These humble blog posts contain much original thinking, less-than fully baked arguments, and a variety of flaws. Nevertheless, every thread here should be worth picking up and improving. Although I cannot possibly finish all of these erstwhile inquiries and reconstructions, it is my profound hope that someone, someday, will do so. There's some good raw ore down here. Feel free to claim a chunk and start refining it.
My original goal was to expand the context for faith-based reading of Christian scripture. As I learned gradually that Christian scholars are profoundly disinterested in combining orthodox faith with historical reasoning, I began thinking differently. Imagine a team of historians constructing multiple conditionally plausible (albeit mutually exclusive) hypotheses that believers and unbelievers can engage, comparatively, altogether. For instance, please consider An Atheistic Hypothesis about Historical Magi, in which a bizarre coincidence inspires Joseph to believe Mary's lie, and the combination of his faith and her desire for silence winds up having a profound psychological effect on the kid. See also my page on Theory & Method, in which I argue that reconstructing the authorial vision, in context and as a whole, should be a necessary prerequisite before judgments about historicity.
The following posts are grouped by topic, with a general description above each. A great deal of my focus has been to determine a basic chronology for the years 9 BCE to 70 CE, beginning with classical history and weaving in the events purported within New Testament narrative content.
The topics themselves are loosely organized by their overall chronological sequence, as you will quickly recognize while scrolling down from here.
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I. EVENTS DURING THE REIGN OF AUGUSTUS
The Multiple Phases of Herod's Temple Project: Construction jobs are notoriously flexible situations, defying neat chronological definition. Should one mark the "beginning" of work on Herod's Temple by his announced promise to rebuild it, or by the log cutting and stone hewing phase, or by the first tearing down of the previous sanctum? The date of Herod's promise according to Josephus may not align with the first year of construction, according to John 2:20. Furthermore, we have a fire question and a paving question. In any case, being under construction for nine decades does not mean that construction was continuous. Here are seven posts where I raise these questions and more, suggesting possible solutions.
Confusion about the Census of Quirinius: Whatever Luke 2:2 is supposed to mean, the Proconsul was elsewhere during the years around Herod's death. We know a lot about his fascinating career, including his registration of property in Archelaus's vacated territories.
By contrast, the Lukan census (if historical) surveyed residents across both Judea and Galilee. For these and other reasons, any hypothesis about a Roman census of Herod's subjects (c. 9-6 BCE) must treat Quirinius as irrelevant. Explaining what Luke 2:2 means would be a entirely unrelated exercise.
Events Related to the Childhood of Jesus: If the historical Joseph was indeed frightened about taking Jesus anywhere near Archelaus (Matt 2:22), and if Joseph maintained that concern until Archelaus was deposed and exiled (6 CE), then I submit we may take that persisting avoidance of Archelaus to explain Luke's implicit suggestion (2:42) that Jesus stayed home from the Passover until he was twelve. Furthermore, this hypothesis offers a new starting point for dating the nativity, because if Jesus is not yet thirteen at the Passover of 7 CE, then his birth occurred sometime between Passover of 7 BCE and 6 BCE.
II. EVENTS DURING THE REIGN OF TIBERIUS
The Accession of Tiberius in 14 CE: There were some ways in which Augustus shared power with Tiberius for a year or so before his death, and that unique situation has been cited within some procrustean arguments about Luke 3:1 and the "fifteenth year" of Tiberius's reign. The post of 9/23/08 reviews options about how Luke might have been counting, which seem inconclusive. Altogether, my hope here was simply that posting a broader view of the historical question (within its own context and for its own value) would make special pleading more difficult for anyone so inclined.
Events Related to Herod Antipas: I explored several issues in this collection of blog posts, including nearby client-dominions similar to Galilee, the timing of Livia's death, the ambitions of Antipas and Herodias, the privileges afforded by their connections in Rome, and how severely their prospects may have changed after the death of Sejanus. The biggest question involves extradition from Galilee, primarily regarding John's arrest, with further implications regarding whether Jesus became too hot for Antipas after John's death (and probably after Sejanus's death as well). As will be clear, several of these posts stand alone. The puzzle about Piso has to do with determining when Agrippa departed from his sister and her husband (their uncle). The post about Salome argues for a young girl doing an innocent dance. The notion of Antipas having his birthday around the timing of Purim is a hunch based on Mark 6:23 and 6:39.
The Public Preaching of John the Baptizer: John is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, but my main interest remains chronological. The strongest Gospel traditions appear to correlate Jesus's popular movement with the time of John's imprisonment, and each synoptic narrative seems to contextualize their episodic material fittingly within the temporal framework of that audience expectation. Certain narrated events only make sense (as constructed) within one specific phase of that three phase timeline (before, during, and after the imprisonment).
The fourth Gospel complicates that neat correlation, which underscores that collective memory can be a bit fuzzy. People remembered John "comes before" and Jesus "comes after" and the rest of the stories get preserved in (or written into) that matrix.
To be clear, these are not issues that boost our confidence in historicity. These are ways of sussing out what the Gospel writers represent in terms of chronological development. The direct reference or propositional statement is one way to purport factual claims, and this type of overall temporal framework, as an aspect of narrative representation, is another.
Finding Chronology in the Gospels: Above and beyond the famous handful of basic historical references (Augustus, Herod, Quirinius, Tiberius, etc), we find aspects of contingency represented at many points within Gospel narratives. Instead of formal dates, think of landmark events: Herod's death, John's arrest, John's beheading. Likewise, Jesus's obscurity preceded his earliest following, which preceded his growing popularity. The two most basic identifying facts about Jesus (popular Galilean, killed in Jerusalem) provides an implicit chronology within audience memory, within which the synoptic storylines constrain themselves, and against which the fourth gospel deliberately pushes.
Connecting the big dots was easy. Thereafter, my larger focus became how to contest a groupthink among NT scholars that explicit reference was necessary before drawing any conclusions about basic event sequence. To the contrary, causal necessities make plain that Jesus's obscurity preceded his earliest followers, who preceded the large crowds, which led to opposition by some authority figures, which led to larger political controversies, which led to his death. This should seem obvious, and yet NT scholars often fail to distinguish between narrative sequence and chronological sequence - perhaps a bit less often now than when I started this work.
It should be noted that some of my studies in this area helped prime my thinking for conclusions I would later draw about event sequence in human remembering.
Comparing the Most Plausible Jesus Timelines: Too many published conclusions have been too quick to dismiss inconvenient alternative options, stacking up their subordinate conclusions like a linear column of sums, to be added together. Unfortunately, the problem of Jesus Chronology is more like a sudoku puzzle. Any conclusion about one parameter necessarily alters the range of possibilities for all others. Settling one's mind on two-thirds of the problem can trigger procrustean scrambling to justify the rest of one's argument.
The following posts lay out possibilities for interpreting the hard data but my main focus has been to compare the constructed hypotheses. In the most recent installment, I showed how 48 possible timelines can be whittled down a bit by focusing on the most likely conclusions. In the end, I find four plausible timelines and a question that must be settled comparatively.
There is no reason to pretend exegetical arguments about snippets of text, by themselves, are sufficient for justifying a complex chronological reconstruction.
The Jewish Community of Nazareth: The first step towards reconstructing a personal background for Jesus is to consider the context of his upbringing. The earliest portion of this bloc (the fourteen part series, below) was originally a key part of my Jesus project represented in the next bloc (further below).
These twenty posts as a group represent my attempts to consider the town and the synagogue, in their own right, while the next bloc of posts is all about Jesus himself, during that so-called silent era.
Jesus - The Nazareth Years: By accepting fact claims that support logical implications about Jesus's personal background, but refusing to engage theological reasoning or religious assumptions, two central questions emerged. First, how could the twelve year old who astonished Jerusalem elders then grow up WITHOUT similarly astonishing his lifelong neighbors until two decades later? "Where did he learn this?" they ask. My answer in 2009 was that he learned it in Nazareth by listening, paying attention, and reflecting silently. (See the 14 part series in the bloc of posts just above this one.)
The other main plank of this inquiry was the baptism story. Matthew has God say "I am pleased" about Jesus. Therefore, anything Matthew has Jesus tell us about how to please God can be taken, implicitly, to reflect Jesus's own lifestyle and ethic in the previous decades. I simplified this argument years later by observing the "sermon" (Matt 5-7) ends by contrasting Jesus's speaking against the hypocrites. Obviously, Matthew implies Jesus spoke from experience.
Combining these threads is more challenging still: if he lived by that high standard, reflected constantly on scripture, "grew in favor" with everyone... and yet nobody thought he was preachy!?!?! To do all that and maintain basic psychological stability, he must have sought comfort from God and he must have believed (whether in truth or delusion) that he was finding comfort from God. He must have closed the door when he prayed, taken long walks alone, and developed a strong sense of his own inner righteousness as a matter of personal devotion to God.
None of that is directly stated by anything in the Gospels but it seems to be firmly implied. My conclusion, that Jesus's origins reflect devout Judaism and personal mysticism, would have been unacceptable during centuries of Institutional Christendom, which may help explain why no one went looking for these echoes of the so-called "silent years" until now.
Jesus - Context & Construction: One hallmark of constructive historiography is identifying patterns, like how Jesus's openness to being rebuked aligns with his insistence that the twelve should not become overlords. We can also connect dots and fill gaps, as I do while inferring that Jesus moved his parents and siblings from Nazareth to Capernaum, and later skipped Joseph's funeral to spare his family the from his thronging crowds. A third hallmark of constructive work is contextualized exegesis, where the most valuable interpretation may not be what best supports institutional doctrine but must absolutely avoid anachronistic assumptions; see, e.g., my consideration of "God's kingdom" in the context of ancient dominions. These kinds of readings keep one eye on their most plausible "fit" to the real world, and they are most effective when we focus on large swaths of similar material across the four Gospels, as opposed to the typically atomized reading which, notoriously, have enabled a great many post hoc rationalizations.
Temptations in the Wilderness: My 2010 series about Jesus and the devil was a ghastly train wreck, a failed thought experiment collapsing repeatedly under the weight of its own absurdities. But then, that was somewhat the point of the exercise. I can see now that my goals at the time were (1) inviting believers and skeptics into pluaralistic hypothesizing together, and (2) demonstrating that creative interpretation can precede judgment, not for the purpose of special pleading but for the purpose of generating multiple scenarios which we may then judge comparatively. Those goals were poorly communicated because they were not fully developed in my own thinking, as yet.
Despite these flaws, the basic thought experiment could become worthwhile with some improvements, I daresay. It's nothing new to suggest we can extract at least some truth from what seems legendary and fantastical, but it has been sad to realize how many believers are unwilling to think critically about realistic scenarios. Whatever claims each of us can accept, personally, my preference is always to be constructive instead of reductive, as much as one can.
The Nazareth Homecoming(s): The traditional question -- whether Luke's story also happened, in addition to the Mark/Matthew story, or whether Luke concocted a new story based on the old one -- illustrates several failures typical of NT scholarship on Gospel narrative content: treating text as a transcript of the past; atomistic exegetical focus; prioritizing judgment about historicity before a holistic interpretation of both passages; judgment as goal rather than as a starting point; and separating "literary" from "historical" approaches.
In reality, Jesus might have gone home any number of times during the years of his public ministry. As constructed literature, Luke's story represents a vastly different occasion. If Luke cribbed two bits of dialogue, for whatever reason, that does not negate the uniqueness of his dramatic representation. Whether truthful or fictitious, Luke purports a violent attack against Jesus alone, while Mark & Matthew depict a later visit that was peaceful because Jesus brought twelve bodyguards with him. In my view, accepting both stories means we know about two of potentially several times when Jesus revisited Nazareth during his ministry.
On a separate subject, Luke carefully avoids raising an obvious point of contrast between the reactions to Jesus in Jerusalem and Nazareth, but that point of contrast is something we should definitely question, ourselves. (Scroll up to see Jesus - The Nazareth Years.)
Events During the Passion Week: I have never been interested in working out a micro-chronology of Good Friday and Easter, and there are various reasons why the date of Jesus's Crucifixion cannot be considered determinative for working out the chronology of Jesus's ministry years. However, I do care about determining the *month* of a given year's Passover moon, as opposed to the precise day. To that end, I have argued that ruling Sadducees must have scheduled each festival season well enough in advance so that traveling worshipers could make reliable plans. Although certain rabbis indeed could have protested when the doves were too small, or the grain was not ripe enough, the Sanhedrin could not have held up the date of the festival at a moment's notice. Wealthy people in transit could not have been notified, and the local authorities very much needed to safeguard those tourism denarii that were (presumably) Jerusalem's largest source of annual revenue.
I also sketched brief hypotheses about a few minor events that took place during Jesus's last week in Jersualem, like Judas being the "other" disciple in Caiphas's courtyard, and the disciples choosing John to keep Mary safe at the cross, because they could not have all shown up en masse. Another interesting question, sparked for me by the Pharisee's gotcha question about coinage, is whether the poll tax was ostensibly protested as Rome's excuse for ending the sabbatical year land tax exemptions. I didn't get very far with any of these minor questions, but I still find them intriguing.
Jesus's Friends Adore Jesus (John 21): Ancient Greeks knew "phileo" was superior to "agapao" but philology was not my starting point here. It was thinking about this Gospel episode as a part of a narrative whole (even if only as "head cannon"), that initially led me to rethink the Greek verbiage in John 21. An audience who knows other traditions (e.g., Peter's restoration to Jesus in private and Peter's key role in leading the earliest church in Jerusalem) should recognize that Jesus's goal here is to shake Peter out of his reversion to individualism and call him back into community, service, and obedience. In that context, the two verbs for love take on a special relationship, one that happens to align well with their paired usage in John 13-15. Incidentally, I still like my pragmatic suggestion that "153 fish" may represent a tradition of how many followers remained at that time, and therefore the number of "sheep" Peter needed to feed.
Development of Oral and Written Traditions: The composition of the Gospels is the only topic about which New Testament scholarship (on the whole) routinely speaks of the past as a developmental process. This correlation makes a great deal of sense because academic professionals know quite well how long it takes to produce publications. My brief foray into this topic began and ended with a few simple pragmatic notions: if 5 to 10 percent of the ancient world was literate, it seems likely at least one early follower of Jesus could write a little bit. In a group with few resources, rare talent often gets pressed into service at moments of communal need, and the synagogue had a longstanding culture of keeping scrolls as communal property. On balance, I suggested Levi (Matthew) the tax collector as the most likely candidate to begin keeping some type of record.
Years later, after my introduction to cognitive memory theory, I began wondering about the origination of oral tradition. My FAQ theory may be the first time someone tried to postulate such development from the starting point, rather than working backwards from the text. The thronging crowds, who could not all receive one-on-one time with Jesus, must have asked many questions of the twelve, and his other close followers. On such occasions, the most natural response would have been to tell stories about Jesus and rehash some of his content. I still want to hear other opinions about what kinds of questions would have been common, and what kinds of answers.
The Earliest Church in Jerusalem: When I first noticed my chronologies leaving less than a year between Jesus's final Passover and Paul's experience on the road to Damascus (necessarily prior to the first Passover Paul spent in Arabia), I checked my math and history work repeatedly. Once I was finally satisfied, I must admit, I was quite pleased to embrace it. Giving less than a year to this period is surprising because Luke spends seven chapters representing that era. The conclusion delights me because I am partial to Luke and his Caesarean compatriots who strongly disliked the behavior of Peter and company in that earliest phase. Furthermore, if the gist of Stephen's speech (structured around the seven Ushpizin) is historical, we can shrink "less than one year" down to less than six months. Less than six months during which Peter used Herod's temple to hold forth until the local authorities (allegedly) expelled all but twelve Christians from Jerusalem.
Sometimes narrative bias is legitimate. I mean both Luke's and my own. My reconstruction is unique largely because of my faith-based but anti-institutional bent. I'm confident Luke's Stephen shares that bent, although Luke's Paul may be more aptly described as one who never stopped kicking at goads. I believe Luke's two years in Caesarea shaped his research. Their experience as second-class citizens under Peter's regime cemented Luke's already deeply Pauline bias. Today, most Christian scholars seem quite at home defending the doctrines of the institutions that trained them, and/or the ones that provide them a salary. We can all nurse our own bias, but a holistic interpretation of Acts should not fail to recognize Luke's bias(es).
The THREE blocs of posts, collected below, elaborate my positions on Luke's Acts, on Peter, and on Stephen.
Paul in Damascus and Arabia (Nabatea): Luke says Paul had to flee from Jewish men in Damascus by going through and down the wall, using rope and a basket. Paul told the Corinthians he used that same trick in that same place to flee from a Nabatean official. Paul told the Galatians he spent time in Arabia and returned to Damascus. If all these statements are true then Paul clearly perturbed the Arabians in between his two visits. He escaped the same way because the trick worked the first time. Acts omits Paul's time in Arabia, I suspect, because Luke wants Paul to seen like a religious outcast, not a worldwide troublemaker.
The situation in Syria was complicated during those years, both politically and militarily, but the upshot for Pauline Chronology is that Aretas would have been less likely to exert power near Damascus any later than 36 CE. The dating of these events also relates to some issues addressed in the next bloc of posts, but reconstructing Paul's "three years" in Arabia (I put it around two and a half years, but including three Passovers) is worth doing for its own sake.
III. EVENTS DURING THE REIGNS OF CALIGULA, CLAUDIUS, & NERO
Paul in Antioch and Galatia: Only one sequence makes good sense of all the data: (1) Peter segregates dinnertime in Antioch and Paul rebukes him; (2) Paul & Barnabas & Titus attend the council of Jerusalem; (3) Meanwhile, the "men from James" who witnessed Paul rebuke Peter travel from Antioch into Galatia, having heard about Paul & Barnabas's work there; (4) Paul & Barnabas & Titus return to Antioch; (5) Barnabas takes Mark to Cyprus; (6) Paul receives word about troubles in Galatia; (7) Paul writes a letter, sending it with Titus & Luke; (8) Titus & Luke deliver the letter in four cities and move on to await Paul at "Troy" (Troas); (9) Paul & Silas wait a short while and then follow into Galatia themselves. (10) Much later, when Paul's letter gets circulated, James evokes and contradicts it.
In contrast, religious apologists on these topics have made embarrassing assumptions over the years, such as: (a) that authoritative church councils really settle all controversies; (b) that letters with similar "theology" are written about the same time; (c) that two anecdotes about the same person cannot be narrated in non-linear sequence; (d) that someone predicting a famine would wait until prices were high and shipping costs were outrageous to send tons of physical grain instead of sending money, early, when the (lucky?) prediction was made.
My arguments for my position, and against authoritarian gaslighting, are below.
The Influence of James, the Lord's Brother: I don't personally care much for the famous epistle, which is fine, because not everything is for me. Despite disliking both James and his letter, however, I have sincerely tried to respect them. After all, Paul showed respect for James, even if Luke (in Acts) really, really did not.
The hypotheses on the epistle which makes the most sense, to me, is that James was writing to non-Christian Jews, scattered across the oikoumene, his goal being to represent the new Jesus sect in the best possible light, for that specific audience. I also happen to think this whole approach fits best as a response to the widespread circulation of Galatians. The Jerusalem here on Earth was James's preferred mother.
My arguments in these posts are not remotely conclusive, but I do point out several ways in which this hypothesis may hold unique explanatory power.
Paul's Aegean Experiments: Religious authoritarians cannot validly synthesize rules for church government based on Paul's work and practice, for two reasons. First, the institutionalized view of professional ministry makes their interpretations deeply anachronistic. Second, Paul's methods changed as he grew in experience.
After Galatia, where the elders appointed with Barnabas had proven utterly worthless against men from James, Paul began leaving someone behind with each new church. Titus stayed in Troas. Luke stayed in Philippi. Timothy stayed in Thessalonica with Silas coming back and forth from Berea. And Paul, in Corinth, finally had time to rethink things. In Ephesus, Paul trained a new generation of extra-local itinerant workers. Philippi finally got elders after more than six years of Luke living among them. In Troas, Paul handed Timothy a list of qualifications and Timothy raced down to Ephesus and brought brand new elders to meet Paul on a beach.
One might suppose Paul had finished the model, but I prefer to observe that Paul kept experimenting to the end, in so far as we know. I don't know many Christians who want to do church like Paul did, but I remain certain that institutional authorities will continue pretending that Paul did things (then) just like they do things (now).
Paul's Roman Era: When Claudius "banished" all Jews from Rome, many winked and nodded and kept their homes on the west side, across the Tiber, which was both outside the official city limits and traditional Jewish district. However, some Roman Jews, like Priscilla and her husband Aquilla, took Claudius too seriously and left Italy altogether. When Claudius died (October 54 CE), Paul and his two serious friends made new plans. They sent Gentile believers from all over the churches to start a new church in Rome.
The rest of this era requires little attention, partly because Luke wrote a lot and partly because Paul was in prison. From Paul's writing to Rome and Paul's dying in Rome, there is neither much to be argued or much from which to build arguments.
My 2009 post sketches out my hypothesis about Titus and Timothy. I still think Paul probably died in the persecution of 64. Any concocted chronologies beyond 64 are baseless speculation, driven by an anachronistic desire to show Timothy "pastoring" in one place for a long time. But if 2 Timothy is authentic, it shows him remaining itinerant.
Paul in General: Here are a few general posts that deal with Paul's career in a longitudinal sense. I was 21 years old when I first hear the idea that Paul's letters might provide greater meaning if we read them in chronological order. That idea prompted me to join an experimental house church and later drove me to construct my own chronology of the New Testament era. Once I set out to do that, I wound up spending far more time on Jesus than on Paul. Nevertheless, reading historical literature in its chronological order is a requisite for holistic interpretation, which in turn should precede critical judgment about historicity.
This concludes my listing of blog posts that sketched out inquiries and reconstructions on various topics, grouped in loose chronological order.