. Archaeologists, for example, have uncovered a farm in Nazreth that was functioning at the time of Jesus; and recently they have uncovered a house that was standing at the time; and they have found coins that were deposited there at the time. There is absolutely no doubt that Nazareth existed at the time. It wasn’t a big place. It wasn’t an impressive place. It was a fairly miserable little place. But it existed. I give some of the evidence in my book.

Q. Robert Price’s argument that the stories of Jesus are a giant midrash on OT stories about Moses and others, and so are completely fiction seems to ignore the fact that midrash is a hermeneutical technique used for contemporizing pre-existing stories. Talk briefly about the difference between how stories are shaped in the Gospels and whether they have any historical substance or core or not. (N.B. It appears that Crossan has recently made the same kind of category mistake arguing that since there are parables in the Gospels, that whole stories about Jesus may be parables, pure literary fictions).

A. In Did Jesus Exist? I try to make a major methodological point that there is a very big difference between saying that a story has been shaped in a certain (non-historical) way and saying that the story is completely non-historical. I make this point because authors like Robert Price have claimed that all the stories about Jesus in the Gospels are midrashes on stories found in the OT. By that he means, roughly, that the story of Jesus is shaped in such a way as to reflect a kind of retelling or exposition of stories about persons and events in the Old Testament. For example, the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel shapes the stories about Jesus to make Jesus appear to be a kind of “second Moses.” Like Moses, Jesus is supernaturally protected at his birth when the ruler (Pharaoh/Herod) seeks to destroy him; like Moses he goes down to Egypt as an infant; like Moses he comes up out of Egypt to the promised land; like Moses he passes through the waters (the parting of the Red Sea; the baptism); after which he spends time in the wilderness being “tested” (40 years; 40 days); after which he goes up on the mountain to receive/deliver the Law (Mount Sinai; Sermon on the Mount). The story of Jesus has evidently been “shaped” in light of the author’s knowledge of the story of Moses in order to say something: Jesus is the new Moses.

It is true that a number of stories about Jesus in the Gospels (not all of them though!) have been shaped as a kind of midrash on the OT. But the key point to make is that there is a difference between shaping a story and inventing a story. As I argue in my book, it is very easy indeed for us today to shape stories of important historical figures when we tell about them. And so we have standard sets of motifs: for example, the “rags to riches” story (which presidential candidates often like to use in telling their own autobiography); or the “tragic hero” story. It would be oh so easy to tell the story of Richard Nixon as the tragic hero, whose tragic flaw led to his spectacular downfall.

But would that mean that Richard Nixon never lived? No, you would need to use other criteria (the ones I’ve enumerated) to decide whether he lived or not. So too with Jesus. Even if you could show that all the stories about him were shaped in light of the OT (you can’t show this; but suppose you could): that would have no bearing on whether he existed or not.

Q. Much weight is often placed on the testimony of Josephus about Jesus and his brother. You argue in the book that at least in an edited form, the Josephus evidence is quite important first century evidence in establishing the existence of Jesus, and presumably also establishing something of when he lived and what he did. Do you see Josephus as a generally reliable historian or put another way a more objective witness since he was not a follower of Jesus?

A. Josephus is an important witness to the fact that there were traditions about Jesus in circulation near the end of the first century outside of Christian circles. He did not get his information from the Gospels, but from other (unknown) sources. So that’s very important. But no one would say that Josephus was objective in his reporting (at least, no scholar of Josephus would say that). He was far from objective! His biases and agenda very much guided his writing. Still, when it comes to what he has to say about Jesus, he was obviously not presenting a biased account in favor of Jesus (in other words, his account is very different from Christian reports that wanted to affirm Jesus for reasons of their own).
When I say this, I am referring to the scholarly reconstruction of what Josephus probably actually wrote, not the Testimonium Flavianum, as it is called, as it now appears in his book the Antiquities.

The Testimonium that we have in the late manuscripts of Josephus has clearly and obviously been “doctored up” by a Christian scribe, since Josephus himself (as we know, e.g., from his autobiography) never became a Christian and so did not himself believe that Jesus was the messiah who was raised from the dead in fulfillment of the Scriptures (as the Testimonium relates).

But Josephus did refer to Jesus, and he does give us some valuable information about him. And he is the first non-Christian source to do so. This is important historical data, as it shows that Jesus was thought of as having lived a real life by the most important Jewish historian of the first century. As such the Testimonium provides us with some much-needed confirmation of information that we can glean from our Christian sources.

Q. Have you considered the recent evidence from the trial of Oded Golan (now over with the defend exonerated) in regard to the James ossuary in which under oath, the head of the IAA was forced to admit that the last third of the inscription (the brother of Jesus part) had genuine ancient patina in it, and then later the IAA lead epigrapher (Ada Yardeni) testified she was convinced the whole inscription James son of Joseph brother of Jesus was a genuine first century inscription? How would this sort of evidence, if genuine, change the discussion of the historical Jesus?

A. I do not think the ossuary provides us with a reliable reference to Jesus. On one hand, I am persuaded by the overwhelming consensus among Palestinian archaeologists, that the inscription is probably a forgery (I’m not an expert on this, as I am not a professional archaeologist; my view is that the professionals are the ones qualified to speak about it. And the experts are pretty unified – or so my colleagues Eric Meyers and Jodi Magness – two of the top experts in the field – tell me). On the other hand, even if it’s not forged, it does not seem obvious to me, or to most other historians in early Christianity that I know, that the inscription has anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth, for all sorts of reasons that experts like Magness have spelled out at length.

Q. In the middle portion of your book, you place a great deal of emphasis on what is usually called the criteria of multiple attestation to demonstrate that Jesus surely existed. Would you explain briefly why historians place so much stock in this criteria, and why it is especially important when dealing with the question of the existence of Jesus.

A. Multiple attestation is one of the most important historical criteria for establishing what happened in the past – not just for historical Jesus research, but for any serious historical research. If the sources to a historical person or event are biased, then it is impossible to know if one of them has just “made something up,” if it is our only witness. But if there are several sources available that independently indicate that an event happened (or that a person lived, etc.), then no one of them could have made it up – since they all report it without having conferred with one another. Some scholars see this criterion as the most important one available for establishing what happened in the past.

And it is extremely useful for establishing the existence of Jesus. If we had only one ancient source that indicated that Jesus lived, we would not be able to make a very strong case. But the reality is that we have lots of sources. Whether or not these sources are biased is immaterial when it comes to this criterion. In addition to Josephus, Pliny, and Tacitus – which are not biased in favor of Jesus’ existence, but which are too late to be of supreme importance (since they are so many years after the fact) – we have numerous Christian sources (on which the non-Christian ones are not dependent). In addition to Paul (who is quite clear and explicit that there was a man Jesus!) we have our first Gospel, Mark, itself based on numerous earlier sources, some of them demonstrably circulating at one point in Aramaic, the native language of Jesus.

But there is much more. Matthew and Luke had numerous sources at their disposal in addition to Mark; we call their respective sources Q (for the material found in both Matthew and Luke not in Mark, such as the beatitudes and the Lord’s prayer), M” (Matthew’s special source, or sources; M may have been one document or, more likely, one or more documents and a collection of oral traditions), and “L” (Luke’s special sources). All of these speak of Jesus’ words and deeds. So does John, and all of John’s sources, which appear to have been independent of the other Gospels. As do the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas, which I take also to have been independent of the other Gospels.

In short, we not only have lots of sources, we have lots of independent sources, from within a hundred years of Jesus’ death, that are absolutely unified in claiming that he was a Jewish teacher from Galilee. I don’t see how we could have this many sources – some of which can be traced to Palestine, and within a few years of the traditional date of Jesus’ death – unless Jesus really existed. This argument has to be taken in conjunction with others, of course, including the importance of Paul himself, who heard stories about Jesus just a couple of years after his death at the outside (more likely within a year or so), and who actually knew, personally, Jesus’ closest disciple and his own brother. Taken together, these independent sources make a compelling argument for Jesus’ existence.

Q. Why do you think it is that some atheists are so adamant about trying to eradicate Jesus entirely from the historical record, by claiming he never existed? It seems they protest too much. Wouldn’t it be just as congenial to their views to argue that yes he existed but: 1) he wasn’t God, and 2) he wasn’t nearly as important as Christianity made him out to be, in particular they might simply deny he was the world’s savior? Why do you think they insist on such an extreme position? It’s like they are haunted by the ghost of Jesus and can’t seem to exorcize it properly.

A). Yes, I long wondered that myself, and in Did Jesus Exist I took a stab at answering it. The mythicists themselves never indicate, of course, why they are so outspoken and even vitriolic in their assertions that Jesus never existed, so all we can go on is educated inference. In my book I argue that it is not an accident that the mythicists are all (to my knowledge) atheists or agnostics who find organized religion highly dangerous. In my view, they have a point about that, as religion has indeed been used for very hateful and harmful purposes over the years, from the crusades and inquisition to the justification of slavery to the oppression of woman, minorities, gays, and other people. So I understand the problem. But the mythicist approach to it seems to be to say that the problem is religion itself (I tend to think the problem is people!); moreover, the one religion they are most familiar with is Christianity. So, in order to pull the rug out from under Christianity (= religion, for them), what better approach than to say that it is complete baseless, unfounded, and built on a myth? If Jesus is a myth, then, in their opinion, Christianity is just a fairy tale not worth believing. And so, to accomplish what they think is a good aim they argue that Jesus did not exist.
I do not see this as disinterested history by people who really want to know what happened in the past. I see it as ideologically driven history by people who have an agenda, and who are willing to “find” what they do in history so long as it meets with their agenda. In my judgment, that is not the best way to do history.

Q. It seems that mythicists place a lot of weight on arguments from silence (e.g. no public records that Jesus existed), but as you point out 99% of all ancients do not show up in records or the literature of the first century, and this tells us nothing about whether they existed or not. Why do you think it is that they refuse to accept the old dictum that absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence? This especially puzzles me about someone like Robert Price who should know better.

A. My sense is that some mythicists think that everyone who believes in Jesus’ historical existence accepts a “believing Christian” view of Jesus, namely, that if Jesus existed he really was the miracle working son of God who really did feed the multitudes with a few loaves, who really did cast out demons, and heal the sick, and raise the dead, and that if there really were a person like that who lived in the first century, somebody from his own day would have mentioned him. On one level, that’s a good point – you would indeed expect such a God-on-earth to be mentioned by someone living at the time. But the fact is that we don’t have a single reference to Jesus from someone living at his time – friend or enemy. We have only documents written by people living later, and almost always by people who believe in him.
So the point the mythicists make is not only that there is silence with respect to Jesus, but that there is unexpected silence. That’s the key.
My response is that this is putting the cart before the horse. As a historian, the first thing to do is to decide whether Jesus existed. If you can show, historically, that he did exist, then and only then can you go on to the next step and ask, “What did he say and do?” If you decide that he did in fact perform hundreds of spectacular miracles (he does them all over the map in the Gospels, of course), then I think you are completely justified in asking: “In that case, why does no one mention him?” But as a historian you may end up saying that he lived a completely natural, non-miraculous life. If that’s true, then it would be no surprise at all that no one mentioned him, any more than that no one mentioned any of his cousins, nieces, or nephews – or indeed, the vast majority of people who lived in his time and place.
But that is a separate question from whether or not he existed. We can show he existed, and it has nothing to do with whether or not he actually existed as a human being.

It’s an old tension or conundrum, but still one worth pondering. On the one hand, it’s a mistake for the Christian to give Satan too much credit for what is going on. Some Christians find demons under every rock in the NT, and even talk about a demon giving them a cold etc. Of this sort of demonizing of everything that goes wrong in life, the NT shows no hint.

Indeed, it is worth noticing that Paul never even uses the word demon, save once (‘you cannot share in the table of demons and also the table of the Lord’). If Christ is the Lord of your life, Christian do not need to fear being possessed by demons. Pestered perhaps, bother or bewildered from the outside or even persecuted, pressured, and harmed perhaps, but not possessed, not spiritually endangered.

If you read Rev. 2-3 carefully you will notice that the powers of darkness are said to be able to harm believers physically, but not spiritually. They are protected spiritually. Greater is he who is within you than the forces that are in this world. Notice in Job 1-2 Satan is able to harm the body, but not the spirit of Job. That’s on the one hand.

On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that Satan still wreaks havoc in the world. Jesus for instance talks about Satan. In Mark 4.15 it is Satan who comes and takes away the Word from the lives of those who’s hearts are like a well-trod path. In Lk. 22.31 Satan is said to be allowed to sift the disciples but Jesus has prayed for Peter so that his faith does not fail altogether, and when he repents and turns back to Jesus he is supposed to strength his fellow disciples.

In Ephes. 6.10-18 Paul is quite frank that we are in a struggle with the Evil One, who has fiery arrows and we must struggle to stand against the onslaught of the evil one in this evil age. In John 8.44 Satan is seen not merely as a tempter but as a liar and a deceiver, and the father of lies. Acts 26.18 says that pagans are under the power of Satan and need to be rescued, and indeed Lk. 10.18 makes clear that exorcisms were one form that rescue took in Jesus’ ministry. He was able to bind the Strong Man, and set his captives free. But the battle is definitely not over. Revelation records a threefold fall of Satan— from heaven to earth, from earth to the Pit, and from the Pit to the lake of fire. According to that book, Satan is alive and well on planet earth these days, and according to 2 Cor. 11.44 he has many disguises, even appearing as an angel of light. 2 Cor. 12.7 says that even Paul was harmed by a stake in the flesh courtesy of Satan. In 1 Thess. 2.18 Paul freely admits that while he wanted to come visit his converts, Satan prevented him from doing so.

Satan is no de-clawed cat or paper tiger in the NT. Indeed, 1 Peter 5.8 says he is a roving, roaring lion looking for someone to devour. He is regularly credited in the NT with schemes, plans, temptations, and harm. Rev. 2.9-10 even says Satan can throw a believer in jail, even leading to his death, but his soul is protected from harm. 1 John 5.18-19 says the whole world is under Satan’s power and control.

On the other hand, 1 John 2.13-14 says Satan can be overcome by believers, and that he flees when he is resisted if one turns to God. ( James 4.7).

C.S. Lewis once said it is perhaps the greatest trick or smoke screen or deception of Satan to convince people that they are too wise to believe in him. But at the same time, it is a mistake to give him too much credit as well. There is a balance between the extremes reflected in the NT, and this is in part because all of the writers of the NT believe they live in ‘this present evil age’ which, now that the Kingdom is breaking in, is passing away. Satan, after the death and resurrection of Jesus is fighting a rear guard action, for he has already lost the battle of D Day, and V-E Day is coming when Christ returns.

The believer then lives betwixt and between, overcoming evil with good, but not surprised or caught napping when temptation happens, wickedness has it’s day, believers suffer, and all is often not right with the world. The good news is— Christ has overcome the world, through faithful life and death and resurrection, and that is our recipe for overcoming as well.

( I don’t normally do more than offer links and small quotes as requested from the NY Times, but this article strikes a major nerve and is so important that I am making a one time exception….)

The Flight From Conversation

By SHERRY TURKLE
Published: NY Times April 21, 2012

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.

As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.

During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why — against all reason — so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?

WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and the author, most recently, of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other

Top 10 Reasons Why Men Shouldn’t Be Ordained

(Kudos to Jason Jackson for this).

10. A man’s place is in the army.
9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.
8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.
7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.
6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.
5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.
4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.
3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.
2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, change the oil in the church vans, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.
1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

The period of 1927-1933 was a crucial one for the fledgling film industry in Hollywood. It was the period when films moved from the silent era (with musical accompaniment) to ‘talkies’. If you have never seen any of the restored earliest films from the silent era, you have really missed something. Start with ‘Birth of a Nation’, move on to some fun films like those by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers. I like black and white films for the same reasons I like Ansel Adams beautiful photography of the West. It manifests magnificent contrasts and so makes things look stark, makes them standout, somethings we will not believe until we see it ‘in black and white’.

Yes, there have been black and white films made in the modern era. The very first film Cybil Shepherd ever starred in (and directed by Peter Bogdanovich), was powerfully filmed in black and white—‘The Last Picture Show’ and there are many others. If you have missed Hitchcock’s black and white classics, like ‘Strangers on a Train’, you have really missed something if you like films at all.

I do not therefore accept the glib remark of some reviewers of ‘The Artist’ that suggest it is an exercise in nostalgia—- Poppycock! Balderdash! Rubbish! Wrong. This film takes advantage of modern technology to perfect this form of art, to do it even better than the old silent films. And it does it in spades (n.b. spades is a suit of cards in black and white). Using mirror techniques, shadow techniques, old style close ups of mouths, and a host of other devices, we see before our wondering eyes what this medium could have become if only it had continued without interruption until now. This film, in terms of cinematography, is just beautiful, even breathtaking in places.

It is a plus in the case of this film that you will not much recognize it’s stars, if at all. I doubt the names Jean Dejardin (John of the Garden in English) and Berenice Bejo roll off your tongue regularly, though you should recognize John Goodman as the film mogul and director within the film.

For an hour and 40 enchanting minutes we have the story told of the transition from the silent to the talking era of film played out in the changing fortunes of silent star George Valentin (aptly named as he is a combination of Rudy Valentino and Errol Flynn) and new star of talking films Peppy Miller who overlap in one film at the end of the silent era.

But the story is not just about ships of fortune passing in the night, the story is ultimately a romance, a typical 30s film romance with no sex but plenty of innocence and pizzazz, no coarseness in the discourse, but plenty of communication, indeed there is much romance, without even so much as a kiss between the protagonists. If you want to see how this could be possible, how a film could make you long for such love without all that demonstrable show and tell, or slap and tickle, then go see this film from an age where gentlemen were genteel, and ladies longed to dress up and look beautiful instead of stripping down to the bare essentials all the time.

The cars, the costumes, the supporting cast, the sets, are all magical, but I haven’t even mentioned the best part— a dog steals the whole show. W.C. Fields warned about getting in a picture with children or animals, and of course he was write. The best actor in the film is the dog! No kidding! Too bad that Oscar doesn’t have a category for ‘best supporting canine in a scene stealing role.

If you are young and in love, or old and still young at heart, or would just like to see an enjoyable story of how love is so much more important than money or fame or even human hubris, then this is the movie for you. I will not in anyway be surprised if it wins the Oscar for Best Picture, and not as an exercise in sentimentality. It will have earned the Oscar fair and square. Cue the swell of sweeping strings about now, and fade to black. It’s the only color you need to say THE END.

( Note from BW3. One of the more constant queries about the book is why the subtitle calls it a Biblical Theology, rather than using the German subtitle which refers to the Doctrine of God in the Bible. That, as Hays pointed out is a narrower field of discussion, though very important. Some of the objects raised have to do with decisions made about the English translation of the book, and its more limited title and table of contents).
God of the Living: A Biblical Theology
An Appreciative Assessment

L. W. Hurtado (University of Edinburgh)

Professors Feldmeier and Spieckermann have produced a major work that deserves the attention of anyone who combines appreciation of historical/exegetical knowledge with a concern for theological engagement with the biblical texts. The eighteen chapters (plus Introduction and Conclusion), amounting to 550 pages of text, represent an impressive project. But it is impressive for more reasons than its bulk, and in what follows I will note some of its additional features. In the spirit of scholarly engagement with matters of shared interest, however, on a few topics I have some critical observations, and will make suggestions for furthering some lines of the discussion so helpfully set out in the book. But, first, a quick overview of its design and the authors’ purpose.

The aim is “to present the Christian Bible’s understanding of God as a coherent scheme” (Preface). That is, the premise for the book is that, with all the diversity of witnesses in the Christian canon, there is a basis for drawing a coherent picture of a single biblical deity. As the nature of this biblical deity is expressed mainly through actions and relations with the world, and with humans in particular, the book is given over to tracing the various ways in which biblical texts give witness to these matters.

There are three main parts to the book. Part 1, “Foundation”, comprises six chapters, each of which focuses on a major attribute of the biblical deity, “God’s being”: “The Name and the Names” (chap 1), “From Lord God to Father God” (chap. 2), “The One as the Unifier” (chap. 3), “The Loving One” (chap. 4), “The Almighty” (chap. 5), and “Spirit and Presence” (chap. 6). Part 2, “Development”, comprises a further twelve chapters devoted to “God’s doing,” i.e., ways in which the actions and character of the biblical God are witnessed to in the Christian Bible. To cite only a few examples, there are treatments here of “Word and Creation” (chap. 7), “Justice and Justification” (chap. 9), “Suffering and Lament” (chap. 12), “Covenant and Promise” (chap. 16), and “Salvation and Judgment” (chap. 17).
The authors emphasize that the biblical texts affirm “God’s will for relationship,” that “God’s being is being God to the benefit of humankind,” and so being human means “participation in the divine life.” They see this expressed in most focused form in the incarnation of the divine Son, and the ultimate divine affirmation of humans is to involve “making the guilty dead alive through the divine life” (13).

My first observation is the boldness of the project. Ours is a time when many have noted the separation of biblical studies and theology (some lamenting this, others celebrating it, all of us aware of it), and when “biblical theology” is often viewed as a species of discourse that is either extinct or extant only in a few curious works that can seem to some as out-of-fashion as bell-bottom trousers. In this situation, it is remarkable to have this unhesitating and carefully considered work.

Indeed, the boldness of the authors goes further. They insist candidly that efforts to articulate a doctrine of the biblical God should relate to the aim of promoting knowledge of this God experientially (2-3). They see “the academic presentation of biblical theology in the form of a biblical doctrine of God” as congenial with “the biblical path” from experience of God to “the disclosure of knowledge of God for others” (6-7). In the historic sense of the word, there is a clear evangelical purpose in this work, the authors insisting that “the doctrine of God” should be formulated to communicate knowledge about God with the objective of promoting the recognition among people that God is “the source and savior of their lives” and their acknowledgement of God as “Lord of their lives” (7). These commendably forthright declarations will cheer those of us who admit to having theological interests, and will perhaps be bad for the blood pressure of those who passionately recoil at any whiff of theology in biblical scholarship.

The book also conveys amply the authors’ familiarity with biblical and extra-biblical texts and with scholarly studies of them. Clearly, the book is primarily a work of biblical scholarship, the authors bringing to their larger purposes ample competence in historical-critical investigation. One quickly has the sense of being guided through the discussions in each chapter by experts with a clear sense of direction and a ready acquaintance with the textual data and exegetical issues.

Although their concern is for a coherent understanding of the biblical God, they insist that “appropriate understanding of the voices of the biblical witness without scholarship in the history of literature and religion is deficient . . .” (8). So (especially in the discussion of OT material) there is regular reference to the situations reflected in various OT texts and to the wider historical and religious environment in which they emerged. I am also impressed that the discussion of OT texts often includes reference to the LXX as well as the MT. In some texts, Jeremiah for example, the textual differences are major, so it is good to see this effort to engage them positively.

As noted already, the book is organized thematically, each chapter tracing a theme (or set of themes) from OT into NT texts. In an obvious effort to do justice to the diversity in these corpora, the discussion typically proceeds by noting varying emphases of major textual witnesses, which, they candidly note, sometimes amount to very real differences in religious outlook, often among OT or NT witnesses, to say nothing of differences between the OT and NT. But in the individual chapters it was not always clear to me what the authors were proposing as the larger, coherent theological point to be taken from this diversity. Are we, for example, simply to note the differences as part of the historical record for informational purposes and to show that we acknowledge that there is such diversity? Or are we to consider the differences in testimony as amounting to a greater richness to be probed theologically? Or are we to see them as reflecting a progressive development (in which the later expressions are to be preferred)?

In addressing these questions and achieving the larger coherence that the authors aimed for, the Conclusion seems to have a crucial role. This chapter-length statement (31 pp.), comprises the entirety of “Part 3” of the work, which I take as confirming its significance. It is clearly intended as an important component of the project.

Interestingly, the first part of the Conclusion (519-41) is given over to various NT texts, beginning with the Mark passage where Sadducees engage Jesus over resurrection of the dead (Mark 12:18-27), and from which the authors derived the book’s title. Judging that there are “good reasons” to take this Markan scene as “the reflection of a historical event” (520), the authors then explore the OT and Jewish background of trust in the biblical God as life-giver. Then, they discuss several Pauline texts that illustrate Paul’s focus on “The relationship of forgiveness granted by God in the death of his Son with new, eternal life” (528-33), followed by brief consideration of Lukan and Johannine texts, all of these showing that “New Testament eschatology understands itself as a christological explication of the Holy Scriptures’ testimony of God” (541).

The final pages of the Conclusion are given over to texts from the OT, “not in order to correct or relativize it, but to demonstrate that the New Testament witness of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ condenses what the Old Testament had anticipated” (541). The authors hasten to add that “This assertion does not imply the claim that only the christological interpretation is appropriate for the Old Testament,” and admit that there are “good grounds” for others, urging only that theirs is “a congenial interpretation” of the OT (541). I take this to mean that the premise for the interpretation that they espouse lies in the NT witness to Jesus, in the light of which the OT is retrospectively understood in a christological relecture. Perhaps the sequence of the discussion in the Conclusion, NT texts considered first, is intended to reflect this.

In the following pages, then, the authors discuss several OT passages, Deuteronomy 30 (the choice presented there between life, linked with adherence to God, and death), Hannah’s song (1 Sam 2:1-10, with its celebration of God as the one who “kills and makes alive”), and Psalm 118 (another celebration of God’s mercy and faithfulness), all three of which, of course, are cited and drawn upon in the NT. The main intention seems to be to establish links between the OT idea of God’s life-giving/affirming power in the face of death and the NT declaration of God’s decisive demonstration of this power in Jesus. So, in answer to the questions I posed about how we are to take the diversity of biblical witnesses, perhaps the authors simply wish to posit the sort of linkage or coherence that they illustrate here.

To turn to a related matter, it seemed to me that there was somewhat less attention given to the historical situations of various NT texts, in comparison with the discussion of OT material. Indeed, in some cases I suggest that the discussion could have been enhanced or nuanced differently had the NT texts been considered with more attention to their respective settings. For example, although the authors note that δικαιοσύνη and δικαιόω terminology feature very prominently in Romans, and to some degree also in Galatians, but not so much in other Pauline letters (although δικαιοσύνη does feature in Philippians), they do not consider why.

To be sure (as noted by the authors, 299-300), Paul’s strong sense of the inadequacy of “the righteousness that came in the Law” (δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐν νόμῳ γενόμενος, Philip. 3:6; cf. v. 9) and the necessity to embrace “that righteousness that is through faith in Christ” (τὴν διὰ πίστεως Χριστοῦ) likely emerged as a consequence of his “Damascus Road” experience, which involved the painful recognition that his own version of Torah-zeal had actually put him in rebellion against God’s redemptive purposes in Jesus. But I think it is also likely that, thereafter, a further important stimulus in his development and (selective) deployment of “justification” language arose from his Gentile mission, specifically in the necessity to give a rationale for the inclusion of former pagans as fully enfranchised co-religionists with Jewish believers in Jesus. If everyone can stand before God acceptably only in the righteousness that comes through faith in Jesus, as Paul certainly believed, then the lack of Torah-righteousness is not such a problem. In short, if Torah-observance in itself is inadequate for Jews, it is unnecessary for Gentiles.

The authors of this book expound the idea of “justification” as typically understood in German Protestant circles, e.g., as the key to Pauline thought and as the high point of NT theology, and they do so with particular eloquence. But, speaking for myself, I found the discussion here (299-306) insufficiently connected to the specific situation in Paul’s ministry and so tending very quickly toward the theologizing discourse of traditional Protestant thought, with the accompanying danger of abstract categories (but cf. the brief notice of the situation for Paul’s thought in Galatians, 461). It is interesting that in the discussion of Paul there is no reference to E. P. Sanders, Dunn, Munck, Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr and the various emphases associated with them, which collectively link Paul and his thought with his own distinctive (but in his own way very Jewish) mission.

One might also ask whether some of the contrasts drawn between Paul and some other NT texts involve occasional over-simplifications (esp. 323-37), and whether these might have been avoided with more (sympathetic) attention to the situations reflected in the respective texts. For example, Hebrews certainly emphasizes Jesus’ priestly, sacrificial and mediatorial roles in a distinctive manner. The authors worry that this can have the (unintended) effect of making God into “a fear-inspiring judge who confronts humanity as a destructive entity” (326), dividing “‘the two faces’ of God between Father and Son such that the attribution of grace to the mediator leads to a problematic one-sidedness regarding God the Father that foregrounds his threatening side” (327). But I wonder if this is to ignore the motivating concern reflected in Hebrews to emphasize to readers portrayed as in danger of retreating from Christian faith the absolute importance of Jesus, and the inadequacy of any form of religious faith (including Judaism) that fails to accord him centrality. So, are the statements about God in Hebrews that the authors take as “threatening” perhaps essentially intended to emphasize that any view of God that omits Jesus and any attempt to relate to God that neglects Jesus is doomed? I have somewhat similar reservations about their later critical treatment of Hebrews with regard to christology and new covenant (464-67), where, again, they make unfavorable comparisons with Paul. I must admit that I wondering if we see in this handling of Hebrews something of Luther’s discomfort with Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation, perhaps still exhibiting insufficiently examined effects.

To be sure, the theology of Hebrews or Revelation (which the authors also find somewhat distasteful in comparison to Paul) is susceptible to distortions of the sort that the authors mention. But surely history shows that Paul’s teachings, particularly his emphasis on divine grace and freedom from Torah-observance, were also not immune to distortions. Indeed, distortions of Paul seem to have started early, to judge from his annoyed complaint in Romans 3:8 about being characterized as promoting an anti-nomian stance, and these continued on into the sort of “cheap grace” versions of Christianity condemned by Bonhoeffer. So, with all due allowance for the footprint of Paul’s teachings in the NT, I do wonder if they should really function, as they seem to in this volume, as the “key” to NT theology and the criterion by which to assess every other NT witness.

As another but much smaller reflection of the German provenance of the volume, I note the frequent use of un-translated Latin formulae, which are sprinkled throughout. This obviously reflects the admirable view in Germany that a working ability in Latin is an essential prerequisite for theological studies. It is a comparatively trivial matter, but I think that in the English translation it would have been wise to include translations. Though it may be regrettable, it is nonetheless a fact that in English-speaking nations today very few students in theology and biblical studies would have any prior study of Latin.

On a matter of greater substance, I think that the discussion of ancient “monotheism” needs greater precision. Time permits only a few observations in what is a complex matter. The authors refer repeatedly to “monotheism” as common and “a relatively widespread phenomenon” in “the religious practice of late antiquity” (e.g., 93, 108-9), but I think this is misleading (as I have pointed out for over 20 years now).

Granted, scholars refer to a “pagan monotheism” in antiquity, but on close inspection it is essentially a conceptual phenomenon cultivated in some philosophically-oriented circles in which the various deities of the religious environment were thought of as expressions (or representatives) of one supreme or common divine entity. But there is no indication that this view was promoted among the general populace. Nor is there any indication that those holding such a view sought to alter the cultic practice followed, not even among their own elite circles, in which all the gods were to be given their proper worship. Indeed, if anything, this “pagan monotheism” seems to have provided its own rationale for regarding all the gods as validly objects of reverence.

By contrast, the rhetoric of what we can call “ancient Jewish monotheism” (which came to more forceful expression particularly in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt) made a sharp contrast between the one true/valid deity of biblical tradition and all the other deities. Indeed, the latter could be referred to as “demons” (as reflected in Deut 32:17 and alluded to in 1 Cor 10:20). This contrast was most forcefully and prominently expressed by Jews in refusing to join in public cultic reverence of any deity other than the biblical deity. In the ancient world, to refuse cult to a deity was effectively to deny the validity of the deity. Second-temple Jewish cultic exclusivity was known and regarded negatively by other peoples as peculiar and even anti-social behavior. Pagans rightly saw it as effectively challenging the validity of their deities, indeed the whole religious scheme of the time.

My point here is that the authors could have made their discussion of the biblical God as “The One and the Unifier” (chap. 3) much more forceful and, to my mind, more interesting and potentially productive heuristically, had they drawn more carefully the ancient religious scene, especially in the second-temple period. The strong, sometimes pugnacious, “exclusive monotheism” advocated among devout Jews and early Christians was not, in fact, simply an intensification or acceleration of a tendency also operative in the wider religious environment of their time. That is certainly not how pagans treated their outlook and practice. The authors observation that the emphasis on one God in Jewish and then Christian circles was related to an emphasis on the particularity of God’s people (whether Jews or the church) is both intriguing and cogent. But the particular “monotheism” advocated in ancient Jewish circles was also a radical critique of gods and religion as typically operative in that time.

Moreover, a clearer sense of the pugnacious nature of “ancient Jewish monotheism” and the zealous efforts made to restrict cultic worship to the one God among ancient Jews also provides a clearer light in which to consider the early Christian inclusion of the risen Jesus with God as a rightful recipient of public worship. The strongly dyadic shape of early Christian faith and practice seems to have been an unprecedented development. Once again, a more adequate presentation of the historical setting of the NT affirmations of Jesus’ significance and place in religious practice might have presented avenues of additional theological reflection in addition to those followed so eloquently by the authors.

I have to lodge one additional complaint, this one in the discussion of God as “Father” (in chap. 2). The authors posit a “transition in the New Testament from ‘Lord God’ to ‘Father God’,” which they claim to be able to show as “a development that can be documented statistically” (53). But their statistics are confined to counting the number of references to God as “Father” in the four Gospels, four in Mark, seventeen in Luke (which they somehow know to be the second-oldest Gospel), forty-five in Matthew, and 115 in John: “Crudely put, the frequency tripled each decade between 70 and 100 C.E.,” reflecting an “exponential growth of language concerning God the Father” (53).

But, as should be obvious, this calculation completely omits reference to Paul’s uncontested letters, which variously pre-date Mark by ca. 10-20 years, and in which God is frequently, indeed characteristically referred to as “Father” (some 28x by my count in these seven letters). The curiously uneven usage of “Father” in the Gospels is interesting, and surely is indicative of something about the literary purposes of the respective Evangelists, but hardly justifies the authors’ particular claim. Instead, to judge by Paul’s letters it appears that “Father” was a much-used epithet for God in Christian circles from the earliest years.

But I sincerely do not wish these critical comments to be my last word here, or to obscure my appreciation for this impressive work. In addition to its breadth of coverage and the seasoned learning it reflects, there are many finely-expressed observations that reflect obvious sustained pondering of biblical texts. I have time to cite only a few examples of many more that could be provided.

In discussing the Johannine prologue, they concisely judge that it affirms “both an equation and a differentiation: The Logos can neither be separated from God as essentially different nor simply be identified with him” (47). In noting the expressions of a trans-national scope of God’s authority and purposes in Deutero-Isaiah: “The uniqueness of YHWH implies the incomparability of YHWH’s relationship with Israel, but not necessarily its exclusivity” (104). On Paul’s view of Jesus: “…the ‘one Lord’ belongs to the ‘one God’ in such a way that the latter is the ‘Father’ only in relation to him and, thus, according to the witness of the New Testament is fully himself” (113). “In the biblical context . . ., almightiness is not unbounded omnipotence, but a power expressed in God’s will for the salvation of his people” (197). “In significant distinction from other ancient cultures, supplicants in the Bible dare to complain to God himself . . . with the assurance that the lament will not provoke God’s wrath, but limit his wrath already poured out and awaken his love and mercy (again)” (361), and “God’s wrath is the inevitable expression of betrayed love that maintains fidelity in infidelity” (362).

In these and many other places the authors offer provocative and often memorably-expressed observations that show a commendable balance of exegesis and theological inferences. Moreover, they do not shy away from the difficult biblical material (e.g., Job, Ecclesiastes, and the “lament” Psalms), or the demanding topics that will seem embarrassing to some, e.g., themes of God’s wrath, judgment, and existential distance from the devout at times, but which the authors engage with courage and insight.

This is a book that one must read slowly and carefully (rather the way that really fine single-malt should be inbibed!). There is a wealth of scholarly work and profound thought provided in its pages, which will sometimes require re-reading to ensure full absorption. Scholars who share the authors concern for theological reflection that involves serious grappling with biblical texts will find in this book a treasure trove to occupy them for some time, and from which they will derive much stimulus. There is the danger that the book might be confined to scholars, however, and that would be a shame. Despite the unavoidable demands that it makes on readers, I hope that it will be taken up also among students, aspiring scholars, and that invisible but real larger body of serious “general readers” who appreciate access to the sort of excellent minds that produced this volume.

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In the response of the authors they pointed out: 1) that the use of Father language in Paul is only 25 times, and mostly in formulae such as opening bits in a letter or in e closing benediction, whereas the Gospels speak of God as Father some 200 times (over 100 of these in John); 2) they stated boldly “I don’t think any non-believer will benefit from our book” as it was written for believers to better understand the doctrine and person of God in the Bible.