The gospel of John tells a lot of stories about Jesus and his run-ins with a group of people that are usually translated into English as “the Jews.” Who were these people, “the Jews?” And what was their beef with Jesus? This is a tough question, and a number of answers have been suggested by biblical scholars. The Greek term is Ioudaioi, a plural word. The singular version is Ioudaios. So what does this word mean? That depends on the context. The word was used by different authors in various ways, so it has quite a wide range of meanings. …
Randy Ingermanson’s Blog
How We Know Jesus Existed
You might think that everybody at least agrees that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Because we have quite a lot of evidence for that, right? But a surprising number of people in the US actually think Jesus never existed, that he’s all a myth. Let’s be clear that they’re not claiming the resurrection of Jesus is a myth. They claim there wasn’t even a crucifixion of Jesus. They claim there wasn’t a Jesus to crucify. Many of them claim that Nazareth itself wasn’t populated at the time of Jesus. There’s a term for these people. They’re called “Jesus mythicists.” What the …
Jesus and Politics
If you aren’t careful, you might think Jesus never had anything to say about politics. Make a list of all the hot issues in American politics. Guns, immigration, minimum wage, LGBTQ, abortion, voter fraud/voter suppression, inflation, and on and on. Jesus didn’t say a word about any of them. But that should be no surprise, because Jewish politics in the first century had nothing to do with any of those things. Jewish politics in the first century was concerned with exactly one thing—the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Caesar The issue was that Rome began its occupation of Palestine …
Jesus on the Mount of Olives
Palm Sunday celebrates the beginning of the week in which Jesus made his final visit to Jerusalem. Take a look at the map of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives shown below, which I drew for my novel Son of Mary. I’ve added three arrows to mark important points along the path Jesus followed: Jesus came up the Jericho Road from the east and passed by the villages of Bethphage and Bethany. I’ve added a red arrow at the location of a modern-day lookout point, just across from the modern 7 Arches Hotel. This is a very popular tourist site, …
Jesus and the Aqueduct Pilate Built
Pontius Pilate was the governor of the Roman province of Judea from AD 26 to 36. He’s famous for presiding over the trial of Jesus of Nazareth and sending Jesus to the cross. We don’t have a huge amount of information on Pilate, but there’s a famous story that shows what kind of a man he was. You can read the story yourself in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus, in his book Antiquities of the Jews 18:60-62, and also in his earlier work Wars of the Jews 2:175-177. The story begins with Pilate looking rather good. He offered …
How Jesus Celebrated Christmas
It might seem absurd to talk about Jesus celebrating Christmas. You can easily think of a long list of Christmas-type things we do now that Jesus never did. Certainly, he never hung up his stocking on the chimney on Christmas Eve. He never wrapped presents and put them under the Christmas tree. He never sang Christmas carols. He never listened to Handel’s Messiah. He never sat down to a turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce meal with his family. But the point of Christmas is that it celebrates the birth of Jesus and reflects on what he did for mankind. …
Jesus and the Miserable Thanksgiving
It might seem silly to ask if Jesus celebrated Thanksgiving. Obviously, he never sat down to a dinner of turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. He never watched the Bears play the Lions on TV. He never had to listen to weird Uncle Joe talk about his very annoying political views—the ones everyone else in the family hates. But the American holiday of Thanksgiving goes back to a feast in 1621 shared by the fledgling Plymouth colony and the local Wampanoag. That feast celebrated a successful harvest, and it has biblical roots in the annual harvest festival in the …
Jesus and the Third Way of Salvation
In the time of Jesus, his family and friends and countrymen thought there were two main ways to salvation, and they argued about which was the better way. Before we talk about these Two Ways of Salvation, we should first define what we mean by “salvation.” It meant something different two thousand years ago than it does today. If you ask an American Christian in the 21st century what “salvation” means, they’ll tell you that it has to do with going to heaven when you die. And making sure you avoid the other place. But that is not what Jews …
The Five Sons of Mother Mary
According to the gospel of Mark, (see Mark 6:3), Jesus of Nazareth had four brothers and at least two sisters. That raises the question of how, exactly, these siblings were related to Jesus. Over the centuries, people have suggested three theories: They were children of Mary and Joseph. They were children of Joseph by a previous wife. They were cousins of Jesus. I discussed all this in a previous blog post, Mother’s Day With Jesus, so I won’t go over that ground again. My own opinion is that the four “brothers of Jesus” were biological sons of both Mary and …
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
In my last blog post, Jesus and Palm Sunday, I talked about how Jesus committed sedition by climbing on a donkey and riding down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem. Every Jew of his time knew the tradition of “Mashiach’s Donkey”—the oracle of the prophet Zechariah about a coming Mashiach (“Messiah” in English) who would someday enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey. They knew many other traditions about Mashiach from oracles in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Micah, and various other prophets: That he would restore the kingdom of his father David. That he would reunite the two tribes of the …
