So, taking his professorial advice to heart, I have compiled some bibliographies on Behind the Gospels for those wishing to become an expert on certain topics. Past reading lists have unpacked the gospels’ christology and the historical Jesus.

Now we’re in Eastertide, I thought it would be apropos to gather some readings on the resurrection. Once again I’ve annotated the bibliography, and it contains not seven, but ten works on the topic… so more than enough to become an expert!

Read more

I told him that we are very confident that Jesus died by crucifixion, and that most scholars agree that at least some of Jesus’ disciples had experiences of him after his death. But historians are more divided on the ‘fact’ of the empty tomb.

In past posts, I’ve unpacked some of the reasons why the empty tomb is so controversial, historically. For example, I’ve discussed arguments for and against whether Jesus was buried in a tomb, and looked at whether women witnesses guarantee its historicity. I have also explored apologetic features in the empty tomb stories, and probed a popular proposal that they are a type of ‘translation fable.’

Yet in this two-part post, I want to offer a more comprehensive survey of the key arguments around the empty tomb. What are some of the reasons a critical scholar might accept its historicity, and what are some grounds for scepticism? Hopefully this will serve as a helpful resource to get to grips with a fascinating historical debate.

Arguments for the Empty Tomb

I begin by surveying some considerations in favour of the empty tomb. These range from the consideration that unlikely individuals are involved in the story (Joseph of Arimathea and women) and its presence in earlier source material to the plausibility of a missing body and the necessity of the empty tomb for resurrection belief.

a. Joseph of Arimathea

To say that Jesus’ body went missing from his tomb is to assume that there was a tomb in which Jesus was buried. Which takes us to our first positive consideration: the fact that a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, is said to have buried Jesus.

It is certainly intriguing that a member of the council which condemned Jesus to death is entrusted with burying Christ. The tendency of the gospel is to be critical of the Jewish leadership, not to be sympathetic to its cause. So some scholars have considered Joseph’s role an unlikely detail for a follower of Jesus to invent.

Yet in purely historical terms, Joseph’s involvement may make a good deal of sense. At least according to the gospel stories, Jesus was executed on a Friday just before the Jewish sabbath. If he was left on the cross, his body would have defiled the land. Thus, the idea that the Sanhedrin would have had someone in place to make sure that the land was undefiled seems to make sense within a Jewish context.

Against this point, it is sometimes pointed out that Joseph’s characterisation seems to develop in later gospel literature. In Matthew and John, he is a ‘disciple of Jesus’; in Luke, he is a ‘good and righteous man’, and in the Gospel of Peter, he is even a ‘friend of the Lord’. One might say, then, that if we reverse-engineered Joseph’s character even further behind Mark, he may have played an even more mundane role.1 Perhaps he was involved in Jesus’ burial, but would he have placed him in his own tomb?

Another point against Joseph’s involvement concerns the plausibility of placing Jesus in his own tomb. According to the gospels, it was important that Jesus was buried before sundown. It may have been a hurried burial. But the likelihood that a wealthy man like Joseph would have a tomb close to a site of crucifixion is questionable.

It does seem remarkable, however, that we are told Joseph placed Jesus in his own tomb. Some scholars suppose that it is for precisely this reason that he is remembered. Joseph did something quite out of the ordinary. And for this peculiar deed, he was elevated in the tradition and his rather obscure name was preserved.

b. Pre-Markan Passion Narrative

Another reason for thinking that the tomb was empty is that Mark (c. 70 AD) may be relying upon earlier material for his narrative. So while Paul says that Jesus was ‘buried’ in the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, we may have a pre-Markan source which indicates that Jesus was buried specifically in a tomb.

What form this source took is much debated. The empty tomb story is sometimes seen as part of a ‘Pre-Markan Passion Narrative’, a text which may date as early as 37 CE. Yet it is worth noting that there is no agreement today on the extent or dating of this written source, with a number of scholars calling it into existence into doubt. For a summary of these arguments, you may want to see my earlier piece, here.

Whether or not we embrace an extended written source for Mark’s passion, however, there are some good reasons to think that Mark has employed some sources in his passion narrative. Beyond the fact that it is common for ancient bíoi to draw upon sources, Mark’s narrative contains some details which don’t seem to fit well with his passover chronology. And in one place, he even alludes to the sons of Simon of Cyrene – an irrelevant detail which may suggest they were known to his audience.

Of course, the fact that Mark seems to have used sources for parts of his story does not necessitate that he has used them for the empty tomb. It also does not necessitate that his sources are historical. Yet the fact that we can detect earlier material in his passion narrative may raise the likelihood that he has done so in this case as well.

c. The Presence of Women

Perhaps the most popular argument for the empty tomb relates to its discovery by women. The argument runs that if the evangelists had fabricated the story, they would not have the tomb discovered by women whose testimony was considered untrustworthy – especially not Mary, who was formerly demon possessed (Lk. 8:2).

Flavius Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, expresses a familiar prejudice. In his elaboration on Deuteronomy 19, he states: ‘… let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.’ While we know that women were permitted to give testimony in certain legal cases – at least according to later rabbinic sources – their testimony was not treated as the same as a man’s.

Interestingly, this issue of the women’s testimony seems to have been taken – at least by one ancient thinker – as a reason to doubt the resurrection. In his treatise, True Doctrine, the second century philosopher Celsus puts it bluntly: ‘But who saw this [the empty tomb]? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery…” (Origen, Contra Celsum 2.55).

Tempering this point, however, I have suggested that the early Church did not always hold women in as low regard as the prejudicial figures cited above. They were leaders, prophets, and were portrayed as effective witnesses. For example, John records that many believed on the basis of the Samaritan ‘woman’s testimony’ (4:29).

We might also note that, in Mark’s social and narrative world, the women are the most natural characters to find the tomb. Women were entrusted with the responsibility of mourning the dead, and in Mark’s narrative, all of Jesus’ male disciples have abandoned him. It is only the women, then, who know the location of the tomb.

Yet I don’t believe that this argument for the empty tomb is entirely without weight. The women are notably absent from the creed of witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15. And even the evangelists seem unsatisfied by Mark’s narrative of the discovery of the tomb by women, which is described in Luke as an ‘idle tale’ (24:11). Notably, both Luke and John do have men come to the tomb, perhaps to shore up the women’s testimony.

Why then does Mark narrate that women discovered the tomb empty? If it was an invention, we might suppose the women would be absent, or the women might have been accompanied by the men. It may just be that the reason why Mark brings our attention to the women is because they were really thought to be there.2

d. The Necessity of the Empty Tomb

Another argument for the empty tomb is its necessity for the disciples to come to believe and proclaim Jesus’ resurrection. The ‘resurrection’ which the disciples came to profess was corporeal. Thus, if the tomb was not empty, there would be no way for the disciples to confirm Jesus’ resurrection or proclaim it so rapidly in Jerusalem. The authorities him would have been able to rebut their claims by presenting the corpse.3

In my view, this is a considerably weaker argument than those made above. For it makes a number of contested assumptions. One is that it assumes that the earliest appearances of Jesus were in Jerusalem. This is certainly the picture painted by the later evangelists. Yet in Mark, the women are to tell the disciples that Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee – an assumption which might make a good deal of sense.

This argument will also hold no traction with those who do not think that Jesus was buried in a tomb. In this sense, the argument assumes an empty tomb – or at least, an entombment – rather than argues for it. As I have noted elsewhere, if Jesus received a more common burial or was buried with others, the question of checking the grave would not have arisen. No pious Jew would be ‘verifying’ a decomposing corpse.

What does seem to be the case is that an empty tomb would have supported resurrection belief – and may at least help to explain why they thought he was risen. Since one of the more common (if not the only) beliefs about resurrection was that it involved some form of physical re-animation, it would be surprising if the disciples had not deemed Jesus’ burial place to be noteworthy if he was entombed.

e. Different Witnesses to the Event

Another argument for the empty tomb is that it attested not only in Mark, but also by John’s beloved disciple (BD), whose memories are sometimes thought to lie behind the gospel. For those who accept the BD as an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, we have at least two distinct witnesses to the empty tomb: Mark and John.

I haven’t made my mind up on the beloved disciple, yet it is important to note that prominent Johannine scholars view the disciple differently. For more conservative scholars, he is identified with John the Son of Zebedee (whose name is attached to the gospel) or another ‘John’ altogether, who was a Judean disciple of Jesus.

For other scholars, the BD is often viewed not as a historical figure at all, but rather as a literary device or a ‘disguised author’.4 This is on account of the stylised role he has in the text, the marked absence of the figure in the earlier material, and John’s distinctive depiction of Jesus which departs heavily from earlier synoptic tradition.

The resurrection is just one point at which a departure is evident. In Mark, an angel tells the women to tell the disciples to go ahead to Galilee, where Jesus will appear to Peter. Yet in John’s account, Jesus himself meets Mary in the guise of a gardener. Rather than ‘telling no one’, Mary goes off to tell the disciples and the beloved disciple beats Peter to the tomb. In this way, again, he serves as an ‘ideal’ witness.

How strong one will find this argument is thus dependent upon one who considers the beloved disciple to be. If the disciple is indeed an eyewitness, perhaps there are ways to reconcile John to Mark’s earlier account. The fact that both attest to an empty tomb – albeit in different ways – would count for much. The difficulty is that the beloved disciple is widely disputed as an eyewitness among contemporary scholars.

f. The Evidence of Stolen Bodies

So far, we have mainly considered arguments for the empty tomb accounts as narrated in the gospels. Yet we might also consider the question of the empty tomb from a different angle: namely, how likely is it that Jesus’ body went missing, generally?

One factor that is often brought up in the literature is the theft of bodies. In particular, there is evidence from classical antiquity that bodies were sometimes stolen for use in magical rituals. The body of a holy man and miracle worker, like Jesus, may have been a prime target for those within the grave-robbing ‘industry’.

In the scholarly discussion, a couple of responses are often raised to mitigate this possibility.5 One is that the odds of a grave robbery are very small. Another is that we have no clear archaeological evidence of grave-robbery from the Jerusalem region, specifically. The evidence for grave-robbery is found mostly in Gentile areas.

Yet I don’t think that these responses are sufficient to take grave robbery completely off the table. For what it’s worth, Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb seems to assume that the theft of Jesus’ body was a live possibility in his setting. And we know that other ancient Jews considered tomb-robbery a possible occurrence and placed curses on their epitaphs for those who might disrupt the tomb.

Another potentially relevant datum is the so-called ‘Nazareth Inscription’, an imperial edict which sentenced tomb-robbers to death. While the exact provenance of the artefact is disputed, some scholars have preferred a pre-70 CE Palestinian context, on the basis of its epigraphic links with other sources from the same time and place.6 If they are correct, tomb robbery may have been a live problem in Palestine.

None of this is to suggest that Jesus’ tomb was actually pillaged by thieves. Yet it is something to take into account when considering the likelihood of an empty tomb, independent of theological interpretation. It may also help us to see how the original story of an empty tomb would not itself be seen – by outsiders – as especially good evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. This is a further factor to consider in our evaluation of how likely it was for the tomb story to be a wholesale invention.

Excursus: Where is the Tomb?

A subject often overlooked in discussions of the empty tomb is the tomb itself. Yet the reasons for this are quite understandable. The oldest tradition of the tomb is a site in Jerusalem within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But this tradition goes back only to the reign of Constantine (306-337), which has left many sceptical of its authenticity.

It is worth noting, however, that some believe that the site might betray an older local tradition. When the tomb was first identified in the fourth century, it was found within the walls of the city beneath a Temple of Venus. This temple was itself connected with the foundation of ‘Aelia Capitolina’, the name of the Roman colony founded in Jerusalem by Hadrian in the wake of the Second Jewish War (135 CE).

Yet Jesus was known to have been crucified outside of the city walls. This means that someone searching for ‘Jesus’ tomb’ in the fourth century would probably not have looked within the city. Moreover, it was not until Herod Agrippa built a third wall (c. 41-44 CE) that the traditional site came to lie within the city walls. This may suggest a very early local tradition of Jesus’ tomb in the traditional site.7

At least one recent archaeologist of the sepulchre is convinced that the site is probably authentic.8 She notes that the area of the traditional site matches the descriptions of the tomb and surrounding area in both the gospels and apocryphal literature, which may preserve memory of the tomb. She is also persuaded by the fact of the tomb’s self-evidence to Constantine’s workmen: the tomb was found exactly where Constantine had been told, beneath a statue of Jupiter in the Temple.

Yet this will not compel all interpreters. While Hadrian may have a motive to build a shrine on top of what was known as the site of Jesus’ tomb, it does seem somewhat surprising we have no direct comment on this desecration. It may also be possible to explain the evidence in another way: the tomb was initially chosen as Jesus’ tomb, at some point early on, because it matched the gospels’ descriptions of the tomb.

Thank you for reading part one!

If you enjoyed this post and want to read part two, in which I will be discussing arguments against the empty tomb, please consider supporting my work.

Subscribe now

By becoming a supporter, you will also gain access to the full archive of my posts. This includes many other pieces on the resurrection from a historical perspective:

• Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? features my recent conversation with Dale Allison and Mike Licona as well as my recent lecture on the historicity of Easter.

• William Lane Craig on the Empty Tomb examines a classic case for the empty tomb offered by a popular philosopher of religion.

• Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb? discusses the common argument that women’s testimony was considered unreliable in the ancient world, and therefore the accounts of their discovery of an empty tomb are reliable.

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial? looks at some arguments for and against Jesus’ burial in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and explores some alternative scenarios.

• Vanishing Bodies, Ascending Gods examines ancient stories of ‘translation’, in which a person’s body goes missing from their place of death or burial.

• Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb explores apologetic features in the canonical and extra-canonical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.

• Why We Can’t Prove the Resurrection makes the case that Jesus’ resurrection is not the kind of event that can be proved by ordinary historical reasoning.

• Is the Turin Shroud Jesus’ Burial Cloth? unpacks the view that the world’s most famous relic is not Jesus’ actual burial cloth, but a medieval artefact.

• Seven Evidences for Jesus’ Resurrection is a two-parter which evaluates common arguments for the resurrection, such as the martyrdom of the disciples.

Second only to Christmas, Easter is a biblical student’s favourite time of year. We get to ask fascinating questions, like: what does it mean to say that someone ‘rose’ from the dead? How likely is it that Jesus was buried in a tomb – or that the tomb was later found empty? What are we to make of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances? And in what sense is the resurrection susceptible to ordinary modes of historical analysis?

If those questions pique your interest, I have occasionally weighed in on some of these classic resurrection debates on the blog. Here are some of my pieces:

• Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb? discusses the common argument that women’s testimony was considered unreliable in the ancient world, and therefore the accounts of their discovery of an empty tomb are reliable.

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial? looks at some arguments for and against Jesus’ burial in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and explores some alternative scenarios.

• Vanishing Bodies, Ascending Gods examines ancient stories of ‘translation’, in which a person’s body goes missing from their place of death or burial.

• Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb explores apologetic features in the canonical and extra-canonical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.

• Why We Can’t Prove the Resurrection makes the case that Jesus’ resurrection is not the kind of event that can be proved by ordinary historical reasoning.

• Is the Turin Shroud Jesus’ Burial Cloth? unpacks the view that the world’s most famous relic is not Jesus’ actual burial cloth, but a medieval artefact.

• Seven Evidences for Jesus’ Resurrection is a two-parter which evaluates common arguments for the resurrection, such as the martyrdom of the disciples.

Usually at this time of year, I would add to this collection. Yet this Easter has been particularly busy and I didn’t make it to the keyboard. As well as teaching and writing, I host a discussion show called Unbelievable? and produce a podcast, Biblical Time Machine – so there has been, to paraphrase James Bond, ‘no time to write.’

I am really blessed, however, that my professional life has taken me back to the Easter sources. I recently had the privilege of hosting a discussion with Profs Dale Allison and Mike Licona on Jesus’ resurrection, and put together a podcast in which Profs Helen Bond and Lloyd Lewellyn-Jones discuss the New Testament sources.

I also gave a talk on Easter as part of my Behind the Gospels 2026 lecture series. So instead of my usual Easter post, here is an update of some of what I’ve got up to this Easter! If you are a paid subscriber, you can access my Easter lecture below.

Subscribe now

Read more

Why, for example, does Matthew redact Mark’s account, so that the scene has two donkeys rather than one? Did Jesus actually ride on both? What influence did Zechariah 9:9 bear on the accounts? And how plausible is it that Jesus rode to shouts of acclamation around Passover, one of the most politically volatile times of the year?

The questions that really excite me about this passage, however, are not historical but literary. One of the key aims of this passage is to present Jesus as a king. Yet if Jesus is a king, what does his ‘triumphal entry’ suggest about the nature of his kingship?

In this piece, I want to dig deeper into these questions with reference to Mark, the font of the tradition. I examine how his narrative compares to the ‘arrivals’ of other royal figures, and how it figures in the gospel’s broader characterisation of Jesus’ kingship. As we shall see, Mark is hesitant to claim outright that Jesus is simply another king, and at the end of the piece I probe some reasons for this reluctance.

The Arrival of a King

When Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, he does so as a king. But to see this, we need to take stock of several biblical and extra-biblical traditions which illuminate Mark’s details:

1. First, Jesus procures a ‘colt that has never been ridden’, which seems like a peculiar request. This may be a subtle reference to unworked animals in the Jewish law, which have been set aside for some special, sacred purpose. Yet more likely, Mark is wanting his readers to think about Zechariah 9:9, where a king enters Jerusalem riding on a ‘young colt’ (πῶλον νέον).

2. Second, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey, which does not seem an obvious mode of transportation. As mentioned above, the likely background for this action is Zechariah 9:9: ‘Lo, your king comes to you, riding on a donkey.’ In several biblical texts, elite Jewish figures ride on donkeys. For example, David’s son Solomon rides on his own mule in an act of kingly succession (1 Kgs. 1:33).

3. Third, the crowd lay down their garments and leafy branches for Jesus in a make-shift carpet. This is redolent of a similar detail in the biblical account of King Jehu’s accession to power, where bystanders hurry to place a garment under the king’s feet (2 Kgs. 9:13, and the ‘leafy branches’ or ‘palms’ (Jn. 12:13) may remind readers of Simon’s entrance into the fort of Jerusalem (1 Mac. 13:51).

4. Fourth, Jesus rides to shouts of acclamation, ‘Hosanna!… Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!’ While Mark falls short of identifying Jesus explicitly as the king of David’s kingdom (cf. Luke 19:38), Jesus is identified as the ‘blessed one’ who ushers in the Davidic Kingdom. It may be significant, in this connection, that Bartimaeus has just identified Jesus as ‘the Son of David’.

5. Finally, Jesus approaches the city from the Mount of Olives. Some have seen a parallel here to Zechariah 14, in which the LORD himself comes to Jerusalem, after standing on the same hillside outside of Jerusalem. The purpose of the Lord’s coming is so that that ‘the LORD will become king over all the earth’.

Taken together, these Jewish allusions comprise a set of subtle signals that Jesus is a kingly messiah. Yet this fills out only one side of the picture. To grasp how Mark’s readers would have understood Jesus’ arrival into Jerusalem, we need to pay close attention to the way that kings would conventionally make an entrance.

Arrivals in the Ancient World

There is a wide body of literary and iconographic evidence for the arrival of Greek, Roman and Jewish leaders into cities. These celebratory ‘arrivals’ or parousiai would have been completely familiar to Mark’s audience, and his readers would have likely seen Jesus’ own parousia into Jerusalem as part of this familiar parousia ‘genre’.

Scholars have sometimes tried to pin-down a precise ‘script’ for what took place on these occasions, which has proved notoriously difficult. Yet there are a few common features in many ‘arrival’ narratives. The leader or king is typically greeted near the city gates and hailed by the citizens; he is then escorted into the city, with songs or acclamations; and finally, the procession tends to end at the city’s Temple, where some form of ritual, such as a benevolent sacrifice, will take place.1

Some of this sounds familiar. Jesus is hailed with shouts of acclamation as he rides into the city. He is also Temple-bound. Yet when we inspect the schema a bit more closely, there are several elements to Mark’s story which begin to seem rather odd.

For a start, there is the background to Jesus’ arrival. In an ancient parousia, it is not uncommon for the leader or king to arrive off the back of a military conquest. Yet here, there is no military victory to celebrate. At most, we have Jesus’ triumph over the forces of darkness, symbolised in the (Roman) ‘Legion’ of demons. Yet Jesus does not come as a conquering king with military might; he comes to the city in peace.

Next, there is Jesus’ mode of transportation. We have already noted that mules were not necessarily un-kingly; Solomon rides on David’s mule. Yet when we look at other parousiai, there is no indication in any of our sources that a king would arrive on a donkey. A horse or a chariot was the conventional transport for a military leader. To arrive to the city on a ‘donkey’ verges on satire of the standard imperial practice.

And finally, our narrative ends with a twist: ‘Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve’ (v11). In some processions, the concluding ritual was a sign that the figure was ritually appropriating the city.2 Yet here, Jesus inspects the Temple and leaves. He has not been embraced as Jerusalem’s king, nor has he taken the city captive. Once he has looked around, it’s time for bed.

Kingship in Mark’s Gospel

We have seen that Jesus’ arrival subverts royal expectations. Yet this is not an isolated instance of subversion, but part of a wider scheme in which Mark contrasts Jesus with other kings and emperors – often called ‘sons of God’ – in the Roman world. Here we shall take a brief look at three instances where this scheme manifests, from the beginning of the gospel all the way to the cross.

a. Omens at his Baptism

The first clear sign of Jesus’ kingship takes place at his baptism. A dove descends on Jesus and a voice from heaven proclaims him as the Son of God. Many scholars have pointed out that the words of the divine voice bear a clear semblance to coronation Psalm 2 ‘You are my son [today I have begotten you…]’ (v7).For Jewish readers, this was the moment that Jesus was declared, and perhaps even ‘adopted’, as God’s royal son.

Yet here is where things get interesting. Michael Peppard has argued persuasively that the declaration of Jesus as God’s son, coupled with the omen of a dove, would indicate to Roman readers that God had adopted Jesus.3 Bird omens were often seen in the rise to power, and Suetonius describes that it was in the context of a dove omen that Julius Caesar knew that he would adopt Octavian – that is, Augustus – as his son.

But what did it mean for Jesus’ reign to be symbolised by a dove? The bird that Augustus, and other Roman emperors, were more typically associated with was not the dove, but the eagle. And in classical literature, the bellicose eagle is often contrasted with the peaceful dove. To have Jesus’ kingship symbolised by the dove was to comment on the nature of Jesus’ kingship – one of peace, not military conquest.  

b. Two Kingly Banquets

Later in Mark, we find Jesus’ kingship contrasted again with the rulers of his age. The most intriguing example of this is found in Mark 6. For the first time in Mark’s bíos, the narrative takes a detour away from Jesus, and we are plunged into the middle of Herod’s birthday banquet, which ends with the death of John the Baptist. What immediately follows is the story of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand.

At first glance, these narratives seem utterly disconnected. The story of Herod perhaps provides a useful bit of information about how John the Baptist was killed. Yet it does not bear much semblance to the story of Jesus’ miracle that follows.

Yet a closer analysis reveals that Mark has deliberately placed these two ‘banquets’ side-by-side. And the key to unlocking this comparison is single word: Basileus – King. Everyone knew that Herod Antipas was not a basileus, but was rather less prestigiously a tetrarch (‘a ruler of a fourth’). When his father King Herod the Great died, he had been allotted only part of his father’s kingdom.

Mark, however, is absolutely insistent that Herod Antipas was a king, calling him basileus no less than six times in this single episode. This cannot be an accident, because Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand is saturated with messianic allusions. Thus, as Helen Bond argues, it seems that Mark is deliberately contrasting the feasts of King Herod and ‘King’ Jesus.4 While Herod celebrates with the elite few and his banquet ends in death, Jesus comes for all and his feast ends in satisfaction.

c. Dressed as a King

Our final presentation of Jesus as a king takes place in his passion narrative. After Jesus is arrested but before his road to Golgotha, he is placed in a purple robe, given a crown of thorns, and satirised by the Roman soldiers: ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ The same expression, ‘King of the Jews’, then appears as a placard upon Jesus’ cross.

For the soldiers who mock him, this is all parody. Jesus does not belong in an expensive purple robe; he does not deserve a crown. Yet for Mark’s readers – who have been ‘in the know’ from the outset that Jesus is the Messiah – Jesus truly is a king. Yet he is a king quite unlike the Roman emperors. He did not come to subject others to imperial power; rather, he came to subject himself to it.

This may be one of the keys to Mark’s motif of the messianic secret: Jesus’ repeated hushing of the notion that he is the Messiah. It is not that Jesus altogether rejects the notion that he is the Messiah, Son of God, or ‘Son of David’. But he is careful not to let people get the wrong impression about what this entails. For Mark, it is only when the Messiah is crucified that he is rightly identified by the centurion as the ‘Son of God’.

For some modern readers of Mark, this proclamation by the centurion is the climax of another procession that has just taken place. In ancient Rome, there was a custom of the ‘Triumph’, in which a military victor draped in purple and laurel crown processed to the Capitoline Hill to celebrate his conquest. Sometimes, this procession would end with a sacrifice to the gods, or with the killing of a foreign king now held captive.

I am not convinced by all of the parallels to the Roman Triumph and Jesus’ procession to the cross. Yet the logic of the Triumph may lie in the background of Mark’s account. Instead of going to the Capitoline Hill (the place of the head, the caput), Jesus is taken to Golgotha, the ‘place of the skull.’ And there he is lifted up. While Roman writers saw crucifixion as a parody of exaltation, Mark’s audience would have seen this as a moment of real glory. Jesus is now exalted, but exalted in his suffering.

Why another sort of King?

In this piece, I have suggested that the logic of that first arrival into Jerusalem is anticipated and mirrored throughout the gospel. Without using the term explicitly, Mark is depicting Jesus as a king, but he is a very different sort of king to the kings who occupied the surrounding Roman world. The question which this leaves us with is – why? Why is Mark so coy about his presentation of Jesus as a kingly figure?

Perhaps the most obvious answer to this question is that Mark does not want us to have an incomplete picture of Jesus. To portray Jesus as a king is to evoke an array of images of conquest and violence that he is explicitly trying to avoid. Yet we know that the historical figure of Jesus was not a royal figure bent on violence. So this only pushes back the question further: why is he so adamant that Jesus was not like this?

Some scholars may account for this by using post-colonial theory. In particular, Homi Bhabha has developed the idea of ‘colonial mimicry’, the idea that oppressed peoples both imitate and adapt the language of their oppressors.5 Applied to Mark’s gospel, we arguably see ‘colonial mimicry’ at play. In some sense, Jesus is presented as a kingly or imperial figure, but importantly he is not a king in the same way.

Yet I think there is also a more specific explanation which relates to Mark’s setting. Mark Lamas Jr has argued that after Nero’s despotic reign, there was a revival of the notion of libertas – ‘freedom’ from kingship.6 This revival lasted from Julius Vindex’s revolt (c. March 68 AD) to 73 AD (the fourth year of Vespasian), the very period when most scholars think that Mark was composing his gospel.

By avoiding any direct portrayal of Jesus as a king, Mark could therefore have tapped into this wider current of libertas. Instead of calling Jesus a king – a term best avoided – he anticipates Jesus’ reign with an omen of peace; he contrasts Jesus with the bloody ‘King’ Herod; he has Jesus arrive in Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war horse or chariot; and when Jesus finally takes on the garb of a king, it is a moment of satire and parody.

In all of these scenes, Mark is re-defining what true kingship looks like. It is not to wage wars, celebrating bloodshed and terror. It is not to take upon the symbol of the eagle, still adopted by great military powers today. It is simply to arrive in peace.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post, you may like some of my other Easter-related posts:

• Good Friday: An Anti-Roman Triumph?

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial?

• Can the Dates of Jesus’ Death be Reconciled?

• Seven Evidences for the Resurrection

Like many NY’s resolutions, I was on a good streak for about a month! After my Christmas lecture on the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, I gave a January talk on my new book, Jesus’ Physical appearance (2025). But in February, I was busy on tour across the UK with Alex O’Connor, and my resolution fell by the wayside.

I had intended to give a lecture for Lent on the stories of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness (often seen as the ‘biblical basis’ for the fast). But since the Church calendar is still in the season of Lent, I thought it wouldn’t be too late to return to the topic. On the weekend, then, a handful of us gathered for a double-whammy to catch up: a discussion on Jesus’ temptation, followed by a talk on Jesus’ resurrection.

In the Lent lecture below, I address a range of questions.

• What are the differences in the Temptation stories and why are they there?

• Do Matthew and Luke’s narratives have their origins in ‘Q’?

• Who are the ‘wild animals’ with Jesus in Mark’s account?

• What are the arguments for and against the episode’s historicity?

• If the temptation narratives did not happen, does this mean they are not true?

For those who couldn’t make it, I hope you enjoy the recording!

Read more

No. 1 Christianity Expert, Wesley Huff: Here is The Proof that Christianity is True!

For those who have been living under a rock – or whose algorithm simply differs from mine – Huff has become a massive name in Christian apologetics over the last year.

He shot to fame after rather coolly debunking conspiracy theorist Billy Carson and was interviewed shortly afterwards by Joe Rogan, in an episode I reviewed here.

I am sure that Huff would not describe himself as the ‘no. 1 Christianity expert.’ Nor is it quite true – as the description says – that he specialises ‘in the historical accuracy of ancient Biblical texts.’ Huff is a Canadian apologist who is pursuing a PhD in the para-textual features of ancient biblical manuscripts, not the historicity of the Bible.

With that said, Huff has surely become one of the most desirable guests in Christian podcast-dem. He speaks with confidence on a plethora of theological topics, and is putting out his case for Christianity on some of the biggest platforms in the world. Whether you like or lump his approach, Huff’s presence looms large in the online space.

I think it is important, then, that his arguments receive critical engagement. If he is – at least in the eyes of some people – the no.1 Christianity expert, what do scholars in the field make of his arguments?

In this piece, I review some of his arguments on The Diary of a CEO which overlap most closely with the subjects I have treated on this substack: the historicity of the gospels, memory and oral tradition, and the resurrection of Jesus.

1. Dating the New Testament

Coming up to their conversation about Jesus, Bartlett first wants to know when the New Testament texts were written. Huff unpacks the debate in this way:

“So the debate…. it’s a question of if John’s gospel is written before 70 AD or after 70 AD. And if it’s written after 70 AD it’s written in the 90s. So it’s written pretty far afterwards…. At minimum I think like 99% of historians, biblical scholars, classicists would argue that the 27 books of the New Testament are written in the first century. And so in that sense, they’re in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to a certain degree.”

Huff is certainly right that there is a debate about dating, but it is not the debate he outlines here. It is simply false that 99% of relevant scholars would argue that the 27 books of the New Testament are written in the first century. This is a misrepresentation of the debate within the field, and it is hard to know how Huff would gain this impression from reading the scholarly literature.

It is not rare to find texts such as the pastoral epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus)1 and 2 Peter dated into the second century.2 The Johannine epistles are also sometimes dated into the second century,3 while late dates for Luke-Acts are also becoming increasingly common, especially for those who think Luke relied upon Josephus.4

The framing of the debate about the dating of the NT as a question of whether John is pre-70 or post-70 – and if it’s post-70, it is in the 90s – is therefore really odd. A more representative summary may be that the majority of New Testament was written in the first century, while more than a handful of texts are debated as second century works.

Read more

My monograph, Jesus’ Physical Appearance, was published in December with a rather hefty price-tag (£81… at 10% off). So in this mini-series, I have begun to sketch its key arguments.

Previously, I have asked whether it is surprising that the gospels don’t describe Jesus’ appearance, and explored the gospels’ relationship to ancient biography. In this piece, I turn to the gospels’ characterisation of Jesus.

The question of why Jesus’ appearance is not described in the gospels has long puzzled scholars. Not only was physical description a common topos in ancient life-writing, there was a whole panoply of models in which Jesus might have been cast: the evangelists might have said that Jesus was ugly and disfigured, based on the suffering servant of Isaiah, or beautiful and strong, like a royal figure or divine man.

Yet rarely have scholars stopped to ask themselves: do the physical profiles of these types – a disfigured slave, or a beautiful divine king – actually match the profile of Jesus we encounter in the gospels? Or is there something about the gospels’ characterisation of Jesus which precludes a description along such familiar lines?

That is the question I ask in chapter 3 of my book (‘The Christology of Appearances’), the results of which I outline here. As we shall see, the question of Jesus’ missing image in the gospels leads us to a range of fascinating problems that relate to it: Is Jesus depicted as the suffering servant? How do the gospels construct Jesus’ masculinity? And what might a missing image have to do with Jewish aniconism?

The Suffering Servant

If you ask Christians today whether there is a physical description of Jesus in the Bible, they might turn to a figure in Isaiah 52-53 known as the ‘suffering servant’.

While the Hebrew Bible has no word for ‘ugliness’, the passage in Isaiah piles on a litany of unflattering terms to describe the servant. He is ‘marred’ in his appearance, and he has ‘no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him’ (53:2). In short, he was far from a stunner.

The reason why Christians might look to this passage today is that the New Testament saw the servant as a type of Christ. In an arsenal of early Christian texts, Jesus is looked to as this rejected, servant type. In very gospel-sounding language, Isaiah goes on to say that he ‘bore the sins of many’, as Jesus would come to do.

Strikingly, however, the New Testament authors – including the gospel writers – swerve around the servant’s physical appearance, when they might have employed it. One of the questions I considering during my research was: why? Was there any problem with using Isaiah’s suffering servant as a depiction of Jesus’ appearance?

In my book, I offer two broad suggestions. The first is that it is far from clear whether the evangelists had any special interest in presenting Jesus as the servant. As scholars have pointed out, there are a number of allusions to the servant in the synoptics. Yet there is no clear identification of Jesus with the servant in John. And where the allusions do appear in the Synoptics, they are generally regarded as ‘traditional’. That is, they are not allusions which the evangelists have crafted themselves.1

Yet I think there is a second – and more vital reason – why the evangelists may not have cast Jesus in the servant’s likeness. Namely, that his appearance would have been a considerable source of embarrassment for early Christian writers and theology.

Consider what Celsus, a pagan philosopher writing in the second century, has to say about Jesus’ appearance, having heard from Christians that he was unattractive:

‘If a divine spirit was in a body, it must certainly have differed from other bodies in size or beauty or strength or voice or striking appearance or powers of persuasion. For it is impossible that a body which had something more divine than the rest should be no different from any other. Yet Jesus’ body was no different from any other, but, as they say, was little and ugly and undistinguished.” (Origen, Cels. 6.75)

Today, we are used to insults being thrown at the looks of politicians and celebrities. Yet Celsus was not merely being churlish. In the mindset of ancient Rome, the gods and their human counterparts were expected to be beautiful, and many of Celsus’ readers would have thought he had a point: if Jesus was ugly, he could not be divine.

Yet the PR problem gets worse. To say that someone was ‘ugly’ in the ancient world was not merely to comment on their physiology – it was to comment on their soul. The ancient Roman milieu was saturated with physiognomic ideas. It believed that one could discern (gnomon) the nature (physis) of someone from their outward appearance. To say that Jesus was ugly would be to open him up to slander and invective – a point that the evangelists may have wished to avoid.

We see the same avoidance strategy in the work of other first-century Jewish writers. For example, in the biblical story of Exodus, we find that Moses was not a good public speaker, and at one point his hand turns white like leprosy – both traits a source of embarrassment. So in their re-telling of Moses’ life, the biographer Philo and historian Flavius Josephus variously explain these bugs or cut them out altogether.2

A perceptive reader might argue that it is plausible that the evangelists wanted to avoid the ugliness of the suffering servant, but the early Church did not seem to have a problem with it. In a host of apostolic and patristic writings – from Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen, all the way through to the present day – Christians have often drawn upon the imagery of the suffering servant to describe the appearance of Jesus.

Yet as I point out in my piece Before Jesus was Beautiful, the early Church drew upon the servant typology for very specific reasons. Primarily, it helped them to establish Jesus’ humanity, against heretics who thought Jesus was only divine. For there was no way that a being who was ugly, like the servant, would have been non-fleshly.

Yet as it turns out, the early Church were not entirely comfortable with letting Isaiah have the last word on Jesus’ appearance. Several of them said he was in fact beautiful (for those with eyes to see), or at least he would be on his second coming. We see, then, that there were good reasons for the evangelists to avoid casting Jesus in the image of the suffering servant. With all of the problems that could arise in its wake, the image of an unattractive Jesus was simply not that attractive to them.

Jesus and the Elites

If an ugly Jesus didn’t suit the evangelists, we might consider why they did not choose a more attractive mould. Like David in the Hebrew Bible and countless figures in the Roman world, kings and elite men were expected to be strong and beautiful. This not only displayed their proximity to the gods, it showed that they were, by nature, destined to rule. Often, this is why we are told that a king was beautiful from birth.

At first glance, it may seem that Jesus is an obvious fit for a handsome casting. All four of the gospels cast Jesus using imperial language: he is a Son of God or Divi Filius who takes on standard kingly traits. And in Matthew and Luke (it is less clear in Mark), Jesus is depicted as the royal Davidic messiah. All of this might lead us to expect a Jesus who was, at least literarily speaking, handsome, tall and strong.

Yet I think when we look closer at how the gospels define Jesus’ kingship, we see something curious going on. Jesus does not like a ‘kingly king’, but rather subverts the standard expectations of kingship. The ‘omen’ at his baptism is not the war-like eagle, but a dove;3 his adventus into Jerusalem is not on a horse and chariot, but a donkey;4 and his joyful messianic symposium starkly contrasts the bloody feast of King Herod.5

Read more

That the ‘Jesus tradition’ was transmitted orally is widely agreed. First-century Palestine was largely illiterate, and the early followers of Jesus had little access to formal education. Yet this itself tells us very little. What we want to know is how the Jesus tradition was told. Was it handed on in a fluid way, with early Christians passing on tradition like hearsay, or were there constraints placed on the process?

In the first part of this series, I looked at a model of the Jesus tradition developed by the form critics. On their view, the gospel materials freely morphed over time to meet the needs and interests of the Jesus movement. Some of the oral tradition goes back to the disciples, but much of it was invented later in the Greek-speaking world.

In this piece, I look at a completely different model of the oral tradition, which developed in Scandinavian scholarship as a response to form-criticism. Advanced among others by Harald Riesenfeld and his student, Birger Gerhardsson, the so-called ‘Scandinavian school’ argued for a stricter, more controlled process of tradition.1

On this view, Jesus’ teachings and deeds were learnt in much the same way as Jewish rabbis learnt their material: by committing it to memory. Jesus’ disciples memorised his teaching, and the Church did not seek to alter their materials freely – as the form critics supposed – but handled their master’s memory with attention and care.

I begin by fleshing out the evidence for this view and reflect on where it offers a helpful corrective to the form-critical position, before offering points of critique.

Jesus and the Rabbis

The form critics had supposed that the oral tradition emerged freely and anonymously like folklore. Yet the Scandinavian model takes as its starting point the fact that we must attend to how ancient Jews actually learnt. As Riesenfeld summarises:

“… in New Testament times the specifically Jewish tradition, at any rate, was not possessed and shaped by an unlimited and undefined anonymous multitude… [Rather, t]he bearer of the tradition and the teacher (rabbi) watched over its memorizing by his approved pupils (talmd) and what was passed on in this way was, in the matter both of content and form, a fixed body of material.”2

The Scandinavian model thus looks to the Jewish rabbis as an analogy for how Jesus and his followers would have learnt and preserved his teaching. In both elementary education (bet sefer) and more advanced education (bet hammidrash), Jews would commit material to memory before an attempt was made to grasp its meaning.

On this view, the process of learning was already underway within Jesus’ ministry. Before Jesus sent out his disciples on their mission, he would have to have ensured that they could repeat the essentials of his teaching. In total, Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic tradition only amounted to 15,000 words. This was far less than the Torah and the ‘oral Torah’ – the Torah’s interpretations – which students memorised.3

By the time of Jesus’ death, a good deal of Jesus’ teaching was already stored in the memory of his disciples. Yet on this model those same disciples would have made an effort to control and preserve his teaching. In Gerhardsson’s view, the disciples formed a collegium, led by Peter, whose purpose was to preserve Jesus’ teaching.

In support of this view, we might note that Paul, who in some ways forged his own path from the apostles, nevertheless submitted to the disciples’ authority. In his epistles, he even uses the technical rabbinic language of ‘receiving’ and ‘passing on’ tradition. This may suggest that Paul had received an authoritative tradition (from the disciples) and committed it to memory before handing it on.

Before we move on, it is important to make two points of clarification. First, the Scandinavian school were well aware that Jesus was not a ‘rabbi’ in the formal sense of the rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Rather, the Scandinavians were proposing that rabbinic education provided an analogy for the kinds of learning which could have taken place in Jesus’ own time.

Second, while they believed that stories and events in Jesus’ life were handled with care, this did not preclude development and interpretation of the tradition. For example, Gerhardsson deemed the infancy, baptism and temptation narratives in the gospels as the product of later Christian scribes, in which literary license was taken.

Memory and the Gospels

What then are we to make of this Scandinavian model of the Jesus tradition?

I think there are a few advantages it has over the form critical view it was supplanting. For a start, I think the Scandinavian school rightly stresses the importance of memory. Whether or not one imagines the learning of material as analogous to rabbinic methods – a point we shall reason to doubt – it is clear that memorisation was a more central aspect of learning in antiquity than in modern, technological societies.

This is borne out by the materials we find in the gospels. Something that strikes me is just how memorable many of Jesus’ teachings are. I think not only of his parables, which are still learnt easily by children, but also his pithy aphorisms: “the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” or “the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.”

Here is where things get interesting. There are 247 independent units which comprise Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptics. And of these, 42% are just a single verse long. Such terse sayings are typically recalled in verbatim memory, which is short-lived. But if they are continuously recited, they are likely to be recalled – and to be recalled accurately. This may offer some evidence for the repetition envisaged by this model.4

I also think there is some a priori plausibility to the idea that Jesus’ followers would want to commit their master’s teaching to memory. The form critics envisaged a model in which the early Church had little regard for the historical Jesus. Yet I take it as a basic assumption that the status of Jesus would have affected how traditions of Jesus were received and subsequently remembered. The early Church would have wanted to remember – and to tell accurately – their master’s teaching.

Qualms and Quibbles

The rabbinic model drew attention to the role of memory in the Jesus tradition missed by the form critics. But like the form-critics’ own model, it has faced its fair share of criticism. Here, I focus on two key problems: (1) the strength of the rabbinic tradition for the Jesus tradition; and (2) its weaknesses in explaining the NT data.

a. The Rabbinic Parallels

The biggest question for the Scandinavian school concerns how well the early Jesus movement can be likened to rabbinic education. Accepting that the rabbinic methods for learning the Torah and its interpretation (the oral Torah) only furnished an analogy for the Jesus tradition, how well does that analogy stand up?

E.P. Sanders points to a number of ways in which the Jesus tradition differs from the (later) rabbinic one.5 The Jesus tradition existed in two languages (Aramaic and Greek), and its period of transmission was relatively brief. Jesus’ followers also believed in him as the living Lord, not just as a past teacher. All of these factors may have encouraged a greater level of creativity and fluidity than the rabbinic tradition.

Others have highlighted the discrepancy between rabbinic education and the disciples’ formation. The rabbis were highly educated. Yet the gospels present the disciples as labourers, while Acts describes James and John as illiterate (agrammatoi). Given low literacy rates in Palestine, we might assume that most of Jesus’ disciples were unlettered labourers – not people who were used to formal learning.

This criticism takes on a greater force when we consider the rabbinic tradition itself. While the Scandinavian school stresses the role of orality and memory in rabbinic learning, Martin Jaffee has observed that rabbinic learning was never purely oral. There was always an interplay of the written text along with the spoken word.6 This is a further dissimilarity between the illiterate disciples and the rabbinic schools.

In response, it might be imagined that Jesus would have educated his own disciples. Yet it is perhaps notable that the gospels never describe the disciples as learning in the way that this model envisages.7 Perhaps Jesus’ disciples did sit at his feet and rehearse his teachings. But I wonder if a more informal method is more plausible. His disciples heard him on multiple occasions in different settings – often in crowds, rather than in a formal learning context – and the disciples remembered his teaching.

What they then did with this teaching is also up for debate. I take it for granted that the basics of Jesus’ message was protected by the authority of the Jerusalem Church. Yet the message of Jesus spread rapidly in diverse (Greek-speaking) settings, and by the time the gospels were written down, the original generation were mostly dead.8 I think this raises a problem for the control the disciples exercised over the tradition.

b. Does it Explain the Evidence?

We have had reason to question whether rabbinic learning provides a suitable analogy to the disciples’ transmission of tradition. Yet there is another way to assess whether the rabbinic model is compelling – and this is to question whether it makes sense of the data we find within early Christian sources. In brief, does it look like the material was handled in the way that the Scandinavian school suggests?

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of evidence in favour of the Scandinavian model is Paul’s language of ‘receiving’ and ‘handing’ on tradition. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, Paul cites what appears to be a creed about Jesus’ death and resurrection. It has a repetitive structure, and elements which may indicate an Aramaic origin. For instance, Peter is not called Petros but goes by his Aramaic name, Cephas.

Yet it is important to handle this evidence with care. One issue is that Paul himself was a highly educated Pharisee. Thus, when Paul uses the technical terminology for ‘receiving’ and ‘handing on’ tradition, it may reflect his own learning, rather than the way material was always handed on at large in the Jesus movement. We might readily imagine that the kinds of information Paul cites in the creed were learnt by memory, but should we imagine the same is true for the Jesus tradition as a whole?

In my view, the evidence is mixed. As I pointed out above, it is certainly true that the sayings materials in the gospels have a memorable quality. It is partly for this reason that I think we can recover Jesus’ teaching. At the same time, even the synoptic gospels do not betray verbatim agreement. To see this point, one need only compare the different gospel versions of the Lord’s prayer, or the Beatitudes, or Jesus’ instructions about what his disciples should wear on their missionary journeys.

At the same time, these differences are ones that also obtain in the rabbinic material. As P.S. Alexander observes, when one compares different versions of the same rabbinic tradition, “it is at once obvious that the material has not remained stable but has changed over time.”9 In these rabbinic materials, what is stable is the ‘gist’ of the tradition, not the exact wording. This presents a problem for those who believe that the gospel texts preserve the exact wording of Jesus’ teaching, let alone his deeds.

Memorising the Jesus Tradition

Overall, there is much that is valuable to the Scandinavian model of oral tradition. Offering a helpful corrective to form criticism, it highlights the role that memory – and memorisation – must have played in the oral culture of classical antiquity. I believe that the echoes of this memory can still be felt within the gospel texts.

Yet I wonder whether this model is, in the end, too ambitious. The disciples were not formal students, sitting at the feet of their rabbi, nor were they in a position to control the tradition as it spread across the ancient world. This would explain why the gospel texts show not only signs of memory, but of adaptation and invention. Memorisation likely played a part – but only one part – in a more complex traditioning process.

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads…

When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I’m currently on tour across the UK, hosting conversations with Alex O’Connor on theology, philosophy and religion. A question I’ve put to Alex so far is what he makes of the argument that Christianity was vital in shaping the moral imagination of the West. This argument was advanced most famously by Nietzsche, quoted above, and has returned to public consciousness with Tom Holland’s history, Dominion.

In its most ambitious form, the argument runs that many of the things we love about Western civilisation – its emphasis on personal liberty, limited government, care for the poor and marginalised, and the inherent dignity of humanity – can all be traced, directly or indirectly, to Christianity. The concerning payoff is that as the West moves beyond Christianity – if indeed it does – the very fabric of civilisation will be torn.

Alex is not convinced by this argument, calling it “almost complete nonsense.” In our Liverpool show, he pointed out that human freedom may have been supported by (evangelical) abolitionists, but other Christians were perfectly fine with owning slaves. And for Alex, these Christians were not reading against but rather with the grain of their scriptures. The Old Testament gives advice on how to own slaves, and the New Testament similarly assumes – and never wholly contests – the widespread practice.

I am similarly sceptical of those who would argue that Western rights can be read directly out of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. Yet this has never been the ‘Tom Holland’ argument – at least not as articulated by Holland himself – and I think there is a variation of it which is more defensible. This is the view that early Christianity made some surprising moves which anticipate ideas that the West now finds intuitive.

The basis for this argument is set out by Larry Hurtado in Destroyer of the Gods. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Hurtado has plotted several modes of ‘Early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world.’ These idiosyncrasies have become common-places in the way we see the world today, whether or not we are Christian. In this post, I sketch three ways in which early Christianity anticipated Western ideas.

A Voluntary, Trans-Ethnic Faith

In the opening line of his magnum opus, Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank reminds us that ‘once there was no secular.’ To be religious in the ancient world was simply to be. Making sacrifices to the gods was a daily part of life. To revere the gods was not something one chose; it was a state one inherited, like one’s family or race.

In this world full of gods, the Jewish people were something of an exception. As staunch monotheists, they made sacrifices to God on Caesar’s behalf, but were not required to sacrifice to the Roman deities. For this, they were routinely decried by Romans as socially deviant. Yet this practice was still accepted, because it bore a likeness to the Roman’s own system: it was perceived as ancient and ancestral.

In this religio-political framework, Christians occupied a very peculiar position. For a start, Christianity was populated largely by Gentiles (non-Jews) who were now refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods. They were not Jews. They had no ancestral or ethnic obligation to join the new cult. Yet they were also – now – not properly ‘pagan’ either. As Paula Fredriksen describes them, they were “ex-pagan pagans.” Or to translate this into the language of ancient Roman writers – they were atheists.

It is difficult to overstate how weird this made Christianity. Today, we see faith in much the same way as the Christians did: as a voluntary act that transcends ethnicity. Yet in the ancient world, to be Roman was to worship the Roman gods; to be Jewish to worship the Jewish God. The idea that there was ‘no Jew nor Gentile… in Christ Jesus’ was a radical notion which detached faith from race and cult. It is an idea that anticipates the common notion of religion we have today as a voluntary choice.

The Limits of the State

I have already noted that the early Jesus movement was comprised largely of “ex-pagan pagans,” who refused to make sacrifices to the Emperor or worship the gods. This did not mean that the early Christians completely ignored Caesar’s authority or were deliberately deviant. Paul claims that earthly authorities derived their power from God, and Jesus calls his followers to ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’.

Yet Jesus’ teaching comes with an important second clause: ‘give unto… God what is God’s. For the early Christians, Caesar may have a proper claim over taxes and governance, but not on the deeper matters of conscience, morality and worship. In brief, the early Christians began to drive a wedge between the authority of the government and God’s own authority. They set limits to the authority of the state.

This is another idea that may seem obvious to us today in the West. Of course, the government is not divine! Of course religion and politics are distinct. Yet in antiquity, such an idea was absurd. The early Christians resisted it because they recognised a different authority over their lives. This planted the seeds for the kind of separation between state and religion which would be later codified in Western law.

To be clear, I am not claiming that Christianity necessitated the rise of secular democracies. Nor is it possible to ignore the fact that Christianity came to tether itself in various ways to Roman power. I am suggesting, however, that this later wedding of Church with state was originally an unnatural one. For the earliest Christians, these two phenomena were kept largely distinct.

Women, Slaves and Children

We have suggested so far that early Christianity made two radical moves for its gentile followers: (1) it creates the notion of a religiosity that transcended ethnicity or kin; and (2) it separates religion from politics. Yet when people suggest that Christianity laid the ‘foundation’ of the West, they are usually thinking in more moral terms. They are suggesting that there was something distinctly Christian about Western values.

It is here that the ‘Tom Holland’ argument seems to face its greatest hurdle. For today, we recognise that all people – men, women and children – have the right to freedom and liberty. Yet in the ancient world, Christians simply assumed the practice of slavery and a steeper division between women and men. Rather than denying the oppressive power structures at play, Christians in some ways reinforced them.

Consider a selection of passages in the New Testament which scholars refer to as ‘household codes’. These texts call for women to submit to their husband’s authority, and for slaves to submit to their masters. A particularly troubling instruction is found in 1 Peter, which states: ‘slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh’ (18-20).

It is clear from these codes that early Christians were unconcerned with the overhaul of societal norms. Yet on one level this is completely unsurprising. Many of Jesus’ early followers were anticipating his return, and were in no social position to imagine a society without slavery. To fault first-century Christians – a small sect of no more than ten thousand people, many of low status – for not holding a modern view of these issues, seems to mis-comprehend the position of the early Jesus movement.

With that said, I do think there are some ways in which early Christians stood out ethically from their Roman neighbours. Here I will briefly list just three:

a. The dignity of women and slaves. The first way in which Christians stood out was in granting a degree of moral dignity and spiritual equality to women and slaves. We see this in the household codes themselves, which – to my knowledge – are the only form of their kind which address both women and slaves. We find household codes in other ancient writers, yet these texts are always written by men to other men.

Imagine, then, that you are an early Christian slave hearing the household codes read aloud. You will hear that slaves are to submit to their masters, and women to their husbands. But in the same assembly, you will hear that husbands must love their wives, and that masters must not threaten their slaves, ‘since you know that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.’

There are two interesting things at play here. The first is that women and slaves are granted a degree of moral agency; the second is that the worst aspects of Christian husbands and masters is tempered. This is one practical way in which Paul’s statement that ‘there is no male or female… nor slave or free’ was manifest in early Christian meetings. It would also help to explain why it seems that Christianity seems to have been especially attractive to the lower classes, slaves and women.

b. The treatment of children. Another way in which Christianity stood out from the wider Roman world is in its treatment of children. Early Christian texts prohibit both abortion and the widespread practice of “exposure”, in which an unwanted infant was abandoned to die. For example, the Didache, an early Christian instruction manual, states: ‘You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.’

A still more striking way in which Christians stood out from their Roman neighbours was in their opposition to child abuse. In an ethic we find morally egregious today, Roman writers lauded pederasty, the sexual use of children and young adolescents. Yet Christian writers from the earliest period were completely opposed to this abuse.

So emphatic was Christian opposition to pederasty that Christians appear to have coined two new terms to condemn the practice: paidophthored (‘to corrupt/sexually abuse children) and its corresponding noun paidophthoros. The Didache and Epistle of Barnabas independently use these terms to condemn the practice alongside adultery and murder, which suggest their origin in even early Christian discourse.

c. The restraint of men. Finally, it is noteworthy that Christianity diverged from the wider Graeco-Roman world on other issues of sexual morality. Of special interest is the way in which early Christian texts restrain the sexual behaviours of men.

In the Roman world, it was widely tolerated for married men to have sex with prostitutes, courtesans and slaves, but not the reverse. Yet in early Christian discourse, all of these sexual activities are brought under the umbrella of what Paul calls porneia (‘sexual immorality’) – a term usually used by Roman writers to refer only to adultery. Resisting this double standard of male versus female sexual behaviour, Paul claims that men’s bodies belong only to their wives, and vice versa.

Another illustration of Christian resistance to sexual double-standards is the call for men to remain faithful to their wives, in a world in which divorce was common. In ancient Rome, the loyalty of women to their husbands was prized. There were even Latin and Greek words (univira and monandros) used to honour such women.

The striking move that Christianity makes is praising men who are faithful to their wives. Lacking a term to describe such men, the author of 1 Timothy has to compose a term to praise them: mias gynaikos andra (literally, ‘a one woman husband/man’). While this requirement was not placed on all Christians, it was held for both leaders and deacons of the Church as a model for righteous behaviour. We see here again that sexual standards typically reserved for women were applied by Christians to men.

Are we all ancient Christians?

I am under no illusion that ‘the West’ as we know it today is the product of a long process of technological development, political and philosophical reflection. It would be anachronistic – and palpably false – to impose a framework of human rights, secularism and feminism onto the early Christian texts, as if Western values can be read directly out of the Scriptures. I think Alex is rightly opposed to this argument.

Yet when we consider the ways in which early Christianity stood out from the wider Roman world, I think we all have much more in common with ancient Christians than we might imagine. Though there are other elements to tease out, I have here highlighted three ways in which Christianity anticipated ideas we now find intuitive:

1. The notion of faith as a voluntary act which transcends ethnic boundaries, anticipating the modern notion of ‘religion.’

2. The recognition that the state is not divine, anticipating the modern secular division between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’.

3. The spiritual dignity accorded to people – women, slaves and children – across the social spectrum, anticipating a modern concern for equality.

To point to these values is not to say that Christians lived them out, either in the past or today. On the contrary, the very fact that these ideas had to be argued for in early Christian debates is evidence that they were not intuitive or always easily liveable.

Yet to forget the distinctiveness of early Christiaity is to our own loss. There was something different about Christianity in the early Roman empire; something attractive and unobvious about it which was appealing. To get back in touch with that early Christian weirdness is to connect to an early part of our own history again.

I (iota) = Iésous (Jesus)

CH (chi) = Christos (Christ)

TH (theta) = Theos (God)

Y (upsilon) = Huios (Son)

S (sigma) = Sōtér (Saviour)

Taken together, it reads: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.

Growing up, I imbibed the view that the fish was used as a secret symbol for Christians to identify each other during persecution. Just as someone might stick a fish on the bumper of their vehicle as a sign that a Christian is on board, so the ancients used fish to identify believers, though in a more clandestine manner.

We find this theory about the Jesus fish represented in all sorts of popular literature:

Jeroen Temperman: “This [fish] was a secret symbol used by early Christians to help them identify one another without exposing themselves to their enemies.”1

Garth S. Jowett & Victoria O’Donnell: “Initially used as a secret sign during the time when Christians were persecuted by the Roman authorities, the fish symbolized the mission of the group it represented and did so simply and effectively.”2

Wikipedia: “The fish was originally adopted by early Christians as a secret symbol, but the many variations known today first appeared in the 1980s.”

Bible Study Tools: “During the times of persecution by the Romans in the first centuries, the fish symbol was used among Christians in hiding to display meeting places for everyone to meet and worship. They could be spotted on trees or doorways or even tombs and at the same time, the fish symbol was also used by several pagan religions so they wouldn’t bring about suspicion from anyone about what it could be.”

Early Christian History: “In the first three centuries of persecution, Christians used to identify each other by casually drawing the Ichthus, the fish in the dirt or sand. If the other person responded, it was good. If they did not, it was just an idle doodle.”

These kinds of theories about the Jesus fish are widespread online. But is there something fishy about them? In this post, I unpack the real meaning of the fish as a symbol for Christ, and examine the evidence that it was a secret code.

Jesus as Fish in Ancient Texts

Read more

This is the second post in which I sketch the contributions of my PhD research on Jesus’ physical appearance. This week’s sketch takes me to the question of the literary genre of the gospels, and whether or not we should see them as Graeco-Roman ‘lives’.

In the last three decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in gospel studies. Some of its first tremors were felt at my alma mater, the University of Nottingham, in the 1980s, when a doctoral student turned up with the intention to prove that the gospels were not biographies. Equipped for the first time with computer software for textual analysis, and a degree in classics, Richard Burridge seemed to be in a good position to prove his thesis. He gathered a collection of ten ancient ‘lives’ (Greek bíoi; Latin: vitae) and ran their features through his software, comparing them with the gospels.

Yet what Burridge found took him by surprise. Far from differing from ancient ‘lives’, the gospels fit the genre well – and the data from his analysis seemed to prove it. Just like the gospels, ancient lives revealed the character (éthos) of an individual through a selection of their words and deeds. They had a strong ethical component, encouraging their audiences to imitate the subject’s virtues (and avoid their vices). They paid significant attention to their subject’s death, believing that one’s death was the greatest testimony to a life well lived. And all of this would often fit on a single scroll.

By the time I turned up for a degree in biblical studies over two decades later, Burridge’s work had already become mainstream. In my very first undergraduate essay, the question I was assigned was the title of this post: Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman biographies? In response, I argued that they were. What principally convinced me was their keen focus on an individual, unparalleled in Jewish literary forms.

Yet the longer I sat with the label, ‘Graeco-Roman biography’, the more uncomfortable, and even useless, it seemed to be. As Burridge himself had pointed out in his original study, the term bios (‘life’) does not cast much light on the Gospels’ purpose, for it is a wide-ranging term that can encompass a great variety of texts. Some lives were highly fictional – others more historiographic. To say that the Gospels are biographies of a sort seems likely, but the hermeneutical payoff is weak.

The Search for a Sub-Type

In response to this quandary, many scholars have attempted to qualify exactly what kind of biography the Gospels are. In the last couple of decades, there has been a whole fleet of scholars who have promised to deliver a specific sub-type of biography in which the gospels might fit. They are ‘subversive’ rather than ‘civic’ (so Robyn Faith Walsh); they are ‘historical’ rather than ‘novelistic’ (so Craig Keener); or they are biographies written in a peculiar ‘mode’, such as tragedy (as proposed by Jeffrey Jay).

These proposals shed light on aspects of the gospels, yet I am sceptical of this ‘fine-tuning’ exercise for two reasons. The first is that it is a modern attempt to put order to a genre that is, by its very nature, amorphous. One can say that the gospels are civic rather than subversive biographies – but did any ancient author have these schemata in mind when they set out to write their ‘lives’?

Read more

Yet there is an even more complex literary puzzle in Mark – something scholars have dubbed the ‘messianic secret’. This refers to the way in which the Markan Jesus – in contrast to the way Jesus is presented in John1 – frequently conceals his identity.

When the demons identify Jesus as the ‘holy one’ of God, he silences them. When he heals people, he commands them not to tell anyone about it. And when the disciples begin to clock on to Jesus’ messianic identity, he instructs them to be silent.

The question I want to address in this piece is: why? Why does the Markan Jesus not want those around him to reveal his identity? Is this something that goes back to the historical Jesus, or should we credit it to the literary artistry of Mark?

Did Jesus claim to be the Messiah?

The phrase ‘Messianic secret’ (Das Messiasgeheimnis) can be credited to William Wrede, who also offered an explanation for it.2 In Wrede’s view, Jesus never actually claimed to be the Messiah. Rather, this belief arose after his resurrection, when the Church assigned him a role he never arrogated. The ‘messianic secret’ is thus a way to explain why people didn’t think that Jesus was the Christ during his lifetime. It says that Jesus acted in a way that was messianic, but he told people to keep it a secret.

Today, I know of no scholars who fully endorse Wrede’s explanation. For one thing, it is notable that Jesus is often deeply unsuccessful in telling people to keep his identity a secret. In Mark 1 and 7, the people Jesus heals refuse to keep his command to secrecy. If Mark invented the Messianic Secret to explain why no one thought that Jesus was the Messiah during his lifetime, he totally failed to give this impression.

Yet there is another crucial problem with this idea: namely, that there are good grounds to think that Jesus did claim a messianic identity. It would be impossible to catalogue all of Jesus’ ostensibly ‘messianic’ deeds here – you may inspect this footnote for a few3 – but they are found in multiple strata and different forms within the gospels. Thus, even if Jesus did not explicitly go around telling people, ‘I am the Messiah,’ he did do things that look implicitly messianic.

We might also take issue with Wrede’s claim that Jesus’ messiahship was a post-Resurrection belief. As James Dunn has pointed out, “messiahship was not an obvious, far less necessary, corollary of resurrection.”4 Other figures such as Moses, Elijah and Isaiah were thought to have been exalted to heaven after their deaths, but none of these men attracted messianic associations. The simplest explanation of the fact that Jesus was proclaimed ‘Son of God’ at his resurrection is the fact that he was already viewed as messianic, and the resurrection experiences vindicated this claim.

The Historical Jesus

If Wrede was wrong that Jesus was not perceived as a messianic figure in his lifetime, could the messianic secret go back to Jesus himself?

On the one hand, scholars have reasons to be sceptical. Did the demons really know who Jesus was when they spoke to him? Did Jesus hush their recognition of who he was? Even if one believes that these episodes did happen – and certainly, strange exorcistic experiences occur in the modern world – it would be difficult to establish historically that these scenes unfolded exactly as they were narrated.

At the same time, it seems plausible that something in the ‘messianic secret’ might go back to Jesus himself. To see how, we must bear in mind that messianic notions in the first-century were varied and diverse. Assuming that Jesus had a messianic self-understanding, but did not buy into the more martial, political strains of messianism which were prevalent in the first century, one might understand why he may not have gone around claiming to be ‘the messiah’.

When I say that Jesus may have wanted to avoid certain messianic overtones, I do not simply mean that he wanted to clarify, philosophically-speaking, what he was about. Avoiding claims to messiah-ship may have also served as a survival strategy. John the Baptist was put to death by the state. Several other kingly claimants of the first-century shared his fate. If Jesus wanted his mission to be successful, he would not have wanted to have run similarly afoul with claims to kingship.

It is possible, then, that the Messianic secret had its roots in Jesus’ own avoidance of kingly claims. Yet this theory is not without problems. On the one hand, it does not explain why Jesus does on occasion tell those he heals to spread the news (e.g. 5:19-20). If Jesus was trying to hide his identity, he does not seem to have done a very good job.

And even if we suppose that the historical Jesus did strategically conceal his identity, we are still left with a cluster of literary questions: For what purpose does Mark include the motif in his story? And how does the motif function within his narrative world? Before we understand the secret, we need to consider how Mark employs it within his wider narrative.

A Literary Secret

To see how the Messianic Secret works literarily, it is important to recognise that we –the readers – know from the outset of the narrative that Jesus is ‘the Christ.’ This places us on the same spiritual plane as the demons, who also recognise Jesus’ identity as the ‘holy one of God’. Yet beyond this, the characters in the story consistently misunderstand or have Jesus’ messianic identity concealed from them. Why is this?

The most common suggestion is that Mark is trying to re-configure his readers’ understanding of what it means to be the Messiah. Like the disciples, Mark takes us on a journey towards the cross. We are not to understand messiahship simply in terms of glory, power or military subjection – the most common ways in which first-century Jews would have viewed it. We are to see it in terms of Jesus’ death.

Consider the first moment Jesus is explicitly ‘revealed’ as the Son of God to his inner ring: the mount of transfiguration. When Jesus is coming down from the mountain, he tells his disciples not to share what they have heard until after his resurrection. It is not before Jesus has died and risen that they will understand his sonship. And on the Mount, they are told to ‘listen’ to Jesus. What follows is a block of teaching in which Jesus informs his disciples of the necessity of his coming suffering and death.

The same dynamics are at work in Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus does not want Peter to share this truth – and immediately, we are told why: Peter thinks that Jesus’ messiahship should not involve Jesus going to the cross. In this regard, Peter is like the first blind man Jesus heals in the same portion of material: he is healed partially and can therefore ‘see’ Jesus – but only to some extent, not fully.

Within this unfolding journey, when is it that a human character can finally clocks and realise who Jesus is? It is only once Jesus has breathed his last, and the centurion proclaims: truly, this man was the Son of God. Here we finally have a figure who understands what has been hidden from the disciples. Jesus is the Messiah, but he is the Messiah in a way that no one expected: he is the Messiah who suffers and dies.

Considered as a narrative, the cross and resurrection appear integral to Mark’s framing of Jesus’ messianic identity. Yet there are two reasons why I don’t think that this fact alone provides a comprehensive explanation of the ‘messianic secret’.

The first is that most of Mark’s readers would have already been familiar with the notion of Jesus’ death as the messiah. And many of Mark’s readers, who were gentile, would have first come across the term ‘messiah’ when they came into contact with the Jesus movement. This poses a problem for the idea that Mark was setting out to correct an errant Christology in which the messiah does not suffer. For as Helen Bond explains, Mark’s readers “would have no need for the title to be reconfigured.”5

The second is that this narrative unfolding of Jesus’ identity – which reaches its zenith on the cross – does not explain earlier instances of the ‘secret’ in which Jesus (inconsistently) tells people he heals not to spread the news. For that aspect of the secret, I think we need another explanation, to which we shall turn next.

Is the Secret… A Secret?

So far, we have couched Mark’s material as a messianic secret. Yet we might pause for a moment to consider whether this is the best framing of the motif. As David Watson has pointed out in his ground-breaking study, Honor Among Christians, the ancient language for ‘secrecy’ is remarkably absent from the gospel.6 For instance, Mark virtually never uses terms like kruptō, apokruptō, lanthanō, arrétos or mysterion.

Rather than seeing Mark’s material in terms of secrecy, then, Watson proposes an altogether different framework for making sense of the motif – that of shame and honour. He observes that many of the episodes in which Jesus grants healing or accrues titles (‘holy one of God’ or the ‘Christ’) can be seen within the context of a patron-client relationship. In the Roman world, a patron would provide services to a client for which he was, in turn, granted ‘honour’, titles and devotion.

Seen through this lens, Watson argues that the Markan Jesus deliberately subverts the dynamics of shame and honour in the ancient world. Rather than receiving the honour that is due him on account of his wondrous deeds, Jesus tells people not to spread the word. Rather than ‘lording’ over others, he establishes new markers of what is considered honourable: sacrifice, service and suffering – even to the point of death.

The notion that the Markan Jesus inverts the dynamics of shame and honour is especially appealing. Yet like other explanations we have surveyed, it is not seamless. Its greatest problem is that it does not account for several moments in the gospel in which Jesus does refuse honour but embraces it. Watson himself notes eighteen such instances. Thus, if he is correct that the motif is designed to invert shame and honour, Mark has not followed through with these dynamics in a completely coherent way.

A Counter-Imperial Resonance?

Watson’s thesis may not completely account for the way that Jesus embraces honour. Yet more recently, Adam Winn has adapted Watson’s argument in a way that attempts to account for Jesus’ simultaneous embrace and rejection of honours.7 The key to Winn’s view is that Jesus is presented in Mark like a Roman emperor; and several of the emperors positioned themselves in a similar way to the Markan Jesus – they embraced honour on occasion, but were known for deflecting it in others.

Consider Vespasian, who was likely Emperor during the time that Mark was composed. Vespasian receives all kinds of honour. Yet following the deflective style of earlier emperors, Vespasian was hesitant to accept the title ‘Father of the Country’ or his powers as tribune. Winn also observes that Vespasian ended the practice of worshipping the ‘genius’ of the living emperor, instituted by Caligula.

Winn’s thesis may not explain why Jesus rejects or embraces honour in any specific instance.8 It also does not – to the best of my knowledge – draw upon the particular language that might be used of imperial deflection. Nonetheless, I find it plausible that Jesus’ relationship to honour may be seen within a wider set of imperial parallels.

As I have set out in earlier posts, there are several ways in which the evangelists present Jesus as ‘Emperor-like.’ Broadly speaking, Jesus is the Son of God (divi filius), is associated with ‘good news’ (euangelia), performs miracles – including the use of spittle – and ascends to heaven. Even more specifically, Jesus is ultimately responsible for the demise of the Temple in Jerusalem. With these parallels in mind, Winn thinks that Jesus’ deflection of honour may be another way that Jesus “out-Caesars Caesar.”

Disclosing the Messianic Secret

The Messianic Secret is no easy puzzle to solve. And I think this is in part due to the panoply of materials that scholars have placed under its umbrella. In the first instance, we have Jesus instructing those he has healed not to spread the news. Yet we also have a sub-plot in which Jesus instructs others not to out him as ‘the Christ’ or ‘Son of God’ when he is explicitly proclaimed as such.

I wonder whether untangling these separate threads might allow us to see the ‘messianic secret’ more clearly. In the first case, the Markan Jesus did not always want to embrace the honour that was due to him in his healing miracles. This aspect of the ‘secret’ fits into Jesus’ wider characterisation as an emperor or ‘counter’ Son of God.

Yet in the second case, Mark is laying out what it means to be the Messiah. He is showing us that any notion of messiah-ship which leaves out Jesus’ death and resurrection is incomplete. This may not be to ‘reconfigure’ his readers’ notions of messiahship, but to emphasise one aspect of Jesus’ identity that would have resonated with early Christian experience: not present glory, but suffering, service and death.

Thank you for reading this post on Mark! If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:

• Who is Mark’s Mystery Man?

• Did Someone Order a Markan Sandwich?

• Eyewitness Testimony in Mark?

If you would like more pieces like this, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Behind the Gospels. In addition to 50+ exclusive articles, you will gain access to my new monthly lecture series, addressing different aspects of gospels’ research.

Get 25% off for 1 year

This is the beginning of a series of posts in which I sketch the argument I make in my recent book. This first one looks at physical descriptions in ancient biography, and whether it is surprising that the gospels don’t describe Jesus’ appearance.

I often quip that my PhD was a hundred-thousand word argument from silence. The silence in question: why do the gospels not describe Jesus’ physical appearance?

This may not seem like an obvious question to ask. Yet a quiet revolution has taken place in the last three decades of gospels’ research. Rather than seeing the gospels as non-literary compilations of oral traditions, most scholars now view them as a form of ‘life-writing’ or ancient biography.

This paradigm shift has re-opened the question of Jesus’ appearance, as many ancient ‘lives’ do describe their subject’s physical appearance. To be sure, not every bíos contains a physical description. Yet it seemed curious to me that not just one – but rather all four – of the evangelists fail to tell us what Jesus looked like.

In this introduction to my research, then, I want to explore whether it really is surprising that we find no description of Jesus the gospels. Is this a silence which subverts the conventions of biography – or is it a silence which fails to speak?

Descriptions in Ancient Biography

The first task in my thesis was to work out how common descriptions were in ancient lives. So I read all of the complete biographies I could get my hands on, four hundred years either side of the gospels. This took me from the origins of the genre in Greek literature up to the emergence of ‘Christian’ biography in the Roman Empire.

What I found took me by surprise. The evangelists were the only biographers in antiquity not to describe their subject in any of their works. Whether it was highly fictional works like The Life of Aesop or the Alexander Romance, or more historical biographies like Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, physical descriptions kept popping up. Moreover, Jewish biographers would make sure to mention their subject’s physical appearance – even when it was absent from their primary source material.

Read more

Each month I am hosting an interactive lecture for my paid subscribers, and the topic of this January lecture was ‘What did Jesus really look like?’, incorporating material from my recent book, Jesus’ Physical Appearance: Biography, Christology, Philosophy (2025).

The lecture covered a range of topics:

• Why are the gospels silent on Jesus’ physical appearance?

• What would an average Galilean man have looked like?

• Does Luke 19 describe Jesus as ‘short in stature’?

• Does Christian iconography, including the Turin Shroud, recover Jesus’ image?

• What are the earliest images of Jesus?

• It it possible that Jesus was physically impaired?

I want to give a huge thank you to Carl, who came to the lecture and recorded it, after I faced some technical challenges at the start.

The lecture is now available below:

Read more

For a while, I have been following the work of Dr Chris Cornthwaite, a scholar whose YouTube channel explores topics in biblical studies. I was fascinated by Chris's work not only because his videos are deeply informative and accessible – you should check them out! – but also because Chris speaks candidly about his journey with faith and scholarship.

I am often asked about my relationship to Christianity – a topic I haven’t explored in detail on the blog. And while Chris would no doubt express himself differently to me, I think his story is one to which many scholars and students of the Bible, including myself, will relate. It was therefore a great privilege to interview Chris, and ask about him a bit more his scholarship, shifting beliefs and plans for his brand new Substack.

JN: Chris, it’s really wonderful to get a chance to sit down with you. As a background to your scholarship, what was the focus of your PhD research?

Diasporas! It’s a loaded word. I worked on Philo and 4 Maccabees for my Master’s degree, and ended up writing a lot about what people do in “diaspora.” Decisions they make to fit in. Reworking their tradition to make sense in a new place. And how their practice evolves.

Of course, when we talk about Christianity we’re usually talking about how it spread in the Jewish diaspora.

I remember thinking, Why don’t we talk about other “diasporas” in antiquity? How did religion spread through THOSE?

So I started researching it. Along the way, I realized that Acts’ description of Christianity spreading through synagogues might be fiction. Or, at the very least, idealized. The “diaspora” model might be a literary invention.

But it seems pretty clear that Jewish communities around the Mediterranean had at least something to do with the spread of Christianity.

During my thesis, I researched how a Syrian goddess moved through those communities, how the Phoenician Baal-Poseidon moved through those, and how a Thracian goddess named Bendis was brought into Athens.

I started working outside the academy and never formally published it. But the thesis itself is available online here. (Note, if I were writing it today, I’d do some things differently! Such is life.)

JN: How did you become interested in a historical approach to the biblical texts, and what does it mean for you to study Christianity through a historical lens?

I sort of fell into it backwards. I was a staunch evangelical, a pastor, and confident that I just “followed the Bible” in everything. I wanted to be ordained, and reluctantly attended the only seminary in my town: an Anglican one.

I was pretty sure those heretic Anglicans had never read the Bible (at least not seriously like I had). And sure enough, from day one, I realized that almost nothing they did was biblical as far as I was concerned.

All those “smells and bells” (“Hell’s bells” as I called them!).

But as I learned, I realized that a lot of what I thought was “biblical” wasn’t at all. It was a shock to the system! And a bit like picking a scab, I couldn’t stop. I just had to know more about the Bible. Its problems. Its history. And its oddities.

By the time I’d finished my MDiv, I knew the Bible wasn’t inerrant. But to my surprise, it was more fascinating than ever. I just want to know where it all came from!

The biggest change comes down to one word. Honesty.

So often, we come to the text needing something from it. Affirmation that the way we believe is right. Reassurance that our faith is completely logical–that we can prove it like a math equation (1 Jesus + 12 Apostles + 500 Witnesses = Certainty).

But the text often resists us.

This goes for skeptics too. I meet people on the other side who are just as convinced that they understand what happened: ‘Contradictions with the texts prove the Gospel writers were lying,’ ‘Jesus was invented by the Flavians,’ or ‘Paul stole Christianity.’

The text resists these too. It’s complex and wonderful. And just when you think you’ve understood it, you’ll find something new. I suppose that’s what scripture should be!

JN: On YouTube, you often share your journey of deconstruction, and rebut common misconceptions that you had as an evangelical Christian. What do you think are some of the more common misconceptions believers have about the gospels, in particular?

I think, again, it often comes down to what we need from these texts. As modern Christians, too often we want the Gospels to validate our presuppositions. We want them to be like court reporting, “eyewitness” testimonies. We often want to use them as proof.

But they don’t work this way.

We don’t perfectly understand the origins of the Gospels. However, they certainly aren’t what I always thought as an evangelical – the equivalent of 4 witnesses each standing on a corner and reporting a car accident.

Stories passed through hands. Changed languages along the way. And almost certainly evolved in the telling.

The Gospels are ancient biographies (I know that’s your specialty, John). Ancient biographies may contain history, but they also love a good embellishment.

• They borrow from Imperial imagery (the emperor is the Son of god first!).

• They seem to have periods of being edited and rewritten (evidenced already from the fact that Matthew and Luke copied Mark –and probably other sources).

• They may borrow stories from the Old Testament or the mythology of the surrounding cultures to fill out the narrative.

• They were not the only Gospels in circulation, nor do we have any way of ascertaining whether they were the most “historically accurate.” (Although there are some pretty wacky alternatives!)

• And—what moderns seem most annoyed by—they contain contradictions that are impossible to reconcile without some mental gymnastics.

They are not obviously the gospel truth.

Yet they are incredible books. Rich repositories of history. Central to the faith of Christians through millennia. And in many senses, I love the Gospels now more than I ever did. In all their complexity and messiness. Despite the fact they raise more questions than answers.

JN: What do you see as the relationship between critical historical study and faith? Can the two co-exist, or are they naturally in tension with one another?

When I was accepted to seminary, a mentor who I respected sat me down. “You just can’t go,” he warned me. “It will destroy you. If you want to learn Greek and Hebrew, take some courses. Maybe go to a Bible college. But don’t go to an Anglican seminary.”

At the time, I shrugged and figured he was wrong. And–I’m stubborn–I decided I’d prove him wrong by going to seminary and being a witness to all the heretic Anglicans.

Turns out, that mentor was right. But he was also wrong.

Seminary shook my faith. It broke me even. But I don’t regret that it happened.

My faith is different now, but I think I like it better. I’m so thankful I’m not the earnest, cocky kid I was when that mentor had the hard talk with me.

I used to tell people, “Give me any argument against Christianity. I’ll prove you wrong!”

God, I was an ass.

But I was doing what I was taught – performing what I thought was real Christianity. I modelled what was shown to me.

For most of us, faith is passed on by others. Most of us don’t have Bible scholars or theologians as parents or faith mentors. We have imperfect people, doing their best with the faith as they understand it.

For some, realizing that the simple faith of their parents or mentors was – to put it bluntly – wrong at points, means that it was all a waste of time. It can even feel like a betrayal.

And of course, the faith I received came with a side of toxic masculinity, purity culture, and rapture paranoia. Lots of us are in therapy for the damage a faith caused us – especially as kids.

There comes a time when we realize that what we were given isn’t just the faith, but the faith as our teachers and mentors understood it.

We unpack these things as we grow. Some people want nothing to do with Christianity. Understandable, really. But some of us still feel the pull to something about it. We struggle through and re-learn how to connect to the faith in new ways that feel authentic.

I’m also thankful that I deconstructed in seminary. I was reading some of the world’s best theologians and Bible scholars. I could say a lot of nasty things about Christians. But I couldn’t say that they weren’t interested in wrestling with their own tradition.

Christians have actually been really good at wrestling with their traditions.

And a lot of those people have been theologians and Bible scholars. Not attacking the faith from outside (as a lot of people seem to think). But exploring it from within. Re-working it.

There are – of course – secular Bible scholars. And there’s a sense that we all need to act as secular, despite our personal beliefs. This is how scholarship works.

But many Bible scholars are within the tradition, trying to wrestle with it.

Unfortunately, Bible scholarship has often been treated as a threat to the people in the pews. I think this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It becomes a threat, because people aren’t exposed to it. And when they are exposed to the discipline that threatens simple, shallow faith, they can self-destruct. Therefore it’s a threat.

I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not.

But done well, Bible scholarship can expand our faith. Historically, being a follower of Jesus has meant a lot of different things. And that’s what’s always at the heart of critical study. What did the earliest followers of Jesus think? How did they create their movement? How did they exist in the world?

The answers to these questions might hurt. They might unsettle and confuse childlike faith.

But childlike faith is often worth losing. And hopefully, it’s replaced by something better!

JN: As you popularise scholarship, are there any trends and currents you see in gospel scholarship which you are excited to discuss and see develop?

CC: It’s changed so much, even since I started my PhD in 2013. I don’t remember people talking about Marcionite priority back then (a few were). This work is cracking the synoptic problem open again and presenting new possibilities.

One of the projects I worked on during my PhD, on Graeco-Roman associations, is raising so many interesting questions about the structure of early Christ groups. This work is only just beginning. It hasn’t been popularized much, but I think it has the potential to be groundbreaking. When we see the roots of Christian practice and language in the evidence from surrounding immigrant groups and trade guilds, it changes EVERYTHING! For example, Paul is using legal contract language in Philippians! Who knew!

People are talking about another quest for the historical Jesus. We’ll see where that goes.

Really, everywhere I turn there are interesting questions being asked. Biblical scholarship is an old discipline, and every time I dig into the work of great scholars of old, I discover new stuff. And at the same time, a lot of work in the Gospels shows paradigms we’ve been operating under that need to be broken down. When we do this, it cracks questions open once more.

Bottom line, when you’re a nerd like me (and you, I think, John), the questions are never-ending. And just when you think they’ve all been solved, a new discovery or perspective throws everything back into a new light.

JN: I was really excited to see that you have now joined substack. What sorts of ‘content’ should your subscribers expect to find as you grow on this platform?

I expect to do lots of reflections and storytelling. I love doing this. There was a time in my life when I gave sermons (it hasn’t happened in years). So I’ve framed my Substack as “Post-Christian sermons from an agnostic preacher.” I hope to talk about the Bible a lot, but use it for reflection. I do more of the critical study in my YouTube videos.

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to do this! It’s been a lot of fun!

JN: Thank you for giving us so much to chew on, Chris. It has been a real privilege to hear more about your journey – I’m excited for what lies ahead on your substack!

If you enjoyed this interview and would like to find out more about Chris’ work, you can find his YouTube channel here and his brand new Substack here.

A reminder that Chris’ PhD thesis on ancient diasporas is available online.

The Rest is History podcast host has often found himself getting invited to Church since he wrote Dominion, a book arguing that Christianity is deeply embedded in the West’s moral imagination. Yet in that book, as he confessed last night, he was nervous to broach the subject of the historical Jesus. I was eager, then, to finally hear what Holland made of Jesus, and where he might aver from Williams. In this piece, I offer some reflections on the event.

The Sources for Jesus

The discussion opened with an exploration of Roman sources for Jesus. Holland explained that when he was an atheist teenager, he believed that the evidence for Jesus’ life was much weaker than, say, the evidence for the prophet Mohammad. Yet in researching his book on Islam, he realised he had got it the wrong way round: the key sources for Mohammad’s life were written hundreds of years after his life. By contrast, Jesus appears in a relatively “astonishing” number of sources relatively early on.

The sources in question are diverse: Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan, asking the Emperor what to do with these pesky Christians who ‘worship Christ as a god’; Tacitus’ reference in his Annals to Christians who were blamed by Nero for the fire in Rome; Suetonius’ possible reference to a certain “Chrestus”; as well as the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’ descriptions of Jesus in his Antiquities.

All of these sources are fascinating windows into early Christianity, and an indirect witness to Jesus. Yet I slightly lament the fact that discussions of Jesus’ life are often framed by them, giving the impression that the Roman sources somehow provide a more stable foundation for Jesus’ life than the ‘Christian’ ones. If we did not have these sources, our understanding of Jesus would remain largely unaffected.

It is perhaps telling that the sources did not come up again in the discussion, attesting to their rather threadbare historical interest. The more pressing concern is whether Paul and the gospels get Jesus right – and that is where the conversation turned next.

What the Gospels get right – and wrong…

Peter Williams opened his case for the gospels by pointing to what they get right. They mostly understand the local ‘colour’ of the region – the names we find in them are common Jewish names, and the terminology they use is often appropriate. Unlike later apocryphal gospels, which show little concern for Palestinian realia, the canonical gospels bear a closer familiarity with the people and places they describe.

I agree with Williams, and would add that it is not only the content but the form of the (Synoptic) gospel tradition which points to its origins in a Palestinian setting. Philip Alexander puts it this way, comparing the gospels to anecdotes in rabbinic literature:

“In terms of form, function, setting and motif, the Rabbinic anecdotes are very close to the Gospel pericopae, and there can be little doubt that both belong to the same broad Palestinian Jewish tradition of story-telling.” (2015, 42)

On the gospels’ historicity, Tom was happy to concur that the gospels may get the “macro” right, but they are not always so great on the details. He offered three examples where the gospels fall short of documentary truth: the unlikelihood that Pontius Pilate would offer Barabbas as a substitute for Jesus (a ‘custom’ nowhere attested in history); Herod’s massacre of the Bethlehem innocents, which does not appear in Josephus; and Luke’s presentation of an empire-wide census under the reign of Quirinius, governor of Syria. As far as we can tell, there was no such census.

Read more

But what went on in this time? That much of the activity was oral is largely agreed. Classical societies were oral societies, in which few people were highly literate. But can we say anything more about how this oral tradition actually functioned?

Over the last century, a number of models of oral tradition in the early Church have emerged, each telling a very different story of how the Jesus tradition got underway. Some accounts are highly fluid, seeing the Church as heavily involved in the invention of proto-gospel material. Others are more regulated, viewing the oral materials as more or less controlled by apostles or early Christian communities.

To get to grips with what we might call the ‘traditioning’ process, I want to unpack some of the key models scholars have devised to think about it. In a series of posts, I will introduce each model, before unpacking some of their strengths and weaknesses.

But before we come to that, we must ask: why do scholars speak of ‘models’ of oral tradition, and by what criteria would we judge a model to be more or less compelling?

When thinking about the origins of the Jesus tradition, I am tempted by a parallel with debates in physics about the origins of the Universe. Of course, none of us can directly observe what went on in the early Universe. It is, strictly speaking, lost to us. But just because we cannot observe the early Universe does not mean we can know nothing about it.

Physicists do not throw up their arms in surrender at the mystery. Rather, they create models – simplified representations – of what could have gone on. And while these models are to some extent conjectural, they are all not all equally valid. A good model is going to be one that make sense of the evidence we do see. Yet it will also be coherent: it will be hopefully align with the best of maths and physics.

When it comes to the Jesus tradition, we are faced with a similar situation. We cannot recover the early Jesus tradition. Yet a good model of what went on in this period is going to account for the data we find in the gospels. It is also going to cohere with what we know about how oral tradition and memory works more broadly.

We begin, then, where the twentieth century began: with a model of the tradition encoded in a school of thought known as ‘form criticism.’ While form criticism is widely rejected today, it was once the way that the game of gospel studies was played. I will begin by laying out what it is, before unpacking why it was eventually rejected.

Form Criticism

The form critics worked from the basic insight that the gospel materials are comprised of a series of short units. These units are often called pericopae, from the Greek meaning to ‘cut around’, since they can effectively be ‘cut out’ of the story and placed where they are needed. Moreover, the form critics noticed that these units take on familiar sub-genres or ‘forms’, such as healings, parables, and sayings.

The idea that the gospel is made up of short anecdotes (chreiai), which follow more or less the same narrative structure, is obvious. Yet it is what the form-critics did with this information which is more controversial and fascinating. In German, the method is called formgeschichte (‘form history’), since the form critics believed it was possible to plot the history of these forms prior to their inclusion in the gospels.

To get behind the gospels from the insight that they are comprised of ‘forms’ may seem like a peculiar task. To understand the form-critics’ modus operandi then, we need to take stock of three three key critical assumptions they made about the forms.

The first is related to what they called the forms’ Sitz im Leben: their ‘setting in life’. Once the form had been identified, the form-critics believed they could infer a particular setting (Sitz) that would generate the form. For example, a parable might be used for teaching, while a healing story might have been used in evangelism.

The second assumption is that the ‘forms’ followed more or less regular processes of development. This allowed the form-critics to ‘work back’ from the form as it finds itself in the gospels to the ‘pure’ form as it originated. Believing, for example, that shorter forms were more primitive, one could work back to an earlier version.

The third assumption is that some gospel material can be attributed to the Aramaic-speaking church in Palestine, while others can be attributed to the Greek-speaking world of early Christianity. For example, parables with semitic imagery might be attributed to the Palestinian speaking Church, while expanded miracle accounts, or the “I” sayings of Jesus, could be attributed to Hellenistic Christianity.

On the whole, scholars have often characterised form criticism’s model as an “informal” and “uncontrolled.” Perhaps the best modern analogy is to Bart Ehrman’s view that the Jesus tradition can be likened to a telephone game. As the Jesus tradition evolved, it do so in a free-form way to meet the needs of the early Christian community. There were no constraints, such as eyewitnesses, to control it.

What Form Criticism Got Right

Today, scholars often look back at form criticism as an abject failure. Yet before we come to their criticisms: we must ask, is there anything the form critics got right?

The basic judgement that the form-critics got correct is that the early Church did not have a purely antiquarian interest in Jesus. They were not remembering details about Jesus out of pure historical or biographical curiosity. They were recollecting material which served, broadly speaking, the needs and purposes of the early Church.

This aligns very well with more recent theory about how groups remembers the past. In collective memory theory, a group will not remember details which are incidental to their communal identity. They remember – and re-write – the past, according to the needs of the present. This explains why much of the material in the gospels does not concern Jesus’ personal foibles but rather his relevance for the present.

In my view, the form-critics were also right to posit a view of the oral tradition which was not strictly controlled. The form critics view the oral tradition as fluid and evolving – and while I would question the extent of its fluidity – it seems to make a good deal of intuitive sense of the human limits of containing the Jesus tradition.

Even within the synoptics, we find different versions of the same saying or story. It seems at least plausible, then, that this flexibility was inherent in the oral period from the start, in which the stories of sayings were being passed down. I find this view more compelling than the idea that the tradition was rigorously controlled.

Where Form Criticism Went Wrong

We have seen that form criticism was not entirely misguided. Why then was it widely abandoned by the end of the 20th century?

It is no understatement to say that each of its key assumptions about how the tradition operated has been called into question. Here I focus on five key criticisms.

(a) The ‘Sitz im Leben’

A fundamental assumption of form criticism is that the forms could be paired to particular Sitze im Leben (‘settings in life’) which revealed the origins of a tradition. One can see how this would work with particular modern forms. For example, an obituary would be written for a funeral; a recipe for use in a kitchen.

Yet beyond such obvious examples, any close link between ‘form’ and Sitz im Leben breaks down. Eric Eve offers the counter-example a short oral form like a joke.1 A joke could be made between friends, but it could also be used in a novel, a sermon, an after-dinner speech, essay or stand-up show. To take a short ‘form’ like a job and infer its Sitz im Leben would be absurd.

The problem is that the gospels are made up of precisely such forms. They are a series of short anecdotes and isolated sayings whose original settings could have been diverse. Yes, a particular unit might have been useful in evangelism or teaching or preaching. The difficulty is that the particular setting of a form is impossible to trace.

A related problem is the assumption that because one can attach a Sitz im Leben to a ‘form’, the form was invented for that purpose. This simply does not follow, for it confuses the (possible) use of a tradition with its origins. As T.W. Manson pointed out long ago: “We can list these stories in the Gospels. We can label them…. But a paragraph in Mark is not a penny the better or the worse as historical evidence for being labeled, ‘Apophthegm,’ or ‘Pronouncement Story’ or ‘Paradigm.’”2

(b) Working back to a pure form?

A second problem for the form-critical model is that it assumes that the forms followed a linear process of development. This gave the form critics confidence to work back to the ‘primitive’ form, since the forms evolved along predictable lines.

The difficulty is that, even among the form-critics, there was no agreement or proof of how the forms evolved. For example, Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius imagined that the tradition would expand and become more elaborate over time, while Vincent Taylor thought that the forms had a tendency to become shorter and abbreviated. As evidence for this, the form critics pointed to developments in the gospel texts.

Yet there is a two-fold problem with this view. The first is that it assumes that the pre-gospel oral tradition functioned in the same way as literary development. Rather than seeing oral tradition as a dynamic series of performances, each of which contain natural variations, the form critics saw the tradition as building on a series of layers.

Yet the second problem is that the textual evidence did not support the ‘regular’ patterns of development which the form-critics imagined. This was shown in a landmark study by E.P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition. Through a careful analysis of the gospels, Sanders showed that there was no particular pattern for how material evolved. Sometimes it was abbreviated; sometimes expanded. Sanders concludes, “The form critics were right in thinking that the material changed; they were wrong in thinking that they knew how it changed.”3

(c) Folklore and Literary Composition

A third problem is one that we will return to time and again: what is the best analogy for how oral tradition worked in the period before the gospels?

In thinking about an analogy for the Jesus tradition, the form critics sometimes appealed to folklore – an image of communal transmission derived from 19th century German romanticism. On this view, the gospel materials were the collective and unconscious product of the Volk, the lower-class illiterate peasantry. This mean that the gospels themselves were not serious works of literature at all, but rather a collection of traditions strung together like beads on a string.

As Robyn Faith Walsh has documented, this romanticist picture of oral tradition has had a surprisingly long legacy in New Testament studies.4 Yet it is one largely idiosyncratic to gospel scholarship. When confronted with similar written texts, classicists and ancient historians do not tend to characterise them as the product of an extended process of oral tradition. Whether or not one sees the gospels, with Walsh, as the work of elite literary producers, they are clearly of literature.

A major reasons why scholars moved away from the form-critical view was the ‘literary turn’ in late 20th century. Studying the gospels with the tools of literary theory, it became impossible to ignore that each of the gospels have their own distinct theological interests and internal narrative structure. Rather than viewing the gospels as the product of the Volk, they are now seen as a kind of ancient life-writing, or bíoi.

(d) The Hellenistic-Palestinian Distinction

A fourth problem relates to the way that the form-critics saw the development of the Jesus tradition. As we have seen, the form-critics viewed some of the tradition as originating in the Palestinian Aramaic-speaking Church, while other material was quickly added to by the Greek-speaking diaspora. One of the tasks of the form-critics, then, was to separate the wheat of the Palestinian Church from the chaff of the Greek.

The flaw with this view is that there is no easy separation of ‘Greek’ and ‘Aramaic’ tiers in the early Church. As Martin Hengel and others have demonstrated, it is not possible to pry apart a Palestinian Judaism from Hellenistic Judaism.5 By the first century, the Jerusalem Church and Judea was itself Hellenised. Aramaic speakers existing alongside Greek ones in the early Church, and the gospels themselves exhibit a strong familiarity with both Jewish and Greek custom and language.

Complicating this view further is the size of the Church. Scholars have had a tendency to speak of different ‘communities’ behind the gospels, as though the Church was a series of isolated sects. Yet this obscures the fact that the early Church was a small, tightly-connected network, populated by missionaries. According to some estimates, there were no more than 8,000 Christians by the end of the first-century.6 In practical terms, this may have meant that Christians were only one-person remove from anyone else.

All of this makes it difficult to maintain the form-critical view of an Aramaic-speaking Church isolated from its Greek counterparts. To attribute parts of the tradition to “Hellenistic Christianity” is to speak of a Church which did not exist.

(e) An Uncontrolled Process?

A final problem with the form critics’ model concerns the role of the disciples of Jesus in the traditioning process. Michael Bird puts the problem tongue-in-cheek: “If the form critics are right, the eyewitnesses of Jesus must have been raptured away not long after the resurrection, and all teachers about the Jesus tradition must have been swallowed up by the earth soon after the Day of Pentecost.”7

To sustain the extreme fluidity envisaged by the form critics, it is necessary that eyewitnesses drop out of the picture quickly. There are elements of truth to this idea. By the time that the gospels were written, the vast majority of the earliest witnesses of Jesus had passed away. I have written on why I am unconvinced that eyewitnesses were closely involved in the writing the gospels (see my pieces on Matthew and John).

At the same time, we are concerned with the period before the gospels. In this time, I find it unconvincing that the memory of Jesus’ early disciples, like Peter, was completely neglected by the Church. We see flashes of eyewitnesses sources and connections within the gospels themselves, and much of the material – to the extent we can judge it historical – would have had its origins in the eyewitnesses.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that eyewitnesses were ubiquitous to control every aspect of the tradition. Nor I am I suggesting that legends of Jesus did not emerge – I have argued they did, here and here. As we will come to see, communities can invent material about eyewitnesses even during the life-time and remit of those witnesses.

What I am suggesting that the shape of the Jesus tradition was informed by eyewitnesses. And the “living memory” of those witnesses – people who knew eyewitnesses or had heard their personal memories –would have lasted long after their death.8 By conservative estimates, the gospels were written only 40 to 90 years after Jesus’ resurrection, placing natural limits on what could be written about him.

The End of Form Criticism

Form criticism was once the dominant model of ‘oral tradition’ in gospel studies. Yet we have seen that almost all of its key assumptions have been called into question.

To summarise the key points of contention:

1. The form critics were overconfident in attaching the ‘forms’ to particular Sitze im Leben, and in using these settings to explain the origin of the Jesus tradition.

2. They were wrong in thinking that the oral tradition followed particular laws, which would allow them to work back to the ‘pure’ or ‘primitive’ form.

3. They were incorrect in their assumption that the gospels were unliterary works, the product of a ‘collective unconscious’ akin to the oral poetry of folklore.

4. They erred in positing a strong divide between ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Hellenistic’ Christianities and believing that gospel material could be assigned to each.

5. Their model did not account for the ongoing living memory of the eyewitnesses.

For these and other reasons, form criticism cannot adequately explain the tradition behind the gospels. As we continue our quest for the ways in which material was passed on orally, we will need a model which does not make the same mistakes.

Thank you for reading this post! If you enjoyed this one, you might also like:

• A Telephone Game behind the Gospels?

• Eyewitness Testimony in Mark?

Get 25% off for 1 year

Further Reading:

Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition. Fortress Press, 2014.

Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus. Eerdmans, 2014.

I had just finished my PhD and was teaching theology and philosophy at a boys’ school back home. The regimented life of a school teacher was a mostly welcome change from the autonomous, anxiety-ridden existence of a grad student.

But it also induced a different sort of existential crisis. There was the fear that if I did not use my training I would lose it; a growing sense of distance from the academy – and most of all, a panic that if I was not writing, I would lose the ability to think.

Two years on – and two-hundred thousand words later! – I am so thankful that Behind the Gospels gave me the opportunity to carry on thinking. This blog has made me a more confident writer and given me an outlet for my work. But it has also allowed me to sit a while longer with the topics I could only graze past in my research.

When I write my weekly pieces, I don’t usually have a set template for topics. But looking back over the last year, I can see a number of threads I’ve kept on pulling. Thus, in an attempt to impose some order onto the chaos which is this blog, I have composed a ‘digest.’ If you are new to the blog, this is what I’ve been up to in 2025!

1. The Historical Jesus

Since my undergraduate days, I have been incurably interested in what we can know about Jesus as a historical figure. It is well and good to read the gospels as theological texts. But if we read the gospels as historians – what can we really say about Jesus?

A number of my posts this year have asked this question with respect to on different episodes of Jesus’ life. In the lead up to Easter, I considered whether there is a historical kernel to the stories of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, examined one popular case for the empty tomb, and asked if the Resurrection was a historical event.

I have also touched on aspects of Jesus’ life which are less well-known. What can we say archaeologically about Jesus’ home-town? Is it really true that John the Baptist was Jesus’ teacher? Did Jesus sing? How famous was he? And what are we to make of that bizarre story in Matthew where many rise from the dead and enter the ‘holy city’?

Some of my posts on the historical Jesus have been more methodologically reflective. In one lesser-read piece, I interrogate one of the primary ways scholars have come to knowledge of the historical Jesus: the so-called ‘criteria of authenticity.’ I also asked how it is that historians are confident that they can recover Jesus’ teaching, given the common problems with recovering the actual speech of ancient figures.

More recently, I have also written some seasonal posts. At Halloween, I unpacked why virtually all historians consider Jesus to have been an exorcist. While at Christmas, I answered questions and delivered a lecture on what we can know about Jesus’ birth. I also touched on another Marian doctrine: whether Mary was a perpetual virgin.

2. Dating the Gospels

Another area of interest this year has been the gospels’ dating. When were the gospels written? And how does their dating affect how we understand why they were written?

The most common view is that they were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, yet the reasons for holding this view are less well-known. Online, it is often chalked up to an ‘anti-supernaturalist’ bias: the reason why scholars hold this view is because Jesus’ prophecy of the Temple’s destruction could not be authentic. But as I have attempted to explain here, this is not the reasoning employed in scholarship.

Still, there are a minority of scholars who have put forward earlier dates. In one piece, I unpacked some more serious arguments for a pre-70 dating of the gospels, before responding to those arguments. In another, I examine the common idea that Luke used the writings of Josephus’ Antiquities, placing his work sometime after 93 CE.

3. The Historicity of the Gospels

A topic of widespread public interest is the gospels’ historicity. To what extent to the gospels provide a reliable source for the events narrated? Apologists and polemicists seem to think that this is a question with simple answers. In this piece, I show why the question – are the gospels historical? – is more intractable than many suppose.

Other pieces have touched on different aspects of the gospels’ historicity. I look at a popular online argument for thinking that the feeding of the five thousand really happened; I explore whether the gospels’ were originally anonymous; and I ask whether names are a clue to eyewitness testimony behind Mark’s passion story.

One popular piece touched on the historicity of John’s gospel. Why do historians see the fourth gospel as a less reliable guide to the historical Jesus, regardless of how they might construe its spiritual and theological value? Here I look at how John paints a very distinctive portrait of Jesus to the one found in the earlier Synoptic gospels.

4. The Christology of the Gospels

A fourth thread concerns Christology: how do the gospels depict the person of Jesus? How do they understand his status and identity as a human and as a divine being?

Historians tend to argue that Jesus did not claim to be God, regardless of whether they think that he was. To explore that question further, I reviewed a fascinating debate between Alex O’Connor and David Wood on Jesus’ self-understanding. I also looked at whether Jesus’ reception of ‘worship’ (proskynesis) points to his divinity, and unpack what it means when gospel scholars say that Jesus is ‘divine’.

Another controversial topic in gospel studies is how to understand the titles attributed to Jesus: 'Lord’, ‘Son of Man’, ‘Son of David’, and ‘Christ’. Are these words containers with a fixed meaning, or does their context determine their use? While paying special attention to Jesus’ titles has fallen out of favour in biblical studies, I asked Dr Kendall Davies how we can better understand the gospels’ titles for Jesus.

One of my favourite series to write has focused on Jesus and other ancient figures. In 2024, I looked at how Jesus’ depiction in the gospels shaped by pagan heroes like Aesop, Vespasian and Dionysus. Yet a more immediate parallel in the gospels’ Jewish context. In Was Jesus Modelled on Moses? I look at Mosaic allusions in the gospels.

5. Sources for Jesus’ Life

To get ‘behind the Gospels’ is to think about the sources for Jesus’ life. Perhaps the most valuable pre-gospel source are the writings of Paul (c.50). A number of my posts this year have therefore focused on what we can know about Jesus from Paul. Did Paul know a pre-gospel source ‘Q’? And why does Paul not say more about Jesus?

I have also thought about a source which was often thought to lay behind Mark – the so-called ‘Pre-Markan Passion Narrative.’ In recent scholarship, many scholars have begun to question whether an early written source ever existed. I have argued that Mark is drawing on early materials, but not necessarily an extended written narrative.

A couple of my pieces have also interrogated the Roman sources for Jesus. I took a look at one attempt to argue that Josephus’ description of Jesus (the so-called Testimonium Flavianum) is substantially authentic. I also look at whether Jesus is the referent of Suetonius’ reference to ‘Chrestus’, arguing that it probably is not.

6. The Gospels as Literature

For a long time, scholars were hesitant to describe the gospels as ‘literature’. Yet in the second half of the last century, a new wave of literary criticism showed that the evangelists were not mere compilers of tradition but authors in their own right.

A couple of posts this year have touched on the literary artistry of the gospels. In Seeing Double in Matthew, I took a closer look at Matthew’s pattern of ‘doubling’ the number of characters found in the same Markan text. While in Did Someone Order a Markan Sandwich?, I examine of one of Mark’s most fascinating techniques: ‘sandwiching’ episodes inside of each other to create new layers of meaning.

One of the key literary puzzles for scholars is the identity of the beloved disciple – the idealised witness who lays behind the fourth gospels. In my piece, Who was the Beloved Disciple? I assess seven candidates for the identity of this enigmatic character.

7. Jesus’ Physical Appearance

A final thread this year is Jesus’ physical appearance. Bloomsbury recently published a monograph based on my dissertation at Edinburgh, and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tyler Wilson of Contingent History to discuss the book. I also took a deeper dive into one of the topics in the book: whether Luke presents Jesus as short.

I haven’t written a lot about my academic research on this substack (partly for reasons of plagiarism.) But I have answered a list of 50 popular questions about it. I took part in an interview with Dr Ian Paul on the subject. And in the future, I’m hoping to make more of much research accessible for readers of Behind the Gospels.

Another post on the physical appearance is called Before Jesus was Beautiful. In the early Church from the second century onwards, it was common for Christians to imagine Jesus as ugly – like the suffering servant of Isaiah. In this piece, I unpack why Christians imagined Jesus as ugly and whether there is any foundation to the idea.

What’s Coming Up in 2026…

2025 has been a really exciting year, and there is more to come in 2026. I have begun writing a new book on the historical Jesus, tailored for a popular audience, and I am also going to be offering monthly online lectures for my paid subscribers.

Topic-wise, I am really looking forward to unpacking the tradition behind the gospels. The period of 40 years before the gospels were written is complex and fascinating – so what was really going on in this time? Many of my posts will be asking this question.

All that is left is for me to say a massive thank you to all of my readers, particularly to those who are supporting my writing. I hope you continue to enjoy my posts going forward. If you have any suggestions or questions you would like me to answer – give me a shout at behindthegospels@gmail.com or DM me. Have a very happy new year!

Get 25% off for 1 year

Their line of questioning runs something like this: ‘if I do not or no longer assent to the idea of a virginal conception, can I still believe?’ The operative assumption is that the truth of Christianity rises and falls on the historicity of this particular miracle.

I understand this concern. The virginal conception of Jesus is affirmed in both the Nicene and Apostles Creed, confessed by most Christians worldwide. Not to assent to this doctrine thus places oneself outside of the bounds of Christian orthodoxy.

At the same time, it does not seem to me – or to many contemporary New Testament scholars – that belief in a literal interpretation of Matthew and Luke’s story is integral to the substance of Christian belief.

To put it differently: I think there are ways to believe in both the Incarnation (the idea that Jesus is fully God and fully man) and in Scriptural revelation, without thinking that the virginal conception was the method by which the Incarnation unfolded.

In this piece, then, I want to do something rather unusual for the blog. I wish to offer some reflections on why the virgin birth may not be a sine qua non for faith.1

The Complexity of the Biblical Sources

It is very common in theological interpretation of the Bible to assume that the Bible speaks with one voice. Guided by this assumption, we often assume that the New Testament has only one account of Jesus’ paternity: he was born of a virgin.

Yet biblical scholars generally do not work with this assumption. When they look at a question like Jesus’ paternity, they do not explore the texts as a unity, or disparate voices to be harmonised, but as individual sources which stand on their own terms.

With this in mind, a historian is well within their rights to ask: how widespread was the belief in the virginal conception in the early Jesus movement? Did all early Christians – if we can call them that – confess what later became orthodoxy?

At the time that Matthew and Luke were written, in the late first or early second century respectively, at least some Christians did believe in the virgin birth. Yet beyond these sources, it is very difficult to find traces of the notion in earlier texts.

Consider our earliest and most prolific New Testament writer: St Paul. On my reading, Paul believed in some form of the Incarnation (Phil 2:5-11); he believed that Jesus was a pre-existent divine being who took on human flesh.

Yet one struggles to find in Paul any hint that Jesus was conceived supernaturally. Some have pointed to his description of Jesus as ‘born of a woman’ as a thinly-veiled allusion to the belief in the virgin birth. Yet ‘born of a woman’ is the same phrase that the book of Job uses to describe a mortal man. Paul is emphasising Jesus’ humanity.

What then did Paul believe about Jesus’ origins? Unless we import later ideas into his letters, it seems that Paul held a standard view about Jesus’ origins. He describes Jesus as ‘made of the seed of David according to the flesh’, which in ancient Jewish terms, meant that his father was of Davidic descent. And he offers no qualification of that view.

Let us assume for a moment that this account of Paul’s belief is correct. We are then confronted with a New Testament witness which is more complex than many traditionally see it: while some NT writers (Matthew and Luke) held that Jesus was supernaturally conceived, other NT writers (like Paul) probably did not.

We might still think that the virginal conception is the majority position of the canon. Yet once again, we have writers who seem to know nothing about it. Mark says nothing of Jesus’ virginal conception (having his family think him ‘out of his mind’)2, while John affirms the Incarnation but without any apparent need for a virgin birth.

All of this should raise questions for how central or important the concept of the virginal conception was to New Testament writers. This is not to suggest that it did not happen. But it is to suggest that if we are judging the New Testament followers of Jesus by the canons of a later orthodoxy, they might not meet the mark.

Read more

Last week, something really cool happened: I threw my (first ever!) online lecture.

Since ‘tis the season, the purpose of the lecture was to walk through nativity, the birth stories of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. I tried to place these texts in their ancient literary contexts, and to unpack some of the debates surrounding their historicity.

It was an immense privilege to meet many of you for the first time, and to put some faces to names. We had about fifteen people tune in, from Denmark all the way to Colorado, and the session was followed by a really engaging time of discussion.

I know that some of you wanted to see the lecture but weren’t able to make it. If that’s you: do not fear! I am planning to host monthly lectures and discussions on Behind the Gospels in 2026 (a ‘New Years Resolution’), and you can now watch the lecture below.

All that is left is for me to wish you a peaceful and blessed Christmas, for those of you who are celebrating. Thank you for all your support in making this happen!

– John

P.S. If you are still looking for a Christmas gift this season, and would like a subscription to Behind the Gospels, please let me know. I have three to give away!

Read more