Bible Review, December 1995
Features
The Search for (the wrong) Jesus
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 Highly publicized forays into the search for...Read more ›
Erasing History
The minimalist assault on ancient Israel
The recent discovery at Tel Dan of a ninth-century B.C.E. inscription—the first extra-biblical reference to the House of David—is causing extraordinary contortions among scholars who have maintained that the Bible’s history of the early Israelite monarchy is simply fiction. According to these scholars, the history of the...Read more ›
A Gospel Among the Scrolls?
Scholar claims to have identified a fragment of Mark among the Dead Sea scrolls and the oldest fragment of Matthew
On December 24, 1994, the Times of London ran a front-page story entitled “Oxford papyrus is ‘eyewitness record of the life of Christ.’” The article reported the claim that three papyrus fragments of Matthew’s Gospel in Magdalen College, Oxford, date to the mid-first century C.E. Instead of...Read more ›