At Mass this morning, we began by reciting a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary—that is, Jesus’ mom. At our parish we start every Mass this way. Lourdes (my wife) sometimes turns on EWTN, which is a Catholic TV station. They play a lot of documentaries, many of which have something to say about Mary. The devotion and love many Catholics have for her is immense…immeasurable. Long, poetic discourses into their admiration for her. She is absolutely beloved. I think it’s fair to say she holds the second greatest importance in the Catholic faith, behind only Jesus himself.

But something that doesn’t get brought up about her, or at least something I’ve never heard brought up, is her faith. Catholics have faith in her—that she hears their prayers, that she protects and guides. But her faith, is not discussed. Or I’ve never heard it discussed, at least. I suspect this is largely because we don’t quite know what her faith in Christ was.

She was a Jew, this is certain. And like the other Jews of the New Testament (Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, etc.), at no point did she stop being a Jew. But did she come to see her son as the Messiah? Did she believe in his messages? Was she in any way a part of the Jesus movement, whether pre- or post-crucifixion?

The answer is not as obvious as you might think.

Something I found surprising when I learned it is that Mary appears nowhere in the New Testament other than the Gospels and Acts. Growing up in the Catholic church, with its intense devotion to her, I would’ve guessed that most Christian texts included her. But this isn’t the case. Even more surprisingly, her presence in the Gospels and Acts is rather sparse.

Here is every single quote from the Gospel of Mark that mentions Mary.

Then his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

—Mark 3:31-35

“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

—Mark 6:3

There’s also another moment in chapter 3 where Jesus’ family as a whole is mentioned, but not Mary individually.

Then he went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”

—Mark 3:20-21

It’s almost hard to believe that one of our Gospels has so little of the Mother Mary in it. Say Mark was the only Gospel we had—she’d likely have little to no importance in the Christian tradition. There’s no virgin birth in Mark, and she isn’t present when Jesus is crucified.

As for our title question, of the three passages above, the only one that in any way tells us what Mary may have believed, is Mark 3:20-21. And in that passage, Mary is not said to be a supporter of Jesus, but perhaps concerned that he has lost his mind. They try to restrain him. It’s important to get particular with the wording here though. It doesn’t say they too thought he was out of his mind; it says that’s what other people were saying. It just says that his family tried to restrain him. One could argue this wasn’t out of disbelief, but out of fear for his safety and reputation—his reputation also being their own to some degree.

Mark is our oldest Gospel. Our oldest Christian texts are Paul’s letters. Paul doesn’t say anything about Mary. He just says that Jesus was born of a woman (Galatians 4:4). Paul doesn’t make a habit of (and this is frustrating for a historian) documenting Jesus’ life or the lives of other characters from the Gospels. Point being, his exclusion of Mary isn’t particularly surprising. However, I’m of the opinion, that if Paul believed in the miraculous virgin birth, he would have mentioned it there in his letter to the Galatians.

And that brings me to the virgin birth. After Mark comes Matthew. Matthew’s infancy narrative is probably my favorite story in the Bible, though I’m skeptical that it’s rich with historical accuracy. If Mary was a virgin when she birthed Jesus and if she believed Joseph’s dream where the angel told him Jesus will save his people from their sins and if the Magi told her the star they observed informed them that Jesus would be King of the Jews, she surely wouldn’t have had a hard time believing that her son was the Messiah. I think if Matthew’s birth narrative was totally historical, it would be fair to assume that Mary was both a believer and follower of Jesus.

The trouble is I don’t think this narrative is totally historical. I don’t even find it likely that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The Old Testament informs us that this is where David was from and where the coming Messiah would be from, so as a means to prove Jesus’ legitimacy, Matthew added it in there. The slaughter of the innocents is likely to be ahistorical (thank God). I won’t spend time getting into this because many other writers here on Substack have already disproven the historical accuracy of the birth narratives at length, but for the purposes of this exploration, I’m of the opinion that we don’t know much of anything about Jesus’ birth and childhood, at least not confidently.

Now while Matthew and Luke have a virgin birth story, neither include Mary being part of Jesus’ ministry in any way. I have no quotes to provide because they only include edited and redacted versions of two of the quotes from Mark above. Matthew and Luke both cut the part about Jesus’ family trying to restrain him. There are no new passages where Mary is present in Jesus’ ministry. And like Mark, she is not there in Jerusalem when he is killed.

However, the author of Luke is also the author of Acts, and while Mary is not mentioned as being present in Jerusalem in Luke, she is there in Acts. I find this odd. Here’s the passage.

When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.

—Acts 1:13-14

While it’s totally possible that Mary would attend the Passover celebration in Jerusalem without being one of Jesus’ followers (as many Jews did this), I think it is significant the author of Luke-Acts has Mary in the same room as Jesus’ followers, praying with them.

That brings us to the last and youngest of our four canonical Gospels—John. Mary is the most present in Jesus’ ministry in John. But there’s something strange—she is never referred to as Mary. Not once. She’s “his mother.”

There’s no virgin birth in John. Jesus’ mom first shows up at the famous Cana wedding.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to me and to you? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

—John 2:1-5

She notices the wine has run out, she tells Jesus, and when he brushes her off, she turns to the servants and tells them to do what he says anyway. He has them fill six stone water jars and the water becomes wine. She sets the first miracle of the Gospel in motion. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Mary never speaks to her adult son at all.

Immediately after, we get the family traveling together.

After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples, and they remained there a few days.

—John 2:12

Here we see Mary traveling with Jesus and his disciples. This is the clearest quote of the New Testament that could inform us that Mary was in some way a part of Jesus’ traveling ministry.

She’s mentioned once more without being present.

They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

—John 6:42

This is John’s version of the hometown skepticism we saw in Mark 6:3. Mark calls Jesus the son of Mary and gives him no father at all. John gives him a named father (Joseph) and leaves the mother generic.

Then we get this passage:

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish Festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing, for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” (For not even his brothers believed in him.)

—John 7:1-5

While it’s not Mary being discussed here, it’s significant to our conversation that John records that Jesus’ brothers didn’t believe in him. This is interesting because we know quite confidently that at least one of Jesus’ brothers did (eventually) believe in him. That would be James. I’ll get more into that in a few moments.

Finally, and most significantly, Mary’s at the execution.

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

—John 19:25-27

This has no parallel anywhere. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the women watching the crucifixion are named and his mother is not among them. In John she is not only there, she’s close enough to be spoken to, and Jesus hands her over to the beloved disciple.

So John is the outlier. He has no birth narrative and no virgin birth, yet he puts Mary into more scenes of Jesus’ ministry than any Synoptic writer does. He never gives her a name, and he gives her the last words Jesus speaks to anyone before he dies.

If you’ve read this far, you have now read every passage in the New Testament about Mary the mother of Jesus. This is all we have to understand who she was. There are apocryphal texts—most notably the Protoevangelium of James. In this text, one might say Mary is the protagonist. It gives her parents, a miraculous conception of her own, a childhood spent in the Temple. The trouble is, throughout my research, it has been said again and again that the apocryphal texts aren’t particularly useful in uncovering the historical Jesus. If they can’t inform us who the historical Jesus was, then I’d say it’s fair to assume they can’t tell us who the historical Mary is either. Now some historians do place great importance on the apocryphal texts (like John Dominic Crossan and the Gospel of Peter), but they are the minority.

So from the passages we have, can we infer if Mary was part of Jesus’ ministry? Can we infer that she came to believe that he rose from the dead, and in a sense became a Christian?

I find these questions difficult to answer—I’ve been thinking about them, deeply, over the past few weeks.

One frame of thinking makes me say, if she had become a devout believer in Christ Jesus, you’d think that the Gospels and Acts, and maybe even Paul, would say this. And they never do. They never say Mary came to believe in Jesus. But on the other hand, I could see it being totally possible that she did come to believe that Jesus was the Christ, but continued her humble life in Nazareth, not playing a significant role in the movement, and therefore hardly recorded in the movement in the New Testament.

We know that James, Jesus’ brother, came to believe because the risen Jesus appeared to him, or so he claimed. He went on to become the leader of the Jerusalem church. This is about as close to certain as anything gets in this field. If we know that Jesus’ brother became a Christian, is it fair to assume that Jesus’ mother did as well?

My intuition says probably. Now, intuition doesn’t really mean much to historians, but let’s think about this. Mary almost certainly knew that there was a movement centered around her son, and then eventually, people came to believe that her son rose from the dead and was the Messiah. One of her other sons claimed that he appeared to him after his death. This son became a leader of the movement. Considering that, I would find it odd that she didn’t come to believe herself. I think this is more likely than the opposite. Sure, it’s totally possible that she saw her own son as a false prophet, a charlatan. But is that likely?

Then one might ask, as I stated above, why is she hardly present in say, the Gospel of Mark? Why was her belief never recorded? Again, I think it’s possible that she came to believe, but never really became part of the movement. Mary and perhaps Jesus’ other brothers and his sisters, could have remained in Nazareth, believers that Jesus was the Messiah, but not a part of any Christian community. If this is the case, it’s not hard to see why memory of her was only sparsely preserved.

The truth is we’ll never know for certain if Mary came to believe her son had risen from the dead and was the Messiah. We’ll never know if she was a Christian. But let’s say she was, here’s a question that fascinates me—what did her Christianity look like? Did she break bread with other believers and say that it was his body? Did she drink the cup and say that it was his blood? Our earliest description of that practice comes from Paul, writing to Corinth about twenty years after the crucifixion. I have no idea if an old woman in Nazareth in the 30s was doing anything like that. She would have gone on keeping Sabbath, keeping kosher, going up to Jerusalem for the festivals—all of which she'd been doing her whole life, and all of which the first followers of Jesus were doing too. There may not have been a noticeable difference. Or maybe there was. What did her Christianity look like?

Bible passages are from the New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition

Art: Stabat Mater by Gabriel Wuger, 1868

This essay is informed by the works of a variety of scholars. To name a few: John Meier, Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, John Dominic Crossan, EP Sanders.

The texts don’t say so, yet many historians are convinced that Jesus was originally one of John the Baptist’s followers. I’m beginning to become convinced myself. Perhaps this is a controversial thing to suggest. Some might say, The Son of God was no one’s follower! I don’t find it controversial though, and therefore I’d like to explore it.

One of the very few parts of the Gospels that historians universally find historical is Jesus’ baptism by John. This is primarily because it makes no sense for a first-century Christian to invent this. It could both imply that John was the superior prophet and that Jesus was sinful, as John baptized for the forgiveness of sins. One could read Matthew’s Gospel as the author being humiliated by this fact, and fabricating a defense. The Gospel reads:

John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

—Matthew 3:14

The authors of the Gospels seem suspiciously keen on making it clear to us that Jesus was actually still the superior, despite this baptism. Why did they feel so compelled to do so? I think for one, at the time, there were many Jews who did in fact see John as the superior. I think also, Jesus’ baptism by John was used as evidence for this.

All three synoptic Gospels have Jesus’ ministry start after his baptism by John. And while the Gospel of John leaves out the baptism, John still appears at beginning, proclaiming Jesus. That’s significant. I recall a video where Mark Goodacre argued for the Gospel of John’s dependence on the Synoptics because like the Synoptics, it starts with John. I think he has this wrong. I think the Gospel of John also starts with John the Baptist because it did start with John the Baptist. John even appears in the Q Source, for those who believe in its existence. This is also significant, considering that Q’s purpose was to record Jesus’ teachings.

The potentially embarrassing nature of the baptism and the prevalence of John in the Gospels has led historians to conclude that this must be historically accurate. But many have gone even further, and suggest that Jesus was one of John’s followers before starting his own ministry.

Similar to Jesus, basically everything we know about John comes from the New Testament and Josephus. We have no writings from John’s followers. While it seems clear that John had followers who remained loyal to him after his death, his movement didn’t endure the way Jesus’ did. Point being, we don’t know much confidently about John. It seems certain that he baptized people in the Jordan River for the forgiveness of sins (Jesus being one of them), he had followers, he was executed by Herod. Whether he actually wore clothing of camel’s hair and ate locusts and honey is up for debate.

Now, if we agree that John’s baptism of Jesus could be seen as embarrassing to first-century Christians, we must ask, why did they bother to record it? Why not just leave it out? I doubt John’s words in Matthew 3:14 are historical. I think Matthew invented that as a means of justifying it. That would imply, by my reading, that he was indeed embarrassed by this. So why even mention it? Why did Mark and Luke mention it too? Why did John (the Gospel writer) cut the baptism part out but feel compelled to keep John (the Baptist) in there?

Perhaps it was because this was well known. Not just among Christians, but among critics even. Perhaps critics used this fact to try and delegitimize Jesus.

That creates an important question. Why was this well known? The Gospels suggest John was baptizing tons of people. Observe:

And the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the River Jordan.

—Mark 1:5

If Jesus was one of these who was baptized, at a time when he was yet to be famous, why was it remembered? Why did so many know about it? One could argue that it’s because Jesus told his followers about it and placed much value on the memory. Others might contest this by saying a man who was a prophet himself wouldn’t make an effort for it to be known that he was once baptized by another prophet. They might suggest instead that Jesus was more than simply baptized by John—he was one of John’s disciples. If this was the case, surely many in Jesus’ life would have been aware of this. And considering how famous John was, perhaps many outside of Jesus’ life were well aware too. What I’m saying is that if Jesus was merely baptized by John once, and that was it, I’m doubtful that the memory would have survived to the Gospel writers. I think the best explanation is that their relationship was much deeper than that—everyone knew it, leaving the Gospel writers no choice but to record it.

The Gospels suggest that Jesus thought fondly of John.

Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

—Matthew 11:11

(John) was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light.

—John 5:35

Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What, then, did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who put on fine clothing and live in luxury are in royal palaces. What, then, did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.

—Luke 7:24-26

Not only did Jesus think fondly of John, they shared a similar apocalyptic message. I think both John and Jesus were preaching that an end-of-the-world event was soon to come.

John says:

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?

—Matthew 3:7

Jesus says:

Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.

—Mark 9:1

There are many other quotes, and much more reasoning that prove that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Quotes from John are significantly fewer, but both prophets make repentance and a coming wrath central to their message. One also has to ask why John was forgiving sins. I think he was forgiving sins to help secure people’s spot in the coming kingdom of God. I think it’s likely that Jesus, in part, developed his own belief system from John. While I’m thoroughly convinced that Jesus and John’s message were not identical, the overlap helps prove the hypothesis that Jesus started off as one of John’s followers.

With all of this evidence combined, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the historians who have suggested this are right.

Edit (7/24): I forgot to bring up Jesus and John the Baptist being cousins. Between the New Testament and Josephus, they are only presented this way in the Gospel of Luke. And it’s only in one quick passage, where Elizabeth is described as Mary’s “relative”. Because of this, I’m skeptical of its historical accuracy. It lies within Luke’s infancy narrative, a section that is one of the least likely to preserve historical recollection. If these men were truly cousins, we’d expect to see it brought up elsewhere, but it remains isolated to this section of Luke.

Art: The Baptism of Christ by John the Baptist, by Almeida Júnior, 1895

Many find it strange that I doubt the supernatural claims of the New Testament yet attend church every Sunday and enjoy it. Rudolf Bultmann’s 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology” nicely articulates what I have long practiced intuitively. Bultmann argues that the mythological elements of the New Testament must be demythologized. But not discarded—instead, reinterpreted. The story of Jesus walking on water, for instance, is not a literal account, but a symbolic one, pointing toward something true about faith and human life even if it never happened.

I won’t go as far as Bultmann in claiming what Christianity as a whole ought to believe. But I do think Christians should be more accepting of people like me. My experience on Substack suggests they are not, at least not in large numbers. When I have written openly about my doubts regarding the supernatural claims of the New Testament, the response has often been somewhat hostile. You are not a Christian, I have been told, sometimes with considerable heat. But, there are Christians here who do accept my position, and I am grateful for them. They feel like the minority though.

I have no hard data to support what follows, but I am confident in it nonetheless: if you asked most Christians whether a person could belong to the faith without believing that Jesus literally rose from the dead, the answer would be no. For many, that belief is required. While I understand that position, I think it is worth interrogating.

Here’s a thought. Consider the Native American communities that still perform their traditional dances, songs, and ceremonies. These were religious practices, directed toward gods and spirits, intended to give thanks or seek intercession. Many of the people performing them today are Christians. Some are atheists. And yet no one finds this strange. In fact, most people consider it admirable. We understand intuitively that a person can participate in the rituals of their ancestors without sharing their ancestors’ cosmology. The practice carries something worth preserving: heritage, identity, continuity, a sense of belonging to something larger and older than oneself.

I find myself in a similar position with Christianity. I was raised in the tradition. It is the religion of my ancestors. The rhythms of the liturgical year, the language of the Gospels, the act of gathering with a community on Sunday morning, these are not empty to me simply because I do not read the miracle stories as history. I find meaning in the practice itself. I value the ethics at the center of Jesus’s teaching. I appreciate the sense of community the church provides, and the discipline of showing up, week after week, to reflect on how one ought to live.

There is also something simpler at work, something closer to beauty than to belief. I find the church building itself beautiful. The incense, the candles, the way light moves through stained glass. I find the language of the Bible and the old creeds beautiful too, the cadence of the Nicene Creed, the poetry of the Psalms, the grandeur of the prologue to John’s Gospel. I do not think this is a small thing. I think beauty is one of the ways truth announces itself, even when the truth in question is not historical fact, but something closer to how a people made sense of their world. And I should say this plainly: I want there to be a god. I pray, to him and to Jesus, more often than my doubts would suggest I should. I am not sure the prayers do anything. I am not even sure anyone is listening. But I say them anyway, because some part of me hopes I am wrong to doubt.

When I went through the RCIA process to become a confirmed Catholic, I recall saying that I saw Catholicism as my vessel toward God. I’m convinced that Jesus never actually walked on water or performed any of the other miracles in the New Testament. I’m less convinced about whether there’s a god at all. But, as I said, I want there to be one. What I am convinced of, regarding god, is that if he exists, he is either not almighty or not good. I feel this way because of all the suffering and evil in this life. This is a common reason for people to doubt god’s existence, and while Christians have responses to it, I have yet to hear one that solves the problem for me.

The most common response is that god gave life forms free will, and with free will, particularly in the case of humans, the consequence is that people will do evil things and cause suffering. But this doesn’t hold up for me, because the same Christians who use this argument also believe god intervenes in the world all the time. If that’s true, I don’t see how free will would prevent god from stopping evil. He could stop all of it and still leave free will intact.

A better way to resolve the problem, I think, is to argue that god isn’t all-powerful. He would like to stop evil, but he can’t. There’s also the possibility that god is indeed almighty but not good, which is why he doesn’t intervene. That thought unsettles me, and I hope it’s wrong.

Both of these views go against Christian belief. The average Christian will claim that god can do all things and is good. Similar to my views on Jesus’s miracles, I suspect most Christians would say I can’t call myself a Christian without sharing those beliefs.

Here is a summary of my Christianity. I do not believe Jesus walked on water, rose from the dead in a physical sense, or performed any of the other miracles attributed to him, though I believe his earliest followers were sincere in thinking he had. I am not sure a god exists at all. And yet I want there to be a god. I pray anyway. I go to church every Sunday, and I find real beauty there, in the building, the incense, the language of the Bible and the creeds, beauty that feels like its own kind of evidence even when I cannot follow it all the way to belief. I find meaning in the liturgy, the ethics, the community, and the discipline of showing up. I was raised in this tradition, and I choose to remain in it, the way a person might return to the dances and songs of their ancestors without sharing their ancestors’ beliefs about the gods those dances were meant to please. Beyond all this, I have a deep interest in the history of Christianity itself. Not just the historical Jesus, though that fascinates me most, but the complex, human process by which early Christianity took shape. How the movement split and argued with itself in its first centuries. How the books of the New Testament were written, debated, and eventually canonized.

I know some Christians will read this and conclude that I am not one of them. I understand why. But I think this view, doubt about the supernatural, uncertainty about god, hope alongside that doubt, and genuine commitment to the practice and beauty and ethics of the faith, should have room within Christianity. Belief has never been a single fixed thing. It has always been argued over, reshaped, and reinterpreted, from the earliest church councils to Bultmann’s demythologizing to whatever comes next. I am not asking Christians to believe what I believe. I am asking them to accept that a person can sit in the pew, take communion, and still doubt, still hope, still pray without certainty, and that this does not make him any less a part of the thing they are all trying to practice.

Art: Christus am Ölberg by Hans Thoma (1907)

I’ve always been disappointed that there aren’t more animals in the New Testament. There are few instances where Jesus has significant encounters with them. Mankind’s relationship with the animal kingdom is not a prominent theme of the New Testament. Actually, it’s hardly a theme at all. Many argue, with good reasoning, that Jesus was immensely compassionate toward people, particularly the poor and sickly. I wonder if this compassion extended to animals as well. It may be fair to assume, but it’s difficult to prove with textual evidence.

We see a few instances of it.

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.

—Luke 12:6 (NRSVUE)

He said to them, “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out?

—Matthew 12:11 (NRSVUE)

And then of course there is the famous scene where Jesus enters the temple and overturns the tables of those selling doves. In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes a whip of cord and drives out the sheep and the cattle too.

But were these actions at the temple motivated by compassion for animals? I don’t think the text really suggests so. Instead, Jesus seems to be critical of the temple as a marketplace, of commerce displacing prayer and worship.

There is also a moment in the Gospels where one could argue Jesus shows a lack of compassion for animals. The demons that possess the man of Gerasene ask Jesus to drive them into a nearby herd of swine, and he does so. This causes the pigs to throw themselves off a cliff.

When Jesus refers to dogs in the New Testament, he means people, used figuratively. Similar to lost sheep. I think there is only one instance in the New Testament where actual dogs are mentioned.

a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.

—Luke 16:20-21 (NRSVUE)

But the fact that dogs were used as an ethnic slur toward Gentiles is perhaps telling of the Jewish view of them in the first century. Throughout biblical literature, dogs are portrayed as pests and scavengers, with scenes of them eating dead bodies. Sometimes they’re portrayed as dangerous. They’re never portrayed as companions. Herders of this time and place were likely using sheepdogs, though it’s difficult to say how these animals would have been seen and treated. What I’m getting at is that the historical Jesus probably wasn’t a dog lover.

I admit this disappoints me, as I would prefer a Jesus who loved dogs like I do. I used to live in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta with the Yup’ik people. Unfortunately, dogs are often treated horribly there. I could give you a whole list of horror stories, but I don’t want to upset you. It still haunts me to this day. I made an effort to save abandoned or mistreated dogs while I was there, shipping out around twenty-five dogs to Anchorage for adoption and adopting four of my own. Barbara, Charlotte, Ruth, and Mary.

When I look at the evidence, I find it very unlikely that loving dogs the way I do was at all common among first-century Jews. However, that doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t have compassion for them. Did he have one as a pet? Probably not. Was he kind to them? He could have been.

Ultimately, I think it’s difficult to argue one way or the other about Jesus’ treatment of animals from the Gospels alone. This is why I was surprised to learn that some respected historians have presented the argument that Jesus was a vegetarian. James Tabor may be the most notable of supporters of this theory.

I’d seen the idea brought up a few years ago, but didn’t give it much attention. It sounded like another shoddy argument, the kind where a scholar builds a case that Jesus’ ethics are the same as his. That sort of thing is actually quite common. The theory received so little attention that I assumed it hardly deserved any.

But recently I looked into it more carefully. I’m not fully convinced, but the evidence is stronger than I had expected.

One strand of evidence is that James, Jesus’ brother, is recorded as having been a vegetarian. Eusebius quotes Hegesippus, who was writing somewhere around the mid to late second century. The quotation reads:

James, the Lord’s brother, succeeds to the government of the Church, in conjunction with the apostles. He has been universally called the Just, from the days of the Lord down to the present time. For many bore the name of James; but this one was holy from his mother’s womb. He drank no wine or other intoxicating liquor, nor did he eat flesh; no razor came upon his head; he did not anoint himself with oil, nor make use of the bath. He alone was permitted to enter the holy place: for he did not wear any woollen garment, but fine linen only.

—Ecclesiastical History 2:23

One might argue that if James was a vegetarian, there’s a decent chance Jesus was too. Keith Akers takes it a step further. He asks: why would Jesus’ family raise James as a vegetarian but not Jesus?

What I think is the strongest strand of evidence is the Ebionites, who are recorded as having been vegetarians. The Ebionites were a Jewish-Christian sect from the first few centuries after Jesus. They kept the Jewish law and saw Jesus as the messiah. We know they were vegetarian from Epiphanius, a fourth-century bishop who wrote against groups he considered heretical. He says it plainly. He also quotes their gospel, and the quotations give it away on their own. Where Mark and Matthew have John the Baptist eating locusts, the Ebionite gospel has him eating honey cakes instead. It’s a small change, but it looks deliberate. We also have fragments where Jesus does away with animal sacrifice himself. The text has him say:

I am come to do away with sacrifices, and if you cease not sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from you.

Some argue that the Ebionites’ understanding of Jesus was closer to the original than that of the tradition that became dominant. Proponents of this theory often argue that much of the New Testament is a Hellenized version of Jesus’ life and message. They believe Jewish-Christian sects, like the Ebionites, better preserved what Jesus actually taught.

This is not quite a fringe position. The argument is that the Christianity enshrined in the New Testament represents a significant departure from what Jesus actually taught and practiced. Paul’s tradition won. James’ tradition lost. What got written down, canonized, and declared scripture was largely shaped by a gentile Christianity that had already moved away from the original movement. Mark declares all foods clean. Luke has the risen Jesus eating fish. If Akers and others are right, these aren’t straightforward records of what Jesus said and did. They’re theological arguments in narrative form, written by a tradition that had reasons to put distance between itself and the vegetarians of the Jerusalem church. That’s a bold claim. If vegetarianism was dropped from the record, it wasn’t a small revision. It would mean the New Testament, as we have it, gives us something quite different from the religion of Jesus.

Akers argues that we can also see anti-vegetarianism in Paul’s letters, and that this means vegetarianism was prominent enough among first-century Christians that Paul felt compelled to argue against it. The relevant texts are Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10. In Romans, Paul refers to those who eat only vegetables as weak in faith:

Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.

—Romans 14:2 (NRSVUE)

Taken together, these three strands build a case. James was vegetarian. The Ebionites were vegetarian. Paul argued against vegetarians. None of this proves Jesus was a vegetarian, but it makes the theory stronger than I initially thought.

Akers also returns to the temple clearing, and what he does with it is worth taking seriously. Earlier in this essay I argued that Jesus’ actions there were motivated by opposition to commerce in a sacred space. Akers sees it differently. The animals being sold were sacrificial animals. The buyers and sellers were the infrastructure of the animal sacrifice business. When Jesus drives them out, Akers reads this not as an objection to a marketplace, but as a direct attack on animal sacrifice itself. He points to Matthew 12, where Jesus quotes the prophets: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

Here’s what I keep thinking about. Say Tabor and Akers are right: the historical Jesus was a vegetarian. And say it was indeed recorded in all four Gospels. Can you imagine how different the world would be? We’d probably all be vegetarians. Maybe holy wars would have been fought to liberate animals from meat-eating nations.

I’m still not convinced. The evidence is circumstantial. The sources are late. The canonical Gospels tell a different story. Mark has Jesus declaring all foods clean. Luke has him eating fish after the resurrection. But what I can say is that I no longer find the argument shoddy. And for someone who has spent all his life caring about animals, I’ll admit there’s something in the possibility that I can’t quite shake. And I remain disappointed that the New Testament has so little to say about our relationship with animals. I’d love a scene where Jesus heals a hurt dog, or scratches a cat’s chin.

Sources:

Keith Akers’ blog post

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Updated Edition

Art: The Good Shepherd (Cubicle of the “Velatio” in the Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome)

About a year ago, Big Think published Kevin Dickinson’s article, “Why historians can only give Jesus a one-sentence biography.” I responded with a comment, completely disagreeing with the central claim of the article. About a month ago, they posted the article again, so this time I feel compelled to write a full response.

Here is the sentence Dickinson produces, claiming this is all that can be said confidently about the historical Jesus’ life:

Jesus was a 1st-century itinerant Jewish preacher who spoke Aramaic and was crucified by the Romans.

If Dickinson were presenting this as his own opinion—that he, personally, can’t confidently say more than a sentence about Jesus—I’d have no problem with it. But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying this is what the experts say. And that is simply not true.

Dickinson interviewed two scholars for his article and claims to have researched the subject extensively:

To determine who the historical Jesus was, I recently spoke with two scholars of 1st-century Christianity: Elaine Pagels, author and Princeton historian, and Joshua Schachterle, a researcher and writer in the field. I also read several books and articles and listened to online lectures.

Look, I don’t have a PhD. I’m a novelist and a poet—not a professional scholar. This has probably hurt Notes From Gehenna—people who come across my page might ask, Who’s this guy? But I have been absolutely obsessed with the historical Jesus for the past three years. I have read extensively on the subject, from a whole variety of scholars with differing views. I’m saying this to make clear that I’m not some random guy on the internet disagreeing with a major publication. I know with confidence that Big Think and Dickinson are wrong about this claim. It is not the majority view of historical Jesus scholars. And it is particularly concerning to me because Big Think’s Substack has over six-hundred thousand subscribers.

When the two scholars were cited as interviewees, I was immediately suspicious. And upon reading the article in full, I noticed that neither scholar is ever quoted saying anything that confirms the article’s thesis.

So I emailed them.

Pagels didn’t respond, but Schachterle did. In the email I told him my view: while there isn’t a ton we can say about the historical Jesus confidently, there is quite a bit more than Dickinson suggests.

Schachterle said, Hi Joseph. I agree with you.

Baptized by John

The most glaring omission, the one I’m astounded the author left out, is Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptizer. I’ve never read a scholar who claims this is ahistorical. Quite the opposite. Most scholars I’ve read are convinced this is something we can affirm with real confidence.

In his email response to me, Schachterle said:

nearly all reputable scholars believe in Jesus’ baptism by John (and even that Jesus’ was therefore probably a disciple of John before his own ministry)

The primary reason for this agreement (there are several) is that the baptism meets what scholars call the criterion of embarrassment. No first-century Christian would invent this. If Jesus was baptized by John, that could imply John was the superior prophet. It could also suggest that Jesus was sinful—the Gospels state plainly that John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. You don’t make up a detail you then have to explain away.

And the Gospel writers do try to explain it away. Matthew has John protest that he’s the one who should be baptized. Luke mentions the baptism almost in passing, after telling us John has been imprisoned. The Gospel of John doesn’t narrate the baptism at all. That trajectory of increasing discomfort is exactly what we’d expect if the event were historical—and exactly what we wouldn’t expect if it were invented.

From Nazareth, Had Family There, Was a Craftsman

While Jesus’ birthplace is contested, there is no disagreement among scholars that Jesus grew up in Nazareth. There’s no good reason to doubt it. Across the sources he is named Jesus of Nazareth. We even get a line in the Gospel of John implying that this, too, may have been a little embarrassing:

Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

—John 1:46 NRSVUE

Nazareth was a small, insignificant village. Nobody inventing a hometown for the messiah picks Nazareth.

Furthermore, it is widely agreed that Jesus had family in Nazareth: a father named Joseph, a mother named Mary, brothers (one named James), and sisters. Now, this is a little more complicated. In historical Jesus studies we often separate participants into two categories: critical scholars and Christian apologists. Catholic apologists argue that Jesus didn’t have brothers and sisters—that the people listed in the Gospels, including James, were his cousins. But this is a product of confirmation bias. Catholic doctrine holds that Mary was a perpetual virgin, so Jesus couldn’t have had biological siblings. Critical scholars are in wide agreement that Jesus did have biological brothers and sisters, and that one of them, James, became a prominent leader of the church after Jesus’ death.

Most people know Jesus as a carpenter. The original Greek is broader than that—tektōn. It’s better translated as craftsman. And like the other details we’ve discussed, there is no good reason to invent it. The author of Matthew, seemingly, is embarrassed by it. Where Mark writes, Is not this the carpenter…? (Mark 6:3 NRSVUE), Matthew revises: Is not this the carpenter’s son? (Matthew 13:55 NRSVUE).

Had Followers

No reputable scholar argues that the historical Jesus didn’t have followers. They are recorded across the sources, and it’s difficult to imagine how Christianity could have come to be if he didn’t.

More specifically, there is wide agreement that Jesus had an inner circle of twelve men—the Twelve Apostles, or simply the Twelve. The number almost certainly represents the twelve tribes of Israel, a symbolic claim about the restoration of God’s people. There is also wide agreement that Jesus sent these apostles out on their own to preach and heal in his name.

Although the Gospels disagree slightly on the names, we can be confident that Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Judas were among the group. Jesus also had followers outside the Twelve, the most famous and best attested being Mary Magdalene.

Was a Healer and an Exorcist

Dickinson says Jesus was an itinerant Jewish preacher. True—but it leaves out his other two occupations. He healed and he expelled demons. This isn’t just attested across the sources; it’s attested many times throughout the sources. It has both multiple attestation and recurrent attestation.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated. Atheist and agnostic scholars do not believe the historical Jesus was literally making the crippled walk with a command, or raising people from the dead. They don’t believe in demons. But they do believe that Jesus was, in some way, healing people—that he was seen as a healer, by his followers and likely by himself. The same goes for the exorcisms. So while the nature and outcomes of these practices are contested, the claim that he was performing them is not.

Preached About the Kingdom of God

Different scholars have different interpretations of what exactly Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. They disagree on what the kingdom was in his eyes. They disagree on how the phrase should even be translated. But they do not disagree that Jesus preached it. The Kingdom of God shows up in Mark, in Q, in the material unique to Matthew and to Luke—it sits at the center of the parables, the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes. Whatever else Jesus was doing, he was announcing the kingdom.

The majority view, going back to Albert Schweitzer more than a century ago, is that Jesus meant it apocalyptically: God was about to intervene in history, overturn the present order, and establish his reign on earth—a future heaven-on-earth scenario, and an imminent one. Scholars like E.P. Sanders, Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, and Paula Fredriksen all read Jesus this way, as an apocalyptic prophet. A minority—perhaps most famously John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg—have argued the kingdom was something present and subversive, a way of living under God’s rule here and now, more metaphor than countdown.

The debate is real. But notice what the debate is about: the meaning of Jesus’ central message. Not whether he had one.

Caused a Disturbance in the Temple

In the last week of his life, Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem and caused a scene—overturning the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. Christians know this as the cleansing of the Temple. Historians tend to call it something more neutral, like the Temple incident or the Temple demonstration, but they overwhelmingly agree that something happened there.

The incident is attested in all four Gospels—the Synoptics place it during Jesus’ final week, while John moves it to the beginning of his ministry. And it carries enormous explanatory power. Of all the things we know about Jesus, the thing we know most securely is that the Romans crucified him, and crucifixion was a punishment Rome reserved for threats to public order. A public disturbance in the Temple courts, during Passover, when Jerusalem was swollen with pilgrims and the authorities were on edge—that explains the cross. A man who only told parables in Galilee does not get crucified. A man who causes a scene in the Temple at Passover does.

This is why E.P. Sanders made the incident the foundation of his entire reconstruction. For Sanders, the demonstration wasn’t a protest against corruption so much as a prophetic act—a symbolic enactment of the Temple’s coming destruction, tied to Jesus’ apocalyptic expectation that God was about to act. Other scholars read it differently. But as with the Kingdom of God, the disagreement is about meaning, not occurrence.

More Than One Sentence

So here is the biography Dickinson could have written, using nothing but claims the broad majority of critical scholars accept:

Jesus was a first-century Jewish preacher who spoke Aramaic. He grew up in Nazareth, in Galilee, with his parents, Joseph and Mary, and his brothers and sisters, and he worked as a craftsman. He was baptized by John the Baptizer, and may have begun as John’s disciple. He then began his own itinerant ministry, preaching the coming Kingdom of God, healing the sick, and casting out demons. He gathered followers—among them an inner circle of twelve, whom he sent out to preach and heal in his name, and women like Mary Magdalene. Around the year 30, he went to Jerusalem for Passover, where he caused a disturbance in the Temple. Shortly after, he was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate. After his death, his followers came to believe he had risen, and his brother James became a leader of the movement that grew in his name.

That’s not a sentence. It’s a paragraph—and a conservative one.

I understand the impulse behind Dickinson’s article. The historical Jesus is genuinely hard to recover, the sources are genuinely difficult, and a one-sentence biography makes for a striking headline. But humility about the evidence is not the same as agnosticism about everything, and the actual consensus of the field is not nearly so thin.

Sources

• This essay draws on three years of reading in historical Jesus scholarship — principally the works of Dale Allison, E.P. Sanders, Helen Bond, Bart Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan.

• Art: Jesus välsignar barnen by Julius Kronberg (1903)

The historical Mary Magdalene is of particular interest to me. Such a central figure to the Christian tradition, and while we know more about her than we do many of the Twelve Apostles, what we know is still rather limited. One of the few details within the New Testament that we get about her life comes from Luke 8.

Soon afterward [Jesus] went on through one town and village after another, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out

—Luke 8:1-2 NRSVUE

I suppose it’s possible that Luke invented this detail about Mary, but it has always struck me as so specific that I believe it to be historical.

I’m less interested in trying to prove that it’s true, and more interested in the question of, if we assume it to be true, what does that mean exactly? In first-century Galilee, if someone was possessed by seven demons, what did that mean? What did that look like? Was Mary’s state of mind similar to the demoniac of Gerasene?

They came to the other side of the sea, to the region of the Gerasenes. And when [Jesus] had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain, for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces, and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.

—Mark 5:1-5 NRSVUE

Maybe Mary was like this demoniac before Jesus cured her. Or perhaps it was something entirely different.

Today we often use demons metaphorically. Mental illnesses are demons. Anxiety, depression, PTSD, addiction, schizophrenia. I have OCD, and a form of it sometimes called Pure-O OCD. I don’t care for the term and neither do most professional psychologists because it implies that you only get obsessions—no compulsions. But I do get compulsions, they’re just mental. Rumination is a compulsion. Anyway, I wonder if part of my interest in Mary stems from this—that perhaps she, like me, was mentally unwell. And then, perhaps, like her, I can be cured.

There’s nothing in the New Testament that describes how Mary’s possession manifested, so that leaves it open to speculation. Maybe she had an anxiety disorder. Maybe she was depressed. Instead of the modern explanations for these states of mind, it’s plausible that Mary was identified as being possessed. Why seven, I don’t know. My wife suggested that they might represent the seven deadly sins. Could be.

Now Jesus allegedly cast these demons out of her. He cured her. I have long wondered what this looked like exactly. The process is not recorded in the New Testament. Did he place his hands on her head, say a prayer, and then the demons were cast out? This would match the other exorcisms that are recorded in the New Testament. I return to the demoniac of Gerasene.

When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him, and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the region. Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding, and the unclean spirits begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine, and the herd, numbering about two thousand, stampeded down the steep bank into the sea and were drowned in the sea.

—Mark 5:7-13 NRSVUE

And then there’s another exorcism earlier in Mark.

Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.

—Mark 1:23-26 NRSVUE

Jesus doesn’t cast out demons the way a psychologist would coach you through an anxiety disorder. He does so immediately, miraculously. Those who trust the Gospel accounts more strictly than I do would likely say that demon possession and mental disorders are two very different things—both real, but different. I wonder if they would agree with me though that in first-century Galilee, demonic possession may have been used as an explanation for mental disorders.

Again, I can only speculate about what exactly was wrong with Mary. I can only speculate about her symptoms. I believe it’s possible that Mary’s demons were indeed mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression, or OCD. And if she felt that Jesus cured her of these ailments, I speculate that it was more complex than a simple demand. I wonder if Jesus was essentially an ancient Galilean equivalent to a modern-day therapist. I think the evidence is strong that Mary and Jesus were close. Not necessarily lovers in the way they are often thought to be, but close. They traveled on the road together. This would create long periods of time together, and I wonder if during this time, Jesus guided Mary through thought techniques that helped her combat her demons.

A lot of modern people claim that Jesus cured them of their mental illnesses. I’ve read these testimonies on the internet many times. People who have claimed that they tried therapy and medication with no success. It was only until they began speaking to Jesus, worshipping him, that they found relief.

The theological Jesus who exists today hasn’t been able to cure me of my OCD, but I wonder if the historical Jesus would have been able to help me. Would I, like Mary and many others, be cured? Maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the more honest one is whether I would have let him.

Art: “The Resurrection, Jesus makes himself known to Mary Magdalene” by Paul Steffensen (1913)

Often when I pray, it feels like no one is listening. That I am just a young man, walking through the woods, 12 gauge yoked across his shoulders, talking to himself. If God responds he must do it through the wind, the harmonized hum of many different insects, birdsong, creek water. But there are days that I am not convinced of this. God is silent. God is not real.

These past few days in particular have held this sense of abandonment from the Father stronger than most. At church last Sunday, while everyone else recited the creeds, I stood there quiet, staring at the floor. Not out of spite, but out of hopelessness.

I resonate with what the kid from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian says about his relationship with God. That is, I don’t believe he much had me in mind.

But it is not just myself and the kid who have felt this way—there’s also Jesus.

In our oldest Gospel, Mark, Jesus’ last moments are recorded as such:

At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”'

—Mark 15:34 NRSVUE

Matthew and Luke used Mark as a direct source to write their own Gospels. While John may not have had Mark in front of him, he seems to be somewhat familiar with the Markan story. Matthew keeps this final quote by Jesus in his Gospel, but Luke and John change it.

It’s difficult to say which author got it right, or if any of them got it right. There are a few things to consider. Mark 15:34 is one of the few instances where Mark provides us with Aramaic—Jesus’ language. Does that make it more likely to be historical? Difficult to say.

A better argument for the authenticity of this quote, I think, would be to invoke the criterion of embarrassment. A first-century Christian writing the passion narrative would not likely invent a moment where Jesus — the son of God, the one closest to the Father — cries out in despair and feels abandoned. The hero of the story should go to the cross with certainty, not doubt. That this moment made it into the Gospel anyway is, by that logic, a point in its favor. I don’t quite agree with this line of thinking, but it’s an argument.

I actually speculate that none of Jesus’ followers were present to hear his final words. I think the men had fled and the women watched from a distance. It’s likely that they feared for their own lives after Jesus’ arrest, so Golgotha would have been a risky place to stand around.

Now, something else that’s important. This quote appears in the Old Testament.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night but find no rest.

—Psalm 22:1-2 NRSVUE

So perhaps this is where Mark got it from, as opposed to tradition passed down by eye-witnesses. Although it’s possible that Jesus said this with it also being in the Old Testament. There’s no real reason they have to be mutually exclusive.

Regardless of what really happened, the Jesus of Mark and Matthew felt abandoned by God.

And so I don't feel so alone in that. If it happened to him, the one who, depending on your theology, was either God's son or God himself walking around in skin, then maybe the feeling is not a sign of weak faith or a broken mind. Maybe it is just what happens sometimes. You are on the cross and the sky is empty and the silence is total, and there is nothing to do but say it out loud.

I am not on a cross. My suffering does not compare. But the emotional logic is the same: you believed in something, you gave yourself to it, and now it has gone quiet on you. That particular ache does not seem to require crucifixion to be real.

The difference, I suppose, is that Jesus got an answer eventually. Or so the story goes. I am still waiting on mine.

Art: Christ on the Cross by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon

Ten days ago something bad happened to me. The details don’t matter, but it led to a state of despair and reflection. And as has always been true of me in such moments, I turn toward the wilderness. After graduate school I moved to rural Alaska and lived with the Yupik people so I could escape academia and become closer to the wild. Such a behavior actually appears to be rather Christ-like. Observe:

But now more than ever the word about Jesus spread abroad; many crowds were gathering to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. Meanwhile, he would slip away to deserted places and pray.

—Luke 15-16 NRSVUE

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.

—Mark 1:35 NRSVUE

Now when Jesus heard (of John the Baptizer’s death), he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.

—Matthew 14:13 NRSVUE

If you go deep enough into the wilderness, there is no one there to be ashamed of you. It is not just the silence that provides consolation, but the erasure. You are not a man with a history there. You are just another animal moving through. I wonder if the historical Jesus felt similarly.

But while you may have escaped the world of man, you have not escaped the world of spirits. You have not escaped God. And perhaps, you have not even escaped Satan. Mark tells us that after Jesus’ baptism he was taken into the wilderness by the Spirit, and Satan was there, waiting.

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.

—Mark 1:12-13 NRSVUE

Matthew and Luke expand the scene. Satan comes to Jesus three times. He offers food, power, and the proof of God's protection. Jesus refuses each one.

I’ve always suspected that this scene comes from the historical Jesus himself, and was passed down by his disciples until it reached the author of Mark. It is possible that Mark invented it, and I don’t know how I might prove otherwise—but there is something about it that I can’t quite identify that doesn’t feel like literary invention, but tradition passed down.

The historical Jesus must have spent a considerable amount of time in the wilderness. As far as I know, all historians are in agreement that Jesus was a preacher who traveled from town to town throughout rural Galilee.

And travel between those villages was not quick or comfortable. The roads were dirt tracks through open country, and a man on foot covered perhaps twenty miles on a good day. Jesus and his companions would have spent hours alone between towns, surrounded by nothing. And then we have multiple accounts from the Gospels of Jesus withdrawing alone to the wilderness. I suspect this tendency of his is historical.

Two days ago there were tornadoes here in Mississippi. When the rain finally cleared I took my four Alaskan dogs to De Soto National Forest. Someone dumped a bunch of roosters on the trail and after Charlotte chased one I fed them oatmeal.

I walked with a staff, as I suspect Jesus did.

I reflected on my mistakes. Tried to make sense of them. If there is a Satan, he was there, and he encouraged me to relapse. If there is a God, he was there, and he did not turn away, though I have given him every reason to.

Old rain dripped from the leaves. The skull of a deer lay there with ferns growing through the eye sockets. There are answers in the wilderness. Find them.

Art: Christ in the Desert by Ivan Kramskoi (1872)

Mississippi. 2026. A flier taped to a stop sign outside a Walmart reads: JESUS IS COMING. REPENT.

I’ve known the phrase “the second coming” all my life. I only learned what it meant a few years ago.

I grew up in and out of the Catholic church. Thirty years, hundreds of homilies. I cannot recall a single priest mentioning the second coming—not once. And yet when I finally started actually reading about Christianity, I discovered that most denominations believe the second coming is real and forthcoming. Many believe it’s any day now. That Jesus will literally descend from heaven. That the dead will be raised. That the living and the dead will be judged, and the righteous will inherit a transformed earth and live there in bliss, forever. The Catholic Catechism affirms all of this. Nobody told me. Or if they did I wasn’t paying attention.

Now that I am paying attention, I still almost never hear it brought up in Catholic contexts. I only notice traces of it in the music, in the creeds.

And we proclaim your death O Lord, until you come again.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

But what did the ancients believe? Was Mary Magdalene waiting for Jesus’ second coming?

I’m a supporter of the apocalyptic prophet model of the historical Jesus. That means I think Jesus was saying that an apocalyptic event was soon to come—he believed this and he was preaching it. Part of why this makes so much sense is the continuum it forms. The story starts with John the Baptist—who was apocalyptic. Then we have Jesus. Then we have Paul—who was apocalyptic. Then we have modern-day Christianity—which is still apocalyptic. If Jesus was an apocalypticist himself, it would fit perfectly on the timeline. It would be odd if he wasn’t. And I think the Gospel tradition, especially the oldest one (Mark), presents him apocalyptically as well.

Now I’ve been vague on purpose. I feel confident about what I just said—it’s the details that get trickier. What was he saying specifically about the end? Was he saying that he would die, return, ascend to heaven, then return again?

You’d think, as this seems like standard Christianity, but it’s actually not that clear. Not once in the Gospels does Jesus say he will return a second time. Instead, he says he will rise again on the third day (so that is, the first coming), and that one day the Son of Man will come from the clouds to judge the living and the dead. That is generally taken to be describing the second coming—but Jesus never says so.

The point is the belief in the second coming might not have come from Jesus. He may not have even predicted his own resurrection. I believe more confidently that he was describing a general resurrection at the near day of judgement—how exactly he was involved in that is less clear to me. For example, did he see himself as the son of the man? Or did Christians after his death come to understand him that way? I don’t know.

What is clear to me is this—Christianity formed because some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had resurrected from the dead. I feel confident that this was not one event, but multiple separate ones. So there were actually many first comings, in that sense. At what point they concluded that the first coming was over, and now they were awaiting the second, is less clear. Paul, our oldest source, seems to clearly be waiting for the Day of the Lord. But he never says the first appearances are over. Then we have John of Patmos later on claiming that Jesus appeared to him—that is, the Book of Revelation.

What I think is likely is that ancient Christians didn’t see it as a linear first event, second event. There were the resurrection appearances, and then there was the end of the world. That end-of-the-world event later became known as the second coming. And that phrase might be as early as the Letter to the Hebrews, where it says,

so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

—Hebrews 9:28 NRSVUE

Now here’s something I hinted at that I’d like to expand on. A deeply interesting exploration of the historical Jesus lies in the question of what actually came from him, as opposed to what came from his followers reinterpretation of him. What I mean is, it’s possible that Jesus never said anything about him resurrecting first. He may have died, then Peter had a vision of him, and Peter concluded he resurrected. It’s also possible he did say he would resurrect first, after three days of being dead, which then led to Peter’s vision of him. It could have been more ambiguous than that. Perhaps Jesus’ followers never fully understood him while he was alive.

Here’s a scenario I’m not certain of but I find rather likely. Jesus was preaching of a coming apocalyptic event where the Son of Man would descend from heaven, raise the dead, judge the living and the dead, then establish the kingdom of Heaven on earth. Then he was unexpectantly crucified. Three days later Peter had a vision where Jesus appeared to him. Peter interpreted this to be Jesus’ resurrection. Resurrection appearances began to spread rapidly among his followers. They reinterpreted his message and now understood that he was the Son of Man and the day of judgement that he preached of was still coming—thereby forming the belief in his “Second Coming.”

It’s actually a heartening story. No matter what you believe, in some way, the followers of Jesus were reunited with him, and they firmly believed it would happen again. I think this would only come about if they truly loved him.

Art: Resurrection of Christ by Ferdinand Fellner

Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen.

—Luke 24:5-6

Everything depends on the resurrection. It is both Christianity’s point of origin and its most essential claim. Without it, Christianity would never have formed. A small, frightened group of people in first-century Palestine became convinced of something almost impossible to believe—and from that conviction came Christianity.

Reconstructing the resurrection as a historian is a difficult task, largely because the various accounts do not always agree on the details. The best place to begin is with Paul, since his letters are the oldest texts in the New Testament. For Paul, the resurrection is the foundation upon which everything else rests. He states plainly that without it, faith collapses entirely: If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins (1 Corinthians 15:17 NRSVUE). The resurrection is also, for Paul, God’s public declaration of who Jesus actually is. As he writes, Jesus was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4 NRSVUE).

Most scholars date Paul’s letters to the 50s AD, placing them a few decades earlier than the Gospels. Unlike the Gospel writers, Paul had personal contact with some of the original disciples. In Galatians 1:18, he mentions traveling to Jerusalem specifically to meet Peter, staying with him for fifteen days, and also meeting James, the brother of Jesus. When Paul speaks about the resurrection, he is reporting what he received from people who were there.

It is worth noting that Paul makes no mention of Jesus’ miracles—the water turned to wine, the walking on water, the healings. But he mentions the resurrection—a lot. He treats it as the living center of everything he preaches. His most significant statement on the subject comes in 1 Corinthians 15, where he lists the appearances of the risen Jesus: to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred people at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself. He even notes that most of the five hundred are still alive—almost as an invitation for his readers to go and verify the claim.

Yet for all Paul’s insistence on the resurrection, he never offers a narrative account of what actually happened that first Easter morning. That is where the Gospels come in.

Our oldest Gospel is Mark. If you open your Bible to Mark’s final chapter, you will notice it has two endings—a shorter one and a longer one. Neither is original; both were added later. The actual ending of Mark, stripped of those additions, reads as follows:

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. — Mark 16:5–8 NRSVUE

Whether this was Mark’s intended ending, or whether the Gospel was left unfinished, or whether the original conclusion was lost, remains a matter of scholarly debate. If this is the intended ending, it is striking that Mark chose to close without any account of Jesus actually appearing to the disciples. We are told he was raised, but we never see him. The mystery of that ending is something I have spent considerable time with, and I have not yet arrived at a confident position.

The first full narrative of the resurrection comes from Matthew then. It is, somewhat surprisingly, rather brief. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb, where an angel informs them that Jesus has been raised and instructs them to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. As they are leaving, Jesus suddenly appears and greets them. The women take hold of his feet and worship him. Jesus then echoes the angel’s message—he will meet the disciples in Galilee. Here we see the beginning of a recurring motif: the risen Jesus appearing out of thin air, without warning.

The narrative then moves to Galilee:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” — Matthew 28:16–20

Many readers are surprised to discover how brief Matthew’s resurrection account is, and how narratively sparse Mark’s is. Luke and John provide the longer, more detailed accounts that most people are familiar with.

One small detail in the passage above deserves attention: but they doubted. I suspect this detail, and the doubt narratives we encounter elsewhere, trace back to something historical. Not every follower of Jesus may have come to believe in the resurrection. It is even possible that not all of the original Twelve were fully convinced—which might help explain why so many of them are absent from the tradition beyond a bare mention of their names. If every disciple had wholeheartedly embraced the resurrection, it seems unlikely that these doubt traditions would have formed at all.

One more thing worth noting in Matthew’s account: here we encounter the first significant discrepancy. Paul indicates that Peter was the first to whom Jesus appeared. In Matthew, it is the two Marys. Paul is reciting a creed, which means it predates him and likely goes back to the very earliest community. And yet Matthew tells a different story.

Next comes Luke, whose resurrection account is longer and more detailed than either Mark’s or Matthew’s. This pattern of increasing detail as we move through the Gospel tradition may itself be evidence of how tradition develops over time. The further we go along the textual timeline, the richer and more elaborate the story becomes.

As in the other Gospels, it is Mary Magdalene and a group of women who go to the tomb first, where they are met by angels—two, in Luke’s account. They report what they have seen to the apostles, who do not believe them.

Jesus then makes his first appearance to an otherwise obscure disciple named Cleopas and an unnamed companion. The two do not recognize him at first. They walk with him and talk with him, but only identify him when they share a meal—and at that moment, he vanishes. The ghostly quality of these appearances is worth noting.

What follows is slightly puzzling. When Cleopas and his companion return to Jerusalem to share the news, they find the other disciples already saying that Jesus has appeared to Simon Peter. So perhaps Peter did see him first, even in Luke. The text makes it impossible to say with certainty.

Shortly after, Jesus appears among the gathered disciples. He seems to materialize out of nowhere, and his opening words are Peace be with you. The disciples are startled—Luke tells us they thought they were seeing a ghost (24:37). Again, the ghostlike quality surfaces.

Jesus then addresses them directly:

“Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering, and he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. — Luke 24:38–43 NRSVUE

What is significant here is that Jesus is actively working to prove he is not a ghost. This, I think, tells us something important about Luke’s theology—and perhaps about early Christian belief in general. Jesus entered an exalted state, yes, but his body got up. The resurrection is bodily, not merely spiritual. The author wants to be clear that this is different from a ghost, which is disembodied.

It is also worth noting that in Luke the disciples are gathered in Jerusalem, whereas in Mark and Matthew they had fled to Galilee, where Jesus was supposed to meet them.

John gives us the longest and theologically richest resurrection account of the four. It begins, like the others, with Mary Magdalene going to the tomb—but in John, she goes alone. She finds the stone rolled away and runs to tell Peter and the Beloved Disciple. The two race to the tomb, and we are told, with oddly specific detail, that the Beloved Disciple outran Peter. They find the burial cloths lying there, the head cloth folded separately—and then, strangely, they simply go home.

Mary stays behind, weeping. She looks into the tomb and sees two angels, then turns to find a man she takes to be the gardener. He asks why she is crying. She asks whether he has taken the body away. Then he speaks her name, and she recognizes him—it is Jesus. It is one of the most quietly intimate moments in the entire New Testament. It also creates yet another discrepancy: in John’s account, Mary is unambiguously the first to see the risen Jesus.

That evening, Jesus appears to the gathered disciples behind locked doors. As in Luke, he arrives without warning, and as in Luke, his first words are Peace be with you. But then he does something Luke does not include—he breathes on them and says, Receive the Holy Spirit. In Luke, the Spirit does not come until Pentecost, weeks later.

Then comes the famous story of Doubting Thomas—whom I have, more than once, been compared to. Thomas is not present for this appearance, and when told about it, he refuses to believe without physical proof. Eight days later, Jesus appears again and invites Thomas to touch the wounds himself. Thomas responds with what is arguably the highest Christological statement in all four Gospels: My Lord and my God. The consistency of doubt across all the Gospel accounts feels significant to me. These traditions seem to reflect something real—not everyone was immediately, or easily, convinced.

Chapter 21 of John reads like an appendix, and to my understanding a number of scholars believe it was added by a later hand. Some of the disciples have returned to Galilee and gone back to fishing. A figure on the shore tells them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat. They do, and the net fills at once. The Beloved Disciple recognizes Jesus first. Peter jumps into the water and swims to shore, where Jesus has already built a charcoal fire and is cooking fish. He feeds them breakfast.

What follows is quietly remarkable. Jesus asks Peter three times (mirroring Peter’s three denials) Do you love me? Each time Peter answers, Jesus gives him a charge. After all the cosmic drama of the resurrection, John ends not with a Great Commission or a formal ascension, but with breakfast on a beach and a private conversation between two people. Like Mark’s ending, it leaves you sitting with something you cannot quite resolve.

Now that we have worked through Paul’s letters and all four Gospels, the question becomes: can we separate what is historical from what is literary invention? I am firmly convinced that not all of these accounts can be completely accurate as they do not all add up. But I am equally convinced that they cannot all be completely wrong. Presenting an evidence-based argument for what actually occurred that first Easter is difficult precisely because the accounts diverge. And yet I think those very divergences tell us something important. The authors of the Gospels were all certain this event had occurred, but they disagreed on the details. That suggests they were not simply copy and pasting from one another—they had access to their own versions of the story.

Mary Magdalene is a useful test case. All four Gospels place her at the tomb, but the details surrounding her visit differ from account to account. To me, this is strong evidence that she was genuinely present in Jerusalem on the third day and that, in some meaningful sense, she went looking for Jesus’ body and found it gone. Is the historical truth precisely what the Gospels describe? Probably not. But I think the basic shape of the event is real.

This is also relevant to the question of the tomb itself. Scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman are skeptical that Jesus was placed in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. They argue his body was either left on the cross or buried quickly in a common grave. If they are right, then most of what has been analyzed in this essay is literary invention.

I have considerable respect for both Crossan and Ehrman, but I find myself less persuaded by their position than they are. Part of my reasoning comes back to Mary Magdalene, along with the other women. The specific detail of named women going to search for the body strikes me as an odd thing to simply invent. The fact that different Gospel authors present these details differently (rather than copying them wholesale from the Gospel before them) suggests to me that this story was circulating independently in early Christian communities and reached each author through its own channel. I cannot prove this definitively. But it gives me a strong working hunch that the tomb tradition is historical.

What else can we say with reasonable confidence? Not much about the fine details—the accounts diverge too sharply for that. But I do feel fairly confident that Mary Magdalene, along with the other women, stayed in Jerusalem and went looking for Jesus’ body. I also feel confident that on the third day following the crucifixion, Jesus’ followers began claiming he had risen from the dead.

Who first proclaimed it is harder to say. Paul’s creed points to Peter. John’s narrative points to Mary. It is possible that both are partially right: that Peter and Mary independently arrived at the same extraordinary conclusion, each through their own experience, and that this convergence was itself part of what ignited the movement. These are mysteries I do not expect to resolve. The honest position, I think, is to hold them as mysteries and resist the temptation to frame the evidence into a tidier story than it actually tells.

What I find myself returning to, again and again, is not the historical puzzle itself but something harder to articulate. A small group of people, frightened, grieving, on the losing side of history, became convinced of something almost no one around them would have believed. And from that conviction, improbably, stubbornly, across centuries and continents, grew something that would reshape the world. Whatever actually happened in Jerusalem that spring, its consequences are almost impossible to overstate. The resurrection claim is, by any measure, one of the most consequential ideas in human history because hundreds of millions of people believe it, and because the world they built around that belief is the world we still largely inhabit.

I find that mystifying. A small sect, an executed leader, a handful of frightened witnesses, and from that, everything. I cannot stop being astonished by it.

- Art by Jean-François Millet - La Résurrection (ca 1863)

- This essay is informed by the books of scholars such as Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Helen Bond, and others.

They must have been devastated. Nothing had prepared them for this. Grief and guilt. I’d bet they didn’t eat or sleep. Some of them remained and witnessed it, perhaps mostly the women, but at some point they must have come together—maybe all together on what is now Holy Saturday.

We have a tendency to jump from the crucifixion to the resurrection—we forget that Holy Saturday was a full day. I suspect one of the longest days of their lives. It’s important to note that although Jesus makes it obvious in the Gospel accounts that he will resurrect on the third day, I think historically, his disciples had no idea that was going to happen. So imagine how hopeless they must have felt on this day.

We have good reason to believe that they truly left their lives behind to follow him. Three years traveling town to town, village to village. They probably got lost together. Maybe they were shipwrecked. They ate together. They laughed together. They watched this man heal and draw crowds. Imagine how close Jesus and his disciples must have been. They believed in him.

And now he was dead, by such a torturous means.

Their mission was ruined. This was not how it was supposed to happen. Maybe they felt abandoned by God, the way Jesus did on the cross in Mark and Matthew. And they spent this day, this long day, sitting in the grayness of it. We have the foreknowledge of the resurrection, but they didn’t.

I don’t know what you should reflect on during Holy Saturday, but I can tell you what I reflect on—the times in my life when I’ve felt similarly. Any memory of despair or abandonment. It helps me imagine how the disciples must have felt. I don’t think it’s entirely unhealthy to reflect on memories like these, as long as they don’t stick around.

And most of these memories of devastation and abandonment turned out okay, in very unexpected ways, like Easter.

Art by Karl Wiener. “Erinnerung an…” (1940)

I have recently encountered an idea known as Process Theology. It was first introduced to me by the Substack writer Loup Des Abeilles. Although I am still in the early stages of reading the literature and working to understand its claims, I find the theory compelling enough to reflect on now. What follows, then, should be read as provisional, not a settled position.

Process Theology comes from Process Philosophy. At its core, Process Philosophy, most notably developed by Alfred North Whitehead, challenges the assumption that reality is made up of stable, unchanging substances. We tend to assume the universe at its smallest level is composed of “things.” Instead, it proposes that reality is fundamentally composed of “events”—dynamic moments of becoming that are always in relation to one another. In this view, change is not something that happens to things; it is what things are. Once that shift in metaphysics is made, its implications for theology begin to open up.

This is a difficult idea to grasp. It suggests that the most fundamental “stuff” of the universe is not stuff at all, but events. Most theories of the fundamental “stuff” of the universe are hard to conceptualize, though. Whatever the true explanation of reality is, I am convinced it will be foreign to ordinary human experience.

Whitehead argues that an ordering principle is necessary. Without it, there would be no way for pure possibility to take on the patterned, intelligible form we actually experience. He calls this principle God. God provides both the realm of possibilities and a persuasive pull toward order and value, making coherent experience possible at all.

This leads to a different understanding of God than the traditional Christian view. In Process Theology, God has two natures. The first is God’s primordial nature—eternal and unchanging, containing all possibilities, the ground from which the lure toward truth and goodness originates. The second is God’s consequent nature—temporal and responsive, genuinely affected by everything that happens in the world. In this sense, God changes. God feels what creatures feel, suffers what they suffer, and is enriched by their experience.

Everything exists within God. Not in the sense that God and the world are identical, but that the world unfolds within God while God remains more than the world. Theologians call this panentheism. God is not an all-controlling being who intervenes at will. Rather, God persuades rather than coerces, drawing reality toward greater order and value.

I find this compelling.

These last few days have been the closest I’ve felt to God in a long time. What’s comforting is that, if Process Theology is right, I have been close to God my whole life. I just didn’t know it.

If God is the lure that guides us toward truth and righteousness, then I feel that I am being guided toward Christianity. That is not to say Christianity is universally “true,” but that it may be true for me. I have often described my interest in the historical Jesus as something like a revelation. It seemed to come from outside of me. Before, that just felt like pretty words. Now it feels like a possibility.

But there is tension. This blog is called Notes From Gehenna after all.

I do not yet see how to reconcile Process Theology with Christianity. They appear to present different conceptions of God. I have spent years studying the historical Jesus, and I have not forgotten those conclusions. The God of Process Theology is dynamic, relational, and present within the world. The God associated with Jesus, at least in many readings, is more often portrayed as transcendent, almighty, and distinct from creation.

I also do not see how Process Theology accounts for miracles in the traditional sense. I still doubt them. And I do not think Jesus understood himself to be God. In that sense, Process Theology may actually align better with my historical conclusions than traditional doctrine does.

Some process theologians, most notably John Cobb, have tried to bridge this gap, arguing that Christianity and Process Theology can be brought into harmony. They see in Jesus’ radical love a reflection of a process understanding of God, even if the underlying cosmology differs. I find this interesting. I will continue to research.

God be with you. As of now, he is with me.

Art: “God’s House Tower, Southampton” by Henry Pether

I don’t think they did. I don’t because without God’s intervention that’s seemingly impossible—and I don’t believe in a God who intervenes in the world in that way. Many would say I cannot be a Christian if I deny the supernatural elements of the Bible. If that’s the case, I can live with that. I don’t need to be a Christian. But it raises a question: who actually has the authority to decide who is and isn’t a Christian? My instinct is to say nobody except Jesus—and he’s dead. We have writings that claim to quote him, but it’s difficult to assess how historically accurate those are. And even within those writings, Jesus never explicitly lays out criteria for what counts as “Christian.”

I’m also a supporter of the old claim: Christianity is not Jesus’ religion; it is the religion about Jesus. I don’t think the historical Jesus intended to be crucified. I think he likely knew it was a possibility, but I don’t think he walked into it the way the Gospels portray. And I don’t think he had any plan for people to proclaim and worship his resurrection. In that sense, Jesus didn’t create Christianity—his followers did. So do his earliest followers have the authority to define what makes someone a Christian or not? Maybe. But they’re gone too. And even if we look back to them, we don’t find a single, unified movement. From early on, Christianity was divided—groups with competing definitions of what “true” Christianity meant. So the claim that “the church” has authority does not hold up in my view. There’s no church that traces back to Jesus more so than the others, and each has its own definition of “true” Christianity.

Division like this existed in the first century. Paul argues against missionaries who insisted that Gentiles had to become Jewish (get circumcised, follow the Law) to be legitimate Christians. By their standard, almost no one today would qualify as a Christian. So who’s to say a Catholic’s Christianity is more “correct” than that of the Ebionites—a first-century Jewish-Christian group who denied the virgin birth and rejected Paul. There’s actually some reason to think the Ebionites’ practices were closer to those of Jesus than that of Catholics. I don’t say that to attack Catholicism. My point is simpler: no one living has clear authority to define Christianity. At some point, it becomes a matter of interpretation. You can say I’m not a Christian, but that doesn’t make it objectively true.

Now, back to walking on water. A user on Substack called Toiler on the Sea reminded me of something important: the story of Jesus walking on water appears only in the Gospels. It doesn’t show up in the rest of the New Testament. The letters attributed to Peter don’t mention it. And more broadly, the New Testament outside the Gospels and Acts says very little about Jesus’ miracles at all—except for the resurrection. Paul, for instance, never references Jesus walking on water, healing the blind, or casting out demons. The only miracle he emphasizes is the resurrection. For this reason, Toiler on the Sea speculates that Peter didn’t believe in the miracle of walking on water, as he thinks the belief hadn’t formed yet. I think he’s right.

Now, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. I’m not arguing that something didn’t happen simply because someone didn’t mention it. But it is at least notable that these stories don’t appear in our earliest Christian writings. The stronger argument, in my view, is this: walking on water conflicts with everything we understand about physics and chemistry. Even most Christians would agree that, if it happened, it would require God’s intervention. And I don’t see good reason to believe that a God who intervenes in that way exists. Biblical miracles strike me as unfalsifiable claims. They’re said to operate outside the laws of nature, which means there’s no real way to test or disprove them. I’m not saying they’re logically impossible—but what is the evidence? Ancient texts claiming they occurred, and little else. So while I can’t definitively rule it out, I think it’s unlikely. How could I believe something so extraordinary when the evidence amounts to some ancient people wrote down that it happened?

Which raises the next question: so if it didn’t happen, where did the story come from? Did it originate with Peter? Was he going around telling people he walked on water when he didn’t? I find that hard to believe. In the story, multiple disciples are present. A claim like that would be difficult to sustain if others could contradict it. It’s possible the story began as a private experience (just Peter and Jesus) and later grew in the telling. But there’s no clear evidence for that. To me, it seems more likely the story didn’t originate with Peter at all. It developed later. Perhaps it started with the author of Mark.

That realization mattered to me. Because if Peter didn’t actually walk on water—and wasn’t claiming that he did—then he didn’t believe it. Like me. And that thought came at a time when I was considering leaving Christianity altogether. The same logic applies to the virgin birth. It’s striking that Paul, the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of John say nothing about it. Meanwhile, we know groups like the Ebionites rejected it entirely.

If Jesus were widely known to have been born of a virgin, why did so many Christians of the first-century reject it or leave it out of his biography? Why do the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke tell such different versions of the story? An explanation is that the idea developed later—that Jesus himself didn’t claim it, and neither did his earliest followers. Some Christians adopted the belief; others did not. Now, that doesn’t make the story worthless. It’s one of my favorites in the New Testament—maybe second only to the Gerasene demoniac. I just don’t think it’s historical. And if that’s right, then once again, it suggests that neither Jesus nor those who knew him believed it. Like me.

So what do I do with that? Most Christians probably won’t like this essay, but I’m no longer interested in seeking their approval. The healthiest option for me is embrace my beliefs, or my lack of beliefs, and not care what other people think. But I still encourage polite disagreement.

Lately I’ve been in a better place regarding my struggles with doubt and faith, and this realization has helped me get there.

Notes

• Art by Gebhard Fugel - Jesus walks on the lake (1931)

• This essay is informed by the works of scholars such as Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison Jr., John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriksen, Helen Bond, and others.

I don’t think Jesus rose from the dead. But that leaves a problem. I take Jesus to have been a historical figure, and I think his followers were genuinely convinced that he had been raised. If he did not rise from the dead, then how did they come to hold that belief? How does such a belief form?

I think it is possible that this belief originated with Jesus himself, though I am less confident on this point. What I mean is that Jesus may have said things to his followers (whether directly or in more cryptic terms, and I suspect the latter) that suggested he would rise from the dead first. The Gospels certainly present him this way.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again.

—Mark 8:31 NRSVUE

for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”

—Mark 9:31 NRSVUE

These sayings may preserve authentic tradition. Or, they may reflect Mark’s attempt to vindicate Jesus’ execution. If Jesus is portrayed as anticipating his death (indeed, as understanding it to be necessary) and as entering it willingly, the event becomes less a source of failure and more of fulfillment. I could see why Mark or the Christians before him would justify Jesus’ death in this way. If this is the case, then the quotes above are likely ahistorical.

I will leave that as an open question. I do not know whether Jesus actually predicted his own specific resurrection, though I think it remains possible. If he did, I cannot explain where such a belief originated, but it would help account for how it took shape among his followers after his death.

I am, however, more confident that he spoke about a general resurrection. That is, I think Jesus taught that God would soon intervene in history, raise the dead, and welcome the righteous into his kingdom. I also hold that he preached this as an imminent event, something that would occur within the lifetime of his hearers. In that sense, the idea was both familiar and urgently expected. And belief in a general resurrection did not originate with the early Christians. We find antecedents of it already within the Old Testament.

our dead shall live; their corpses shall rise.
Those who dwell in the dust will awake and shout for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

—Isaiah 26:19 NRSVUE

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

—Daniel 12:2 NRSVUE

So Jesus’ followers were already expecting the resurrection of the dead well before he died. This is important in understanding how belief in his resurrection formed.

Although some Gospel accounts have Jesus first appearing to Mary Magdalene, I think it is more likely that Peter was first—more precisely, that Peter was the first to proclaim the resurrection. Mary appears in the later narratives; Peter appears in the earlier ones. As a general rule, historians tend to give greater weight to sources closer in time to the events they describe. Paul, who reports that Jesus appeared first to Peter, knew Peter. Here is how he records it in what is often taken to be a pre-Pauline creed:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

—1 Corinthians 15:3-8 NRSVUE

Cephas is Peter. What matters here is that the appearance to Peter is presented as individual. I also take him to mean that the Twelve saw him individually as well. This differs from the more familiar Gospel scenes, in which Jesus appears to groups of disciples.

What follows is more speculative, and I want to be clear about that. In the aftermath of Jesus’ death, his followers would have been devastated. Peter, as the leading disciple, seems the most likely figure to whom others would have turned. The movement had lost its center, and they were left searching for some way to make sense of what had happened. At some point, Peter becomes the first to proclaim that Jesus has been raised.

I can imagine two possibilities.

• Peter made up seeing Jesus as some means of keeping the movement alive.

• Peter actually had a vision or dream where he saw Jesus.

Both seem plausible to me, and without a clearer sense of Peter’s character, I cannot say which is more likely. People lie to preserve what they value; they also have visions, dreams, and experiences that feel real enough to convince them. It’s important to consider that grief-induced “appearances” of the dead are actually very common. I’ve met more than one person who has claimed to have seen their dead parent or spouse. If this is what happened to Peter, you can see why he would have made the assumption that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

I think this caught on. After Peter proclaimed that Jesus appeared to him, someone else said, “Me too.” Maybe it was Mary. The claim started to spread and eventually even Jesus’ brother James claimed the resurrection.

I am confident that these experiences were not uniform. Some of Jesus’ followers may have had genuine visionary experiences, while others may have repeated or adopted the claim without having such experiences themselves. I wonder where Paul falls. It’s impossible to know.

A likely point of criticism to my claim of individual appearances is Paul’s claim that Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time. If that report is taken at face value, it would require a different kind of explanation—perhaps something like mass hysteria. But it is difficult to assess, since Paul provides no details about the event. I do not assume that the claim is historically reliable simply because Paul records it. It may reflect a tradition he received, one that had already developed by the time it reached him. It is also possible that it emerged as a way of strengthening the credibility of the resurrection claim. In any case, without further evidence, it remains uncertain how seriously it should be taken.

I think it is more likely that these experiences were individual rather than collective. That, to me, is the more plausible historical scenario.

The important question, then, is how the earliest witnesses understood the resurrection appearances. Did they interpret them as a physical resurrection, in which Jesus’ body literally rose? Or as something more akin to a non-physical, visionary, or “ghostly” experience? At this point, my own bias becomes difficult to ignore. I am inclined toward the latter interpretation, in part because I find it more intellectually and imaginatively plausible, though I will return to that preference later. I am not confident that belief in a non-physical resurrection reflects the truth. It is likely that Jesus’ followers anticipated a general resurrection in which the dead would be bodily raised. The Gospel accounts emphasize the empty tomb, which strongly suggests that Jesus’ body itself was understood to have risen. One could imagine that Peter, for instance, believed that Jesus’ body had been miraculously transformed or exalted, and that was what he saw.

However, when attempting to reconstruct what Peter may have actually experienced, it is not unreasonable to consider that he understood the encounter in less material terms, perhaps as an appearance of Jesus’ spirit or soul rather than his physical body. I would think the non-physical interpretation is the most logical assumption. It is possible that the earliest experiences were interpreted in this way, with the tradition later developing into a more explicitly physical doctrine of resurrection. Yet caution is necessary here. What may appear to us as a “logical assumption” risks imposing modern distinctions onto an ancient worldview, where logical assumptions are not necessarily the same.

It is also important to clarify that both early and contemporary Christian belief does not typically present the resurrection as a mere return to ordinary life. Rather, Jesus is understood to have been raised in an exalted state, transformed in a way that transcends ordinary physical existence. This suggests that even within a framework that affirms bodily resurrection, the nature of that body was conceived as fundamentally different from its prior condition.

But I prefer the other kind of resurrection. I prefer a belief that Jesus’ ghost rose from the dead, rather than his body. That kind of resurrection makes more sense to me. I like it. I can imagine that people had real experiences—genuine, conscious encounters with Jesus—without him being physically present. And that, for me, is a form of resurrection I find easier to accept.

It is necessary to clarify my position, as we are entering into a metaphysical question. I think that at least some of Jesus’ followers genuinely experienced seeing him, though I do not think his physical body was present. That is the view I find most plausible. If that is the case, then the question becomes whether this can, in any meaningful sense, be called a resurrection.

I would argue that it can, though only in a sense. I believe that some of Jesus’ followers had conscious experiences in which they encountered him, and that these experiences were real to them in a meaningful way. In that sense, I can say that I believe in the resurrection, though I understand it differently from a strictly physical event.

I think I’m getting closer.

Art: “The Lord’s first appearance after his Resurrection” by William Henry Margetson

Beloved Subscribers, let’s continue this exploration of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Read the first essay here. The painting above is actually of Saint Paul the Hermit, who we won’t be discussing. I just liked the painting.

Anyway. I’d like to start off with 1 Corinthians 10:1-9

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.” We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.

—1 Corinthians 10:1-9 NRSVUE

This passage draws upon multiple books and episodes from the Old Testament. Here Paul reminds the Corinthians of Moses and the Israelites passing through the sea—the story most readers are familiar with. A lesser-known tradition connected with this narrative holds that, during Israel’s journey through the wilderness, a miraculous rock or well accompanied them so that they would not die of thirst. This is the “rock” Paul is referring to. He then makes an interesting interpretive claim: the rock was Christ.

Recently I posted a note on here suggesting that Jesus did not claim to be God and that neither the Synoptic authors nor Paul appear to present him in that way. Yet in this passage we see that Paul clearly believes Jesus existed prior to his earthly life, which is, at the very least, a divine or quasi-divine attribute. One might reasonably argue that this passage could be used to challenge my claim.

Nevertheless, I still maintain my position. Although Paul appears to regard Christ as preexistent, I think he understands Jesus specifically as God’s Son rather than as God himself in the later Trinitarian sense. It is entirely plausible that a first-century Jew could believe that the Messiah existed prior to his earthly appearance without identifying him with the Father. As someone else put it, “Paul does not confuse Christ with the Father.”

Moving on, in the passage cited above, Paul states that twenty-three thousand people died in a single day (he’s a thousand off) and that others were killed by serpents. In doing so, he is referencing episodes from Book of Numbers 21 and 25 in the Old Testament. The relevant passages read as follows:

From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.

—Numbers 21:4-6 NRSVUE

and…

While Israel was staying at Shittim, the people began to have sexual relations with the women of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. Thus Israel yoked itself to the Baal of Peor, and the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel. The Lord said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people, and impale them in the sun before the Lord, in order that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.” And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you shall kill any of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.”

Just then one of the Israelites came and brought a Midianite woman into his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the Israelites, while they were weeping at the entrance of the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he got up and left the congregation. Taking a spear in his hand, he went after the Israelite man into the tent, and pierced the two of them, the Israelite and the woman, through the belly. So the plague was stopped among the people of Israel. Nevertheless those that died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.

—Numbers 25:1-9 NRSVUE

In the first passage, God sends venomous serpents among the Israelites after they complain against both God and Moses during their journey through the wilderness. In the second, severe punishment follows when some Israelites engage in sexual relations with the women of Moab and participate in the worship of their gods, specifically the cult of Baal of Peor. God orders the chiefs to be impaled.

Taken together, these passages function as warnings within the narrative of Israel’s wilderness traditions. They illustrate the consequences of ingratitude, participation in foreign cultic practices, sexual relations associated with those cults, and the worship of idols—“idols,” in this context, referring to the gods of surrounding pagan religions.

Paul is employing the same warning in relation to the Corinthians, particularly concerning the practice of participating in idolatrous worship through the consumption of meat sacrificed to idols. Although we do not possess the Corinthians’ letter to Paul—only Paul’s responses—we can reasonably infer that such practices were occurring within the community. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why Paul devotes such extended discussion to the issue.

This suggests that, in the first century, some members of the Corinthian church continued to maintain elements of their former pagan religious practices.

Here’s another quote I find interesting.

Does not nature itself teach you that, if a man wears his hair long, it is dishonoring to him?

—1 Corinthians 11:14 NRSVUE

This verse is noteworthy because Jesus is commonly depicted as having long brown hair. If Paul’s statement reflects prevailing assumptions about male appearance in the first century, it may suggest that Jesus himself likely did not wear his hair long. Paul never knew Jesus during his lifetime, but he did know Jesus’ brother and several of his closest associates. While we cannot know whether Paul ever inquired about Jesus’ appearance, it seems unlikely that he would make such a claim if long hair had been a recognizable feature of Jesus.

Artistic depictions of Jesus are widely understood to be historically unreliable. The New Testament contains no physical description of Jesus, and the earliest surviving visual portrayals appear several centuries after his lifetime. For this reason, the familiar image of Jesus with long hair should probably be treated with caution. This brief remark from Paul may suggest that such a feature is unlikely to reflect historical reality.

At the same time, it is often suggested that Jesus was likely bearded, as he is commonly portrayed. Facial hair appears to have been typical for Jewish men in the first century, which makes that element of the traditional depiction somewhat more plausible than the long hair.

Let’s continue exploring Chapter 11. Here’s another quote I find interesting:

Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you proceeds to eat your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What!

—1 Corinthians 11:17-22 NRSVUE

Here we see some of the tensions present within the Corinthian Christian community. Factions appear to be forming among them. Paul also claims that some individuals are eating their own supper rather than participating in the Lord’s Supper.

The Lord’s Supper described here seems quite different from the modern practice of standing in line to receive a small piece of bread. Paul’s description makes it sound much more like a full communal meal. Yet it appears that some participants are not sharing their food, that groups are eating in separate cliques rather than together, or that certain individuals are eating and drinking excessively while others are left with little or nothing.

What interests me less is the fact that the Corinthians were performing the Lord’s Supper poorly, and more the question of what the practice itself actually looked like. It seems likely that some form of ritual was taking place, perhaps including the recitation of the well-known words attributed to Jesus: This is my body, which will be given up for you… This is my blood…

Although participation in the Eucharist in 2026 does not resemble this setting very closely, it remains striking that the practice of the Lord’s Supper reaches all the way back to the first century. The earliest Christians were already observing it.

In Chapter 14 Paul discusses speaking in tongues. The phenomenon still occurs in some Christian communities today. Speaking in tongues—often called glossolalia—refers to a form of ecstatic speech in which a person produces speech-like sounds that do not correspond to any known language. Gibberish, in other words. Many believers interpret this experience as the Holy Spirit speaking through them or enabling a form of spiritual prayer. If you’re curious you can find Youtube videos of it.

Paul acknowledges speaking in tongues as a genuine spiritual gift, but he insists that it should serve the community. Because tongues are unintelligible to others unless interpreted, Paul argues that prophecy or clear speech is more useful in communal worship. If tongues are spoken during a gathering, they should be interpreted; otherwise the speaker should remain silent.

Here are some direct quotes.

For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them; they utter mysteries by the Spirit.

—1 Corinthians 14:2 NRVSUE

Tongues, then, are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is not for unbelievers but for believers. If, therefore, the entire church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind?

—1 Corinthians 14:22-23 NRSVUE

If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three and each in turn, and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let them be silent in church and speak to themselves and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said.

—1 Corinthians 14:27-29 NRSVUE

What interests me most is what speaking in tongues in the first century actually looked and sounded like. Paul never provides a detailed description of the practice. However, based on certain remarks he makes—such as his concern that outsiders might say the participants are “out of your mind,” and his observation that no one understands the speech—I infer that it may have resembled what is today called speaking in tongues in modern Christian contexts.

To be honest, I personally find the practice somewhat strange and even slightly unsettling. It is not part of Catholic worship, and therefore it is unfamiliar to many Catholics. I can’t even imagine some of the priests I know speaking in tongues. I do not necessarily object to it, but it remains a practice that I find unusual, and I suspect I am not alone in that reaction.

Nevertheless, Paul’s letter suggests that speaking in tongues was present among first-century Christians, and Paul himself appears to have participated in it. This raises an interesting question: did the historical Jesus speak in tongues? The Gospels never record him doing anything of the sort. If that is the case, it invites the further question of where Paul (and the early Christian communities) derived the practice.

Another interesting feature to examine is the way Paul addresses the Corinthians. He appears to be writing to the community as a whole rather than directing his comments specifically to a group of leaders. In fact, he does not clearly identify any formal leadership within the letter. His discussion of speaking in tongues also suggests a setting in which multiple members of the community may participate, and in which interpretation is not restricted to a particular office.

For this reason, one might speculate that the first-century Christian community in Corinth functioned in a somewhat more egalitarian manner than many churches today. The gathering Paul describes does not appear to revolve around a clearly defined priest or pastor, but rather around the participation of the community as a whole.

Now we come to what is probably my favorite quote of Paul’s because it is so historically important.

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

—1 Corinthians 15:3-8 NRSVUE

Scholars commonly refer to this passage as a pre-Pauline creed, since Paul explicitly states that he “received” the tradition he is quoting. That is significant. Paul is the only New Testament author whose identity we can establish with relative confidence, and 1 Corinthians is widely regarded as one of his authentic letters. Although Paul never met Jesus during his lifetime, he did know Jesus’ brother and several of his closest associates. Moreover, Paul’s letters were written roughly twenty years after Jesus’ death. For these reasons, Paul represents one of our earliest and most valuable sources for the beliefs of the first Christian communities.

Within New Testament scholarship there is a well-known concept called Markan priority, the view that the Gospel of Mark was written first and served as a source for Matthew and Luke. Furthermore, I find that many scholars treat Mark as the most historically reliable. One might similarly speak, in a chronological sense, of a kind of Pauline priority, since Paul’s letters predate the Gospels and he knew James and Peter. When we encounter material that Paul himself says he received—such as this creed—we are likely dealing with a tradition that circulated even earlier than his letters. Chronologically, this brings us very close to the earliest Christian movement.

For that reason, scholars often regard this creed as an important window into what the earliest Christians believed about Jesus. Interestingly, some scholars have used the creed to argue that Jesus may not originally have been thought to be buried in a specific tomb. Paul simply states that Jesus “was buried,” without mentioning the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea that later appears in the Gospel narratives. Some historians, including John Dominic Crossan, see this silence as significant. I am not fully convinced by that argument, but it is a position that has been seriously proposed within modern scholarship.

Whether or not one agrees with every scholarly theory about the creed, the larger point remains clear. In Paul’s letters we are standing very close to the beginning of the Christian movement. These texts were written only a couple of decades after Jesus’ life, and in places like this Paul is passing along traditions that may be even older than his own writings.

And that, to me, is what makes Paul so fascinating.

Art: Saint Paul the Hermit and Saint Anthony Abbot fed by a raven (circa 1530) - Dutch School (Dutch, 16th-20th Century)

I’m fed up with myself. I’m a denier who wants to be a believing Christian. Not merely a denier, however, but someone deeply preoccupied with the historical study of Jesus and early Christianity. I developed this obsession a few years ago, an experience I have described as almost revelatory. Yet I didn’t know how to direct this fixation. I needed some form of outlet, which ultimately led me to create this Substack.

Over the past year I’ve formed friendships online, written essays I’m genuinely proud of, and learned an enormous amount through the process of publishing here.

Yet I’m growing weary of feeling like an outlier. From what I can tell, most people who share this intense interest in ancient Christian history and the historical Jesus tend to move in one of two directions. Some remain comfortably agnostic, treating the subject primarily as an intellectual or historical pursuit. Others find ways of reconciling historical-critical inquiry with personal faith. Both groups, at least outwardly, appear relatively confident in their positions. I find myself in neither camp. My own stance is marked instead by a persistent uncertainty. I resist identifying as agnostic, largely because the prospect unsettles me, yet I also find myself unconvinced that God exists, and even less certain that Jesus was his son—despite a sincere desire to believe otherwise.

So what do I do?

Two Jehovah’s Witnesses have been coming to my porch weekly, where I do most of my writing. They are attempting to persuade me toward belief, though if anything the encounters seem to have the opposite effect. I’ve experienced something similar here on Substack as well. Extended debates arise over the truth of Christianity, and in those moments I often find myself adopting a strongly skeptical posture, arguing against the claims that God exists or that Jesus is his son. In part, this seems to be a natural response to my own uncertainty.

When someone asserts that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, my instinct is to press the question: how do you know? What would constitute proof? These conversations tend to reach a familiar endpoint. Eventually the other person concedes that the resurrection cannot be demonstrated in a strict evidentiary sense and that belief ultimately rests on faith. Yet that answer raises another difficulty for me: why should I place faith in something that, from my present standpoint, appears so improbable?

That response tends to frustrate people when I voice it. But am I being unreasonable?

I’ve wondered if there is a solution—something like a metaphorical acceptance of Jesus. The trouble is I don’t know what it is, or what it means. Perhaps it would involve treating the claim that Jesus is the Messiah not as a literal statement about divine metaphysics, but as a recognition of the moral and imaginative world his followers believed he revealed. In that sense, “Messiah” could function less as a biological or ontological claim about God’s son and more as a way of saying that, in this one figure, people encountered a vision of reality they found uniquely authoritative: a radical ethic of forgiveness, the inversion of status, the insistence that the last are first and the first last.

I’m not saying I believe this. It’s only a thought. But I sometimes wonder whether the earliest followers themselves experienced something closer to that: the sense that in Jesus they had found the decisive interpreter of God’s will, the one through whom the meaning of life suddenly seemed clarified, even if the language they used to express that conviction eventually became theological in ways they may not have fully intended. If that were the case, “Messiah” might be less a proposition to be proven and more a recognition that this particular life and teaching continue to shape how people imagine God, justice, and the meaning of a human life. I’m not sure whether that solves anything. But at times it seems like a possible way of thinking about the problem.

Interestingly, I have found that no one advises learning to live with uncertainty. Instead, they pray that I will eventually become a believer. It is difficult to inhabit this uncertainty about God while continuing to attend church every Sunday. I often feel like a fraud when I sit there. No one at my parish knows what I actually think. I rarely discuss it with anyone besides my wife. I want to feel the conviction that others seem to possess so naturally, but what I have instead is only the desire for it—like a man standing at a well with a rope and no bucket. I want to feel it. I suspect it would be something like a drug.

I find it somewhat easier to entertain belief in God than belief in Jesus, though even here the problem persists. The form of divinity that seems most plausible to me is not the personal and benevolent God of traditional Christianity, but something more ambiguous—something merely God-like. I struggle to reconcile the claim that God is good with the reality of a world in which children die of cancer. If such a God exists, the possibilities appear limited: either God’s power is constrained, God is indifferent, or God is not morally good in the way believers claim.

I’m reminded of a passage from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:

The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it suit everyone, did he?

I dont believe he much had me in mind.

This reflects the God who seems most plausible to me. Perhaps others feel their prayers are heard and answered. Mine, however, seem to disappear into silence. It does not feel as though anyone is listening. Never has.

Art: Alexis Marie Louis Douillard - Le Christ en croix (1871)

You can read the Bible through a variety of lenses. The most common is devotional or theological: Scripture as a source of spiritual formation and guidance. My own interest lies less in that way of reading and more in the historical-critical lens. Rather than asking how Paul’s words apply to my personal faith, I am more interested in what his letters reveal about the social dynamics, conflicts, and theological development of the earliest Christian communities.

First Corinthians is widely regarded as one of Paul’s undisputed letters, meaning that a strong majority of scholars agree that it was in fact written by him. Paul—also known as the Apostle to the Gentiles—was a first-century Jewish follower of the resurrected Jesus who, after a dramatic conversion experience, became a missionary throughout the eastern Mediterranean. He didn’t know Jesus, but he claims that the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. His letters, written roughly between 50 and 60 CE, are the earliest surviving Christian texts and were addressed to specific communities he had founded or influenced. They offer not only theological reflection but also direct insight into the practical concerns, divisions, and beliefs of the earliest assemblies of Christians.

In church, we often take isolated verses from Paul’s letters and apply them directly to contemporary life. Yet when these texts are read cover to cover, they reveal themselves to be documents of their time—written to address disputes within early Christian communities. Near the outset of 1 Corinthians, Paul responds to reports of factionalism in Corinth and names the divisions explicitly:

It has been reported to me about you, my brothers, by Chloe’s people, that there are rivalries among you. I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I give thanks [to God] that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say you were baptized in my name. (I baptized the household of Stephanas also; beyond that I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with the wisdom of human eloquence, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning.

—1 Corinthians 1:11–17, NABRE

What is interesting here is the specificity. We are given names—Chloe, Apollos, Cephas, Crispus, Gaius, Stephanas—and a glimpse into an actual dispute unfolding within a small, first-century community. It is theology of a sort, but more so a response to particular rivalries, loyalties, and misunderstandings. When read this way, the letter feels less like a timeless theological manifesto and more like a window into the lived realities of an early Christian group. We do not always read Paul’s letters in this light.

Further down in chapter 1, Paul says something I find historically important. Here it is:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

—1 Corinthians 1:22–24, NABRE

This points to what I consider one of the most historically interesting aspects of early Christianity. Today, many Christians take for granted that the Messiah was crucified. Of course he was, we might say. It was foretold in Scripture. But Paul’s comment reminds us that the claim itself was, in its original context, deeply counterintuitive.

To proclaim a crucified Messiah was, by Paul’s own admission, absurd to many. Gentiles were not awaiting a Jewish Messiah in the first place, and the idea that a man executed as a criminal could be worshipped as Lord and Savior would have sounded strange, if not ridiculous. For many Jews, the claim would have been even more difficult. Messianic expectations in this period often centered on a royal or Davidic figure—someone who would defeat Israel’s enemies and restore national sovereignty. A crucified Messiah did not fit that framework.

Now, turning back to specific issues within the Corinth community. Observe:

It is widely reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of a kind not found even among pagans—a man living with his father’s wife. And you are inflated with pride. Should you not rather have been sorrowful? The one who has done this deed should be expelled from your midst.

I, for my part, although absent in body but present in spirit, have already as if present judged the one who has committed this deed, in the name of [our] Lord Jesus: when you assemble and I am with you in spirit with the power of the Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

—1 Corinthians 5:1–5, NABRE

An unnamed man, Paul says, is “living with his father’s wife.” He offers no further detail. The phrase probably implies a sexual relationship, not mere cohabitation, particularly given the severity of Paul’s response and the language of “immorality.” This might be a case of incest involving a stepmother. It could have just been a rumor. Whatever the precise circumstances, Paul treats it as a serious violation.

What is striking is the severity of his rhetoric. He instructs the community to expel the man and, more dramatically, “deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh.” The exact meaning of this phrase remains unclear.

Finally, the apocalyptic horizon is present in this passage. Paul adds, “so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” The “day of the Lord” refers to the anticipated return of Christ, when judgment would occur and the faithful would be vindicated. Even here, in one of his harshest moments, Paul’s aim is not permanent exclusion but eventual restoration. The offender’s salvation remains possible. The urgency of the discipline makes sense within that apocalyptic expectation.

Regarding apocalypticism, here is a passage that might not seem apocalyptic on the surface, but in fact carries clear apocalyptic implications:

Now to the unmarried and to widows I say: it is a good thing for them to remain as they are, as I do, but if they cannot exercise self-control they should marry, for it is better to marry than to be on fire.

Now in regard to virgins, I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife. If you marry, however, you do not sin, nor does an unmarried woman sin if she marries; but such people will experience affliction in their earthly life, and I would like to spare you that.

—1 Corinthians 7:7–9, 25–28, NABRE

When my wife and I were married in the Catholic Church, we were required to affirm that we would have children and raise them in the faith. That expectation stands in noticeable contrast to Paul’s advice here. In this passage, Paul suggests that those who are unmarried would do well to remain unmarried, as he himself is. Marriage is permitted, but it is not presented as an ideal.

Why would Paul give such advice? The answer likely lies in his apocalyptic outlook. Paul believed that the present age was nearing its end and that Christ would soon return. If the world as they knew it was about to pass away, the ordinary rhythms of life—marriage, family formation, building future generations—would naturally seem less urgent. From that perspective, Paul’s counsel makes sense.

Chapter 7 also contains one of the few times where Paul indirectly quotes Jesus, again on the subject of marriage. Observe:

To the married, however, I give this instruction (not I, but the Lord): a wife should not separate from her husband—and if she does separate she must either remain single or become reconciled to her husband—and a husband should not divorce his wife.

— 1 Corinthians 7:10–11, NABRE

By stating “not I, but the Lord,” Paul indicates that this instruction derives from a teaching attributed to Jesus rather than from his own judgment. The teaching corresponds closely with traditions preserved in the Synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of Mark records Jesus as saying:

“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

—Mark 10:11–12, NABRE

These passages represent two independent early Christian sources that attribute a similar teaching on divorce to Jesus. Because of this convergence, many scholars consider the prohibition of divorce to be among the teachings of Jesus that has a relatively strong claim to historical authenticity.

Paul gets back onto the topic of marriage in chapter 9:

My defense against those who would pass judgment on me is this. Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a Christian wife, as do the rest of the apostles, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas? Or is it only myself and Barnabas who do not have the right not to work? Who ever serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating its produce? Or who shepherds a flock without using some of the milk from the flock?

—1 Corinthians 9:3-7 NABRE

One notable implication of this passage is that certain early Christian leaders—including Cephas (Peter) and the “brothers of the Lord”—were married. The tradition that Peter had a wife is independently attested in the Gospels, where Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law.

Of particular interest is Paul’s reference to the “brothers” of the Lord in the plural. The New Testament clearly identifies James, the brother of Jesus, as a prominent leader in the Jerusalem church after Jesus’ death. However, Paul’s plural wording raises the possibility that other brothers of Jesus were also involved in the early Christian movement. The Gospel of Mark preserves the names of several of Jesus’ siblings:

"Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?"

—Mark 6:3 NABRE

If Paul’s remark is taken at face value, it may suggest that more than one of these brothers participated in the early Christian mission. Yet the New Testament preserves remarkably little information about them beyond their names. Despite their familial relationship to Jesus, they do not appear prominently in the surviving texts.

Interestingly, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus provides a reference to James:

And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea as procurator. But when Ananus the high priest saw that Festus was now dead, and that Albinus was still on the road, he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

—Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, Chapter 9, Section 1

Thus, somewhat paradoxically, one of the most detailed references to Jesus’ brother James comes not from a Christian source but from a non-Christian historian.

Beloved subscribers, next week’s essay will continue my analysis of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. In the meantime, I would greatly appreciate it if you would complete the poll below. I am trying to better understand what kinds of essays/stories you most enjoy reading so that I can focus more of my writing in those areas.

Art by Pere Serra (1357-1406)

For the past few years, I have been obsessed with the critical study of the historical Jesus. By “historical Jesus,” I simply mean Jesus considered through the methods of historical inquiry, where theological beliefs and biases are set aside as much as possible in favor of historical analysis. I should note that I do not hold formal academic credentials in New Testament studies and am not a professor; however, I have studied the subject extensively, with obsessive personal interest. I have read widely among scholars who specialize in this field, including Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Paula Fredriksen, Albert Schweitzer, and others. Unsurprisingly, there remains considerable debate about who Jesus was and what he actually said. The portraits offered by scholars such as Allison and Crossan, for example, differ immensely. I have shared many reflections on the historical Jesus here before, but I would now like to devote an essay to presenting a fuller portrait of him.

Methodology

It is important to begin with this methodological question: how can we know anything about Jesus historically? The reality is that nearly all of our information comes from texts, primarily the New Testament writings, and especially the Gospels. Archaeological evidence tells us virtually nothing specific about Jesus, and too much time has passed for oral tradition to be treated as straightforward historical testimony without scrutiny.

Paul’s letters are the earliest surviving Christian writings, yet they contain relatively little detail about the events of Jesus’ life or his specific teachings. Even so, they remain crucial sources. Paul affirms key traditions, such as Jesus’ crucifixion, and his theological reflections sometimes allow cautious inferences about earlier beliefs associated with Jesus himself, though this must be done carefully.

A small number of non-Christian ancient sources mention Jesus, but these references are even less informative than Paul’s letters. This leaves the Gospels as our primary sources. Primarily the canonical Gospels, as most scholars think the apocryphal gospels post-date the New Testament. Most scholars I read do not think the canonical Gospels were written by the apostles whose names they bear; rather, those attributions likely emerged later as a way of giving them authority. The common scholarly reconstruction claims that Mark was written first, followed by Matthew and Luke, with John written last. Most scholars agree that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. Many argue they also used a hypothetical sayings collection known as Q, though others propose that Luke used Matthew directly, eliminating the need for Q. For much of modern scholarship, John’s Gospel was considered largely independent of the Synoptic Gospels. That view has changed in recent decades, with some scholars suggesting John used the Synoptics. My own judgment is this: John may reflect awareness of Synoptic traditions through oral channels, but I am not convinced the author had direct access to the Synoptic texts. That would explain why there’s only some overlap.

The Gospels are deeply theological and do not always align neatly with one another. That does not make them historically useless; rather, it requires careful historical method. Scholars employ a range of critical tools to distinguish earlier traditions from later theological development, and further on in this essay I will briefly illustrate some of these approaches.

Another methodological question concerns the reliability of our sources. Paul did not know Jesus during his earthly ministry, yet he did know Peter and John, two of Jesus’ closest disciples, as well as James, whom he identifies as the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:18–19). Because we can situate Paul historically and trace his connections to members of Jesus’ inner circle, his letters are often considered among our most secure early sources. While Paul’s interests are primarily theological rather than biographical, his proximity to key figures in the earliest movement gives his testimony significant historical value.

The Gospels present a more complex case. We do not know who their authors were. We can’t even say with confidence whether they were Jews or Gentiles. We are on firmer ground, however, regarding approximate dates of composition. Mark is commonly dated to around 70 CE, largely in part because its apocalyptic discourse appears to reflect knowledge of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. That places it roughly forty years after Jesus’ death.

Forty years may not seem excessive in ancient historiography, but it is not insignificant. To use a modern analogy: it would be as if no written account of Ronald Reagan’s presidency appeared until today. Memory, interpretation, and theological reflection would inevitably shape the narrative.

None of this means the Gospels are historically worthless. On the contrary, I think they preserve substantial historical material. But they must be read critically, with attention to genre, theological intention, and the passage of time.

His Birth

Before I begin, I want to stress that these are simply my conclusions after studying the evidence. Over the past year of writing here on Substack, some of my reflections on Jesus have unsettled or even angered readers. That is never my aim. I am not attempting to dismantle Christianity or attack anyone’s faith. I am trying to examine the sources we have, consider the historical probabilities, and follow the evidence where I think it most reasonably leads.

With that said, I am not persuaded that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. I find it more historically plausible that he was born in Nazareth and that the Bethlehem tradition developed later for theological reasons.

Our earliest Gospel, Mark, says nothing about Jesus being born in Bethlehem. Mark begins not with a birth narrative but with Jesus’ baptism:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

—Mark 1:9 NASB

Although it doesn’t say he wasn’t born in Bethlehem, I find it suspicious that his miraculous birth there was left out of the earliest record of his life. I think the belief either hadn’t formed yet, or wasn’t widespread.

The Gospel of John essentially explains why I think the Bethlehem birth story formed:

Has the Scripture not said that the Christ comes from the descendants of David, and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?”

—John 7:42 NASB

That expectation likely stems from Micah:

But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
Too little to be among the clans of Judah,
From you One will come forth for Me to be ruler in Israel.
His times of coming forth are from long ago,
From the days of eternity.”

—Micah 5:2 NASB

In its historical context, Micah appears to envision a restored Davidic ruler arising from David’s hometown. It speaks of a future ruler emerging from Bethlehem. This passage was read messianically. Since David himself was from Bethlehem (1 Samuel 16–17), it is not difficult to see how early Christians, convinced that Jesus was the Messiah and heir to David’s throne, would associate him with David’s city.

Only Matthew and Luke include infancy narratives and they do so in very different ways. In Matthew, the family appears to reside in Bethlehem and later relocates to Nazareth (Matthew 2:1–23). In Luke, Joseph and Mary live in Nazareth but travel to Bethlehem because of a census (Luke 2:1–7). These accounts differ in structure, setting, and sequence of events, and both strongly emphasize Jesus’ Davidic identity.

For these reasons, I think it is more historically plausible that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth, and that the Bethlehem birth tradition emerged as early Christians reflected on Israel’s Scriptures and sought to articulate Jesus’ identity as the Davidic Messiah.

Moving forward in Jesus’ life, the canonical Gospels say almost nothing about Jesus’ youth. Luke briefly describes an episode from his adolescence, and later apocryphal writings expand the childhood narrative considerably, but their historical reliability is difficult to assess. At present, I am skeptical that we can draw firm historical conclusions from these sources on Jesus’ life before his baptism. Practically speaking, the historical trail becomes much clearer at the point of Jesus’ baptism by John. That is where our earliest and most widely attested traditions about his life begin.

His Baptism

I do think the historical Jesus was baptized by John. I am far from alone in that judgment. A broad consensus among historical Jesus scholars holds that the baptism is one of the more secure events in Jesus’ life.

Two primary considerations usually drive this conclusion. The first is what scholars often call the criterion of embarrassment. John’s baptism was associated with repentance and the forgiveness of sins. For early Christians proclaiming Jesus as sinless or spiritually superior, the idea that he submitted to another preacher’s baptism could raise uncomfortable questions. It might suggest John’s authority over Jesus or imply that Jesus himself required repentance. That makes it less likely the early church invented the episode outright. It reads more naturally as a remembered event that later writers had to interpret theologically.

The second reason is multiple attestation. John the Baptist appears across our Gospel traditions, and Jesus’ public activity consistently begins in relation to him. Mark presents the baptism directly (Mark 1:9–11). Matthew includes it but adds dialogue that softens the potential theological tension (Matthew 3:13–15). Luke narrates it more briefly and somewhat indirectly (Luke 3:21–22). John’s Gospel does not narrate the baptism itself but still depicts John the Baptist testifying about Jesus (John 1:29–34). Beyond this, traditions about John appear to surface in material often attributed to the hypothetical Q source, a sayings collection many scholars believe Matthew and Luke may have used independently. While Q remains hypothetical, the recurring presence of John traditions strengthens the case that the connection between Jesus and John is early and widespread.

Because of this convergence, I think it is historically very likely that Jesus was baptized by John.

Personally, I suspect the relationship may have gone deeper than a single encounter. The Gospels portray both figures preaching an imminent kingdom of God and expressing apocalyptic expectations. That shared emphasis raises the possibility that Jesus was, at least for a time, influenced by John’s movement or even associated with it more closely than the later Christian tradition preferred to emphasize. This remains speculative, but it helps explain why John figures so prominently at the opening of Jesus’ public ministry. If their interaction had been minimal, it is harder to see why the tradition preserved it so consistently.

His Followers and Family

I believe the historical Jesus did indeed have followers. Now, as for how many followers he had, that is harder to say. Different scholars suggest different numbers. I tend to lean lower, perhaps somewhere between fifty and one hundred individuals at any given time. The difficulty is not only the scarcity of evidence but also the challenge of defining what, in Jesus’ lifetime, actually constituted a “follower.”

The later Christian movement gives us a clearer category than likely existed during Jesus’ ministry. After his death, communities formed with shared beliefs, rituals, leadership structures, and a developing theological identity. During Jesus’ lifetime, however, allegiance may have been much looser. Some individuals likely traveled with him regularly; others may have listened occasionally, supported the movement financially, or simply found his message compelling without adopting a permanent role. The Gospels themselves reflect this fluidity—crowds gather, disciples come and go, and even the inner circle sometimes appears uncertain or inconsistent.

For these reasons, any numerical estimate remains difficult. What seems historically secure is that Jesus attracted a recognizable circle of adherents, some more closely committed than others, and that this network became the seedbed of the early Christian movement after his death.

I do think it is historically likely that Jesus had a close follower named Peter, who appears to have been among his most prominent disciples. Alongside him, figures such as James, John, Andrew, Mary Magdalene, and Judas are consistently attested across early Christian sources.

Judas, in particular, presents an interesting case. The tradition that one of Jesus’ own disciples betrayed him to the authorities is widely preserved in the Gospel accounts. Many scholars see this as another instance of what is often called the criterion of embarrassment. Early Christians portrayed Jesus as possessing extraordinary insight and, at times, foreknowledge of events. Within that theological framework, the idea that a chosen member of his inner circle would betray him creates an obvious problem. It is therefore not the sort of detail one would naturally invent to strengthen a movement’s credibility.

For that reason, I find it historically plausible that Judas did, in some form, facilitate Jesus’ arrest by directing authorities to him. The exact circumstances remain unclear, but the persistence of the tradition across sources suggests that it reflects an early and likely historical memory.

I am also inclined to think that Jesus achieved a certain level of regional prominence in Galilee and its surrounding areas. This impression rests not only on the Gospel traditions but also on the brief references to Jesus in Josephus. From a historical standpoint, it seems somewhat more plausible that a religious movement would coalesce around a figure who had already attracted a substantial following than around one who remained largely obscure. That said, the possibility that Jesus’ public recognition was more limited during his lifetime cannot be ruled out.

Interestingly, I also think it is historically likely that Jesus had biological brothers and sisters. For much of my life, I was unaware of this possibility, largely because I was raised Catholic, and the Catholic Church maintains the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity. Within that theological framework, references to Jesus’ “brothers” and “sisters” are often interpreted as cousins or extended kin. However, when read in their historical context, the Gospel texts appear to present these figures as members of Jesus’ immediate family.

For example, the Gospel of Mark states:

Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are His sisters not here with us?” And they took offense at Him.

—Mark 6:3 NASB

Matthew preserves a similar tradition (Matthew 13:55–56). The most straightforward reading of these passages suggests biological siblings.

Beyond the Gospels, Paul refers to “James, the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19), distinguishing him from the apostles in a way that implies a familial relationship. The Jewish historian Josephus likewise mentions “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” (Antiquities 20.200). These independent references strengthen the historical case for Jesus having a brother named James.

What is particularly intriguing is that the Gospels imply Jesus’ family did not initially believe in him (Mark 3:21; John 7:5). Yet after Jesus’ death, James emerges as a leading figure in the Jerusalem movement. This shift suggests that his allegiance developed later, a detail that, if anything, enhances its historical plausibility rather than diminishing it.

His Ministry

I am inclined to think that Jesus did in fact travel throughout Galilee much as the Gospels describe. I also find it historically plausible that he was known as a healer, though whether these healings were genuinely miraculous remains impossible to determine. What seems clearer is that contemporaries believed they were. This impression arises not only because healings appear in all four Gospels, but because they recur frequently and occupy a central place in the tradition.

It is interesting that Paul never explicitly mentions Jesus’ miracles, yet I still regard the healing tradition as historically credible. For similar reasons, I think the historical Jesus likely engaged in exorcisms. Whether this involved the literal expulsion of demons is uncertain, but there is good reason to think observers understood these events in that way.

Likewise, I consider it plausible that Jesus hosted communal meals, an activity well attested in the Gospel tradition. While I do not assume miraculous feedings in a literal sense, the consistent association of Jesus with shared meals suggests a historical core. Over time, however, it seems likely that memories of healings, exorcisms, and communal meals were progressively amplified, so that by the time they were recorded in the Gospels they had taken on a more overtly miraculous character.

I am inclined to think that Jesus did experience rejection in his hometown and likely in other communities as well. This tradition appears across multiple Gospel accounts and arguably again hits the criterion of embarrassment—an unlikely detail to invent for a revered figure. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus remarks,

A prophet is not dishonored except in his hometown and among his own relatives, and in his own household.”

—Mark 6:4 NASB

I also suspect that the hardships of Jesus’ ministry may be somewhat understated in the sources. There is no indication that he derived material wealth from his movement; on the contrary, sayings attributed to him commend radical simplicity. As one tradition puts it,

And Jesus said to them, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

—Matthew 8:20 NASB

Likewise, the instruction to disciples to carry minimal provisions (e.g., Luke 9:3) suggests economic precarity. Given that Jesus and many of his followers likely came from peasant backgrounds, it is reasonable to imagine periods of hunger, exposure, and general instability, even if the Gospels do not dwell extensively on these difficulties.

I think Jesus was indeed preaching to crowds and speaking in parables. Like other aspects of the Gospel accounts, I do not see a compelling reason to doubt this. It is, of course, possible that the Gospel authors attributed parabolic teaching to him when he did not in fact teach that way, but that seems less likely than the simpler explanation—that he did speak in parables. This would help explain the recurring motif of his followers failing to understand him. As Mark records, after the Parable of the Sower, Jesus says to them,

“Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?”

—Mark 4:13 NASB

How closely the written parables reflect the precise words that left Jesus’ mouth is more difficult to determine. It seems likely that Jesus told a parable about seeds, since versions of it appear in multiple independent sources. We do not know when Q was written, but it is often regarded as one of the earliest collections of Jesus’ sayings, likely older than the Gospels. The closer such material stands chronologically to Jesus’ lifetime, the more confidence one might place in its relative accuracy. It is plausible that some of the parables developed over time. At the same time, one could argue that ancient cultures, deeply shaped by oral tradition, were skilled at preserving and transmitting remembered speech. Without print or electronic media, memorization and recitation were central cultural practices. For that reason, it is possible that at least some of Jesus’ sayings were preserved with great fidelity. I suspect the parables, as we have them, represent a mixture of authentic teaching and later development.

His Beliefs

Bart Ehrman and Dale Allison, two of the most prominent historical Jesus scholars in the Anglophone world, both characterize Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. As Ehrman summarizes in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium:

Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God would intervene in the affairs of the planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgement, and establish his utopian Kingdom here on earth. And this was to happen within Jesus’ own generation.

The roots of this interpretation are traced to Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which argued that Jesus proclaimed an imminent eschatological intervention by God. Schweitzer’s thesis proved enormously influential throughout much of the twentieth century. Although late–twentieth-century scholars such as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan proposed non-apocalyptic reconstructions, the apocalyptic model has remained a major position within scholarship, and in recent years it appears to have regained strength. I find the case persuasive.

A full defense would require far more space, but the core of the argument rests on our earliest sources. Mark, widely regarded as the earliest Gospel, opens Jesus’ proclamation with urgency:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the gospel.”

—Mark 1:15 NASB

In Mark 13:30, within an explicitly eschatological discourse, Jesus declares,

“Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”

Likewise, a saying often attributed to the hypothetical Q source states,

“For this reason you must be ready as well; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think He will.”

—Matthew 24:44 NASB (Luke 12:40)

These texts suggest an expectation of impending divine action.

Paul, whose letters predate the Gospels, reflects similar anticipation. In 1 Thessalonians 4:15 he writes,

For we say this to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

Here we have language that appears to include himself among those expecting to witness the event. Significantly, these apocalyptic expectations are most pronounced in our earliest strata of evidence.

Moreover, the resurrection of the dead—central to earliest Christian proclamation (cf. 1 Corinthians 15)—is itself an apocalyptic concept rooted in Jewish eschatological hope (e.g., Daniel 12:2). Many contemporary Christian traditions continue to affirm a future return of Christ and a decisive transformation of the world. In that sense, apocalyptic expectation is not peripheral to Christianity but foundational.

For these reasons, I am persuaded that Jesus proclaimed an imminent divine intervention—a renewal of the world that was both judgment and restoration. I remain cautious about the label “apocalyptic prophet,” not because I reject the substance of the claim, but because the term risks reducing a multidimensional figure to a single interpretive category.

His Last Days

I consider it plausible that the historical Jesus anticipated the possibility of his death. It is conceivable that he spoke in ways that cryptically implied impending suffering, particularly given the Gospel traditions that portray him as predicting future events and teaching in metaphor. He also saw what happened to John, and surely knew he could share a similar fate. However, I am less persuaded that he possessed detailed foreknowledge of dying specifically in Jerusalem during Passover, or that he traveled there with the intention of provoking his own execution. I don’t think he went there to die. I think Jesus’ death was more surprising than foreknown.

I believe Jesus went to Jerusalem with followers for the Passover celebration and engaged in some form of disruptive action at the Temple. The Temple incident is multiply attested and coheres with the story. I also regard the betrayal by Judas, the arrest, and the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate as historically secure. The crucifixion, in particular, is attested across our earliest independent Christian sources (e.g., Paul, Mark, John), is referenced in non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus, and represents a form of execution that would have been deeply shameful within a Jewish context. For these reasons, it satisfies several of the commonly invoked criteria of authenticity and is widely accepted by scholars as one of the firmest facts about Jesus’ life.

The details are where things become more complicated. Why exactly Judas betrayed Jesus remains unclear. Likewise, how much of the specific detail in the Passion narratives is historically accurate is difficult to determine. One moment in Mark is interesting to consider here because of its unusual wording.

Mark 15:21 reads:

And they compelled a passer-by coming from the country, Simon of Cyrene (the father of Alexander and Rufus), to carry His cross.

It is somewhat atypical to identify a man by naming his sons; more commonly, individuals were identified by their fathers (e.g., James and John, sons of Zebedee). One plausible explanation is that Mark and his audience already knew Alexander and Rufus. While some might see this as speculative, it is difficult to identify another clear reason for the phrasing. If this is correct, it raises the possibility that Mark had access to testimony associated with that family, which could lend some credibility to elements of his Passion account.

At the same time, other portions of the narrative present greater historical difficulty. For example, reported private conversations between Jesus and figures such as Pilate or Herod would have been inaccessible to Jesus’ followers unless mediated through later reports, which are themselves uncertain. For that reason, it seems likely that at least some of these detailed dialogues reflect narrative shaping rather than strictly preserved historical memory.

I think the Last Supper likely rests on a historical core. It is narrated in all four Gospels, and Paul also refers to it in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26, which predates the written Gospels. That multiple early sources preserve the tradition strengthens the case for its basic historicity. At the same time, it is reasonable to assume that some of the details were shaped or developed as the tradition was transmitted and interpreted within early Christian communities.

I think it is historically plausible that Jesus was arrested and executed through the combined involvement of certain Jewish temple authorities and the Roman administration. I also find it likely that the charge placed above his cross—“King of the Jews”—reflects a historical memory. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ followers do not themselves use this title; rather, it is primarily placed on the lips of Roman authorities and soldiers (e.g., Mark 15:2, 15:26). If the designation were purely a literary creation meant to exalt Jesus, one might expect it to appear more positively or more frequently within the narrative. Its limited and ironic usage suggests it may derive from the formal charge against him.

Moreover, the accusation coheres with what we know of Roman practice. Claims to kingship carried political implications, especially in a volatile province such as Judea during Passover. The Romans reserved the authority to recognize or install kings, and perceived challenges to that authority could result in crucifixion, a punishment typically associated with rebellion or insurrection.

Closing Remarks

I would ultimately need a full book to present all of my conclusions about the historical Jesus and the evidence that has led me to them. What I have offered here is simply an overview—a sketch of the portrait I currently find most historically plausible.

In broad terms, I see Jesus as a Galilean Jewish preacher who was baptized by John, attracted a modest but meaningful following, and proclaimed what he understood to be the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. He likely traveled through Galilee teaching in parables, performing healings and exorcisms that convinced many people he possessed unusual authority, and sharing communal meals that later took on symbolic importance within the Christian movement. I think he experienced both enthusiasm and rejection, lived with material insecurity, and operated within the social world of rural peasants rather than political elites.

I am persuaded that his message was fundamentally apocalyptic—not necessarily in the sensational modern sense, but in the ancient Jewish sense of expecting decisive divine intervention in history. I suspect he anticipated danger, especially after John’s execution, but did not fully expect the precise manner or timing of his own death. His final journey to Jerusalem likely involved Passover pilgrimage, a provocative Temple action, betrayal by a close associate, arrest through cooperation between temple authorities and Roman governance, and ultimately crucifixion under Pontius Pilate on a political charge connected to kingship.

At the same time, I think many details preserved in the Gospels reflect later interpretation, theological reflection, or narrative development layered onto earlier memories. The sources are invaluable, but they are not neutral transcripts. They preserve history refracted through belief.

This portrait is provisional. Historical inquiry rarely produces certainty, especially at this chronological distance. Still, based on the sources we have and the methods available, this is the reconstruction that currently makes the most sense to me. It neither confirms nor dismantles faith; it simply attempts to understand Jesus as a figure situated in first-century Jewish history.

And, like all historical portraits, it remains open to revision.

Works Cited

• Odilon Redon “Le Christ du silence” (1890-1907)

• This essay has been informed by the books of Dale C. Allison Jr., Bart D. Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Albert Schweitzer, and other scholars engaged in the historical-critical study of Jesus.

• New American Standard Bible

It is widely accepted in New Testament scholarship that the author of the Gospel of Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as a source. Matthew not only follows Mark’s overall narrative structure but frequently reproduces Markan material verbatim, preserving episode order, phrasing, and Greek vocabulary. The degree of verbal and structural overlap is often so close that Matthew can be understood as revising and redacting Mark rather than composing an independent narrative.

Most of Matthew’s modifications to Mark are minor, but some are theologically and historically significant. Matthew’s editorial activity is often deliberate and revealing. In this essay, we will examine three such instances.

The Baptism

First, we’ll explore a one-word change and its significance. In Mark, after Jesus is baptized by John, God speaks to Jesus. Here is the passage:

It happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. On coming up out of the water he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

—Mark 1:9-11 NABRE

Matthew includes the same episode in his Gospel. Observe:

After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened [for him], and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove [and] coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

—Matthew 3:16-17 NABRE

There is an important change that is easy to miss at first. Consider what God says. In Mark, the voice says, “You are my beloved Son.” In Matthew, it says, “This is my beloved Son.” The shift is subtle, but it changes the scene: God is no longer speaking directly to Jesus, but is addressing all present.

This difference is significant because it changes who the revelation is for. In Mark, the divine voice addresses Jesus directly, which can be read as a private or visionary experience. In Matthew, the voice functions as a public proclamation, revealing Jesus’ identity to others. Matthew thus turns the baptism from a personal moment of affirmation into a scene of public christological disclosure.

Now, shifting gears—it is difficult to prove, but I suspect this episode may trace back to the historical Jesus—especially Mark’s version. Jesus’ baptism by John is a somewhat awkward detail to invent, since it places Jesus in a subordinate position to another prophetic figure. For this reason, the vast majority of historical Jesus scholars conclude that Jesus was indeed baptized by John.

If that core event is historical, it is plausible that some of the associated details—such as the claim that God spoke to him after he emerged from the water—also derive from Jesus’ own experience and later recollection. He may have told this story to his followers, who preserved it in oral tradition until it reached the Gospel writers. At the same time, it remains possible that the heavenly voice is a Markan literary construction.

Eating Kosher

Matthew is often called the “Jewish” Gospel. The author shows familiarity with Jewish scripture, law, and concerns, and frequently frames Jesus as a teacher within Jewish tradition. Most critical scholars agree that the Gospel was not written by the apostle Matthew but by an anonymous Jewish Christian author, likely writing for a community that still identified strongly with Judaism. In that context, questions about Torah observance (like dietary laws) would have mattered greatly.

In Jewish law, keeping kosher refers to observing dietary regulations outlined in the Torah and later rabbinic tradition, governing which foods may be eaten and how they must be prepared. Many Jews still practice this today. The Gospel of Matthew never has Jesus explicitly affirm or reject kosher laws. However, a small but revealing change between Mark and Matthew may suggest that Matthew was cautious about portraying Jesus as abolishing them.

Here is the passage in Mark:

He said to them, “Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

—Mark 7:18-19 NABRE

And here it is in Matthew:

He said to them, “Are even you still without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into the latrine? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

—Matthew 15:16-20

Notice that Matthew removes Mark’s editorial comment: “Thus he declared all foods clean.” Mark interprets Jesus’ saying as abolishing Jewish dietary restrictions. That’s what he means when he says all foods are clean. Matthew reproduces the teaching almost verbatim but omits that conclusion. Instead, he narrows the issue to handwashing, rather than the broader question of kosher law.

This may indicate that Matthew, or his community, was uncomfortable with Mark’s implication that Jesus set aside dietary law. Throughout his Gospel, Matthew tends to emphasize continuity with the Torah (see Matthew 5:17–19), and here he quietly tones down one of Mark’s more radical interpretations. Whether or not Jesus himself rejected kosher laws, Matthew appears eager to present him as more Torah-observant than Mark does.

The Craftsman

You might know Jesus as a carpenter, but the Greek word used in Mark is broader than that. τέκτων (tektōn) can mean craftsman, builder, or artisan—it does not strictly mean “woodworker,” and in first-century Galilee, stone may have been the more common building material. Most Bibles translate it to “carpenter” nonetheless. In Mark, Jesus is explicitly identified with this trade; Matthew, however, makes a subtle but meaningful change.

Here are the relevant passages:

Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

—Mark 6:3 NABRE

Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?

—Matthew 13:55 NABRE

Notice the difference: in Mark, Jesus himself is the τέκτων, a working craftsman. In Matthew, he is no longer described as a craftsman; instead, he is the son of one.

This change is significant. By downplaying the occupational detail, Matthew shapes how his readers perceive Jesus’ identity—not as a manual laborer, but as someone whose authority and significance transcend his social class. Matthew’s small change quietly recasts Jesus’ social position, reflecting the community’s interest in presenting him as a professional prophet, rather than a local craftsman.

Some Thoughts

Exploring these changes may seem minor to the casual reader, but for those engaged in biblical studies, they present significant insights into the theological shaping of the texts. Through Matthew’s revisions, we can observe how the portrayal of Jesus evolves: his divine status is emphasized, his authority made more public, and aspects of his ordinary human life (such as his occupation) are downplayed or reframed. In Matthew, the identity of Jesus as the Son of God is proclaimed more explicitly.

Perhaps more importantly, these changes remind us that the Gospels are deeply human texts. They are shaped not only by historical memory but also by the interpretive choices, theological priorities, and communal contexts of their authors. Matthew’s editorial decisions reflect the concerns of his audience, their relationship to Jewish law, and their understanding of Jesus’ significance.

Art: John White Alexander “Manuscript Book mural in Evolution of the Book series” (1896)

I cannot recall my childhood understanding of death in full, but I do remember believing that when you died you either went to Heaven or Hell. Heaven if you were good. Hell if you were bad. Millions—maybe billions—of people today believe these are their two potential fates. This belief is central to modern Christianity. But is it what the historical Jesus believed?

In the early books of the Bible, neither Heaven nor Hell was where you wound up after death. Instead, the dead were thought to go to Sheol, a shadowy, undifferentiated realm where all people—righteous and wicked alike—existed in a diminished, almost inert state. There was no reward nor punishment.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might; for there is no activity, planning, knowledge, or wisdom in Sheol where you are going.
—Ecclesiastes 9:10

Return, Lord, rescue my soul;
Save me because of Your mercy.
For there is no mention of You in death;
In Sheol, who will praise You?
—Psalm 6

For many ancient Israelites, death was an ending. The dead were silent and cut off from existence. Generally speaking, you just died. That was it.

Belief began to shift among some Jews a few centuries before Jesus. Texts like Daniel introduce a new idea: the dead will rise again. Not as ghosts in Sheol, but as embodied persons restored for judgment.

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake;
Some shall live forever,
Others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.
—Daniel 12:2

This is the first clear biblical vision of resurrection and postmortem judgment. It marks a theological turning point—one that would shape later Jewish thought and, eventually, the world Jesus inherited.

There is, of course, debate around Jesus’ beliefs, and his views on the afterlife are no exception. I read Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart Ehrman, who argues strongly for an apocalyptic historical Jesus—an expectation that God was about to intervene dramatically in history. This model greatly influences what he has to say about Jesus’ belief in the afterlife, which makes sense, because the afterlife is central to these apocalyptic views. A lot of my readers aren’t fans of Ehrman and I understand why. I find his beliefs to be shocking, but he always comes to them through evidence.

According to Ehrman, Jesus believed that very soon God would send the Son of Man, raise the dead, judge the living and the dead, destroy the wicked, and welcome the righteous into the kingdom of God. In the past, instead of saying “destroy the wicked,” I’ve said “send the wicked to Hell.” Ehrman argues this is not what Jesus meant. The wicked would not be eternally tortured. They would be wiped out. Annihilated. They would just be dead.

As for the righteous, being welcomed into the kingdom of God is not the same as entering modern Heaven. The kingdom, in Jesus’ vision, was on earth. The righteous would live in bodies—transformed bodies, but bodies nonetheless. This is different from the later idea of disembodied souls ascending to a celestial realm.

Ehrman describes Jesus’ eschatology as more horizontal than vertical. Not up versus down, but this age versus the age to come. If Ehrman is right, Jesus didn’t believe you went to Heaven or Hell when you died. You died. Later, you would be raised. In the meantime, you were dead.

Ehrman’s argument is complex, but one key point concerns Gehenna. When Jesus speaks of being sent to Gehenna, Ehrman argues he is not describing Hell in the modern sense. Gehenna was a real valley outside Jerusalem, associated in the Hebrew Bible with child sacrifice (2 Kings 23:10). It later became a symbol of divine judgment, but not necessarily eternal conscious torment.

Translations are important here. The NRSV often changes Gehenna to Hell. The NAB preserves the term Gehenna. I think the latter is the better translation. Gehenna was not an underground torture chamber ruled by Satan. In some Jewish apocalyptic literature, such as 1 Enoch, it is a place where the wicked are judged and destroyed.

The accursed valley is for those accursed forever; here will gather together all those accursed ones… Here shall they be gathered together, and here shall be their judgment in the last days.
—1 Enoch 27:1–3

Jesus mentions Gehenna repeatedly:

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off… it is better for you to enter life maimed than to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire…”
—Mark 9:43–47

“Fear the one who, after he has killed, has authority to throw into Gehenna.”
—Luke 12:4–5

“How can you escape being sentenced to Gehenna?”
—Matthew 23:33

It is easy to see why people equate Gehenna with Hell. “Unquenchable fire” sounds like eternal torment. But Ehrman argues Jesus was speaking in the language of apocalyptic destruction. Gehenna is where enemies of God are eliminated—not tortured forever, but erased.

So, again, Ehrman argues Jesus didn’t believe you went to Heaven or Hell after death. Instead, when you died, you just died, but soon God was going to raise the dead. If you were righteous, you would be raised and welcomed into the kingdom of God that was now on Earth. You would be in your body, in an exalted form—so no pain or suffering. It would be beautiful eternal existence. When he says Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, this is essentially what he means. The end of the world was coming soon. But according to Ehrman, the real Jesus was not saying that when you died, you’d go up to Heaven to meet him. Not at all. When you died, you were simply dead until the day of judgement, where you would be raised. From there you either went into the kingdom of God or were annihilated.

There are some quotes from the Bible that seem to certainly prove Ehrman wrong. An example is when Jesus speaks to the man crucified beside him:

And he said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
—Luke 23:43

There’s also the rich man and Lazarus:

Now it happened that the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s arms; and the rich man also died and was buried. And in Hades he raised his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his arms.
—Luke 16:22

Ehrman argues that Jesus never said this, but instead, it was invented by the author of the Gospel of Luke. Luke is newer, further away from Jesus. According to Ehrman, by the time Luke was being written, apocalyptic expectation was starting to diminish, and more modern belief in Heaven and Hell was beginning to form.

I don’t know if Ehrman is right, but he makes a compelling argument. I listened to a podcast where James Tabor (also an acclaimed Bible scholar) discussed this subject, and he seemed to hold similar views. I’m confident though there are many who see it differently and I hope to read books from different perspectives in the near future. One thing is quite clear though: this is a complicated subject. You would think that the Bible would be pretty clear about its belief in the afterlife, but I find it is not. There are a lot of quotes that seem to be referring to an image of a modern Heaven and Hell, but this is largely because our brains are trained to interpret it this way. Fiery judgement at the end of times sounds like Hell, but depending on the context, that could be something quite different.

Slowly, in my pursuit of the historical Jesus, I am discovering myself. By searching for the historical Jesus, I’m searching for my own view of the afterlife. Nothingness at death scares me. This sometimes frustrates people. They insist there is nothing to fear in nonexistence. It will be like before you were born, they say. Their logic is sound. If my consciousness ends, then there will be no pain, no anxiety, no dread. I simply will not be.

It doesn’t matter. The thought still terrifies me. I can’t reason myself out of it. Fear is not philosophical.

Many atheists argue that life can be just as meaningful without Heaven as with it. Intellectually, I understand the argument. Practically, I struggle to feel it. I’m not saying atheists cannot live meaningful lives. Not certainly. I’m saying it is difficult, for me, to see how meaning ultimately holds in a universe that ends in oblivion. If death is final, if consciousness collapses into nothing, I can’t help but ask: what is the point, really?

Christian thought has long linked meaning to continuity: that the self persists, that identity is not a temporary pattern in matter but something God remembers, preserves, and restores in Heaven. If I continue after death—if I retain memory, if I remain a subject who can love, be loved, and behold—then my existence has never-ending narrative. My life is not merely a flicker but a chapter in something larger.

Heaven, in that sense, is a metaphysical validation. It says: this person is for forever. Without that, I feel nervous. A finite life can be intense, beautiful, morally serious—but it is still finite. Oblivion erases the self.

I know the counterarguments. Meaning can be local, contingent, self-made. But I find myself drawn, perhaps irrationally, to a thicker vision of meaning—one in which consciousness is not an evolutionary accident that flickers and vanishes, but a participant in something forever enduring.

Works Cited

• Art: “Christ in Hell” by Sascha Schneider (1895)

• New American Standard Bible

• Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart Ehrman

• Biblical Time Machine Podcast featuring James Tabor