032033 Of the Roman emperors after Constantine, only Julian (331–363) rejected Christianity in favor of the pagan gods. A nephew of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Julian incurred the...

018 Scholars know it, but most lay people don’t. The first two and a half verses of the Book of Ezra (Ezra 1:1–3a) are identical to the last two verses of the second Book of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36:22–23). These repeated verses at the end of...

030031 031 Archaeological artifacts do not interpret themselves. Here’s a case in point: Some 40 relatively small altars were found in at...

038039 “tradition (which is a product of oblivion and memory)” —Jorge Luis Borges The Exodus from Egypt is a focal point of ancient Israelite religion. Virtually every kind of religious...

023 If the Bible is the ineffable word of God, then it makes sense that all truth is to be found in it. An early rabbinic sage by the delightful name of Ben Bag-Bag said, “Turn it and turn it again, for all things are in it.”1 The history of...

028 I believe that we are ready for a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. We now have sufficient ancient texts and critical tools to improve the Hebrew text that has come down to us as the textus receptus, the Masoretic Text, or MT...

In 1883, antiquities dealer Moses Shapira presented to the watching world several scroll fragments that he claimed were an ancient biblical manuscript. Yet the manuscript was quickly decried as a forgery. Although its authenticity has been reappraised recently, biblical scholars Ronald S. Hendel and Matthieu Richelle argue—with old and new evidence—that the Shapira Scrolls are forgeries.

052 053 The search for the historical patriarchs of Genesis has taken some dizzying turns in the last half-century. From the 1940s through the 1960s, scholars proclaimed that the patriarchal...

020 The first half of this decade has been a busy one for questers after the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar capped a decade of self-promotion with the publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.1...