Talk:Jesus/Cited Authors Bios

Archives: /1


 * Previous talk is at /1.
 * Capsule bios are at Jesus/Cited Authors Bios
 * There is an additional bibliography at Talk:Jesus/Historical Jesus/Sources. Do we need to create capsule bios for the authors on that list who don't already have a capsule bio? Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring Talk  TCF  17:57, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

"The pages Jesus/Cited Authors Bios and Jesus/Cited Authors Bios have shown up on User:Bluemoose/Uncategorised good articles a list of uncategorized articles. It is against wikipedia policy to have subpages in the main article space, so could you remove it or copy it to a subpage of you user page? (I don't recommend moving it because that will leave a redirect to user space which is also against policy). --JeffW 02:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)"

As per the above comment, I'm moving this page back to the Talk: space. Arch O. La  Grigory Deepdelver  03:00, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Original Intro
Below I will list what I find out about each scholar on slrubenstein's list, my list and robsteadman's list as I poke around. I'm concentrating first on pinning down references where the scholars listed affirm what is in our paragraph, deny the existence of Jesus or question it. Please feel free to add to it.

Further Musings
Since this page started, we've added some others. This is a good development, IMHO, since it provides a handy reference for us as we develop this page. Please feel free to add to it, but let's try to stay focused on who these folk are and not what we think of them, beyond how we evaluate their credentials. --CTSWyneken 15:08, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Comments on the Scholarly Opinion of the Non-Existence Hypothesis
Robert E. Van Voorst, Professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary, in Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000, has written:


 * "Many books and essays -- by my count, over one hundred -- in the past two hundred years have fervently denied the very existence of Jesus. Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed their arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes or ignore them completely." (p. 6)


 * "The issue of the nonhistoricity of Jesus is indeed a side current in New Testament study." (p. 7)


 * At the end of the eighteenth century, some disciples of the radical English Deist Lord Bolingbroke began to spread the idea that Jesus had never existed. Voltaire, no friend of traditional Christianity, sharply rejected such conclusions, commenting that those who deny the existence of Jesus show themselves "more ingenious than learned." (Note 12: F. M. Voltaire, "De Jesus," from Dieu et les hommes, in Oeuvres complétes de Voltaire (Paris: Société Littéaire-Typographique, 1785) 33:273. He accepted the historicity of Jesus (p. 279).)" (p. 8)

G. A. Wells, The Jesus Legend Chicago: Open Court, 1996., p. xxii.

"The question 'Did Jesus exist?' has often been asked, and is normally answered with an unqualified 'yes' and a sense of outrage that the matter should even have been raised."

Michael Grant. Jesus: an Historian's Review of the Gospels New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977. pp. 199-200.

"If we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned." --CTSWyneken 17:32, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

General Jewish Historians
I checked some of the standard one-volume Jewish histories.


 * Howard Sachar, a professor of history at George Washington University, wrote a one volume history in which he talks about Jesus as a charaismatic preacher in the Galilee
 * Marx and Margolis's A History of the Jewish People also refers to Jesus in this way. This may be the most frequently-cited one volume history.
 * For Rob Steadman's sake, let's be up-front about Margolis's religious background, which Steadman claims inevitably biases the historian. Max Leopold Margolis was born Mordechai Yom Tov Margolis in the village of Merecz in the Russian province of Vilna (now Lithuania) on October 15, 1866. Margolis received his early Jewish education from his father who was a rabbi. Margolis began studying secular subjects such as mathematics with his self-taught father and also received additional training in Russian and other subjects from a local priest in Merecz. In Berlin, Margolis studied at the Leibniz Gymnasium, where he received a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin. Margolis was consistently the top student in Greek and graduated with distinction in 1885. Margolis began his graduate studies at Columbia College in New York in 1889, received his M.A degree in 1890, and only one year later in 1891 successfully completed his Ph.D., the first to be awarded in the Oriental Department. Writing in Latin, which apparently was stronger than his English at the time, Margolis submitted a text-critical study of Rashi's commentary on tractate Eruvin of the Talmud, under the supervision of Richard Gottheil. From 1893 until 1898, Margolis taught Hebrew and Semitic languages at the Hebrew Union College, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Margolis departed HUC in 1899 for the University of California in Berkeley where he assumed the position of assistant professor of Semitics. One year later, Margolis was awarded an associate professorship. Margolis had left Berkeley shortly before his marriage to return to Cincinnati where he had been recruited by HUC's new president, Kaufmann Kohler. From September 1905 to March 1907, Margolis held the position of Professor of Hebrew Exegesis at the Hebrew Union College. Unfortunately, the return to Cincinnati did not prove felicitous. Margolis left HUC within two years due to personality conflicts with the new president. They also differed substantively on a number of important issues such as the nature of the curriculum, Margolis' desire for an unfettered teaching hand, and his political outlook (Margolis was a Zionist). After leaving HUC, Margolis spent one year abroad in Europe from 1907 into 1908, visiting Berlin, Belgium and Holland and several of Europe's famous libraries. Margolis returned to the United States in 1908 to accept the position of secretary of the editorial board for the Jewish Publication Society's proposed new translation of the Hebrew Bible into English. Margolis eventually became editor-in-chief of this complex undertaking, which was finally published in 1917. On March 28, 1909, Margolis was unanimously elected by the Board of Governors of the newly created Dropsie College in Philadelphia to the position of Professor of Biblical Philology. Margolis remained on the faculty of Dropsie College until his death in 1932.
 * I know less about Alexander Marx, but he was a historian, and the head of the department of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He was the son-in-law of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffman.
 * In Louis Finkelstein's 3 volume "The Jews", Judah Goldin has an article on late-Hellenic/early-Rabbinic history in which he too refers to Jesus as a charismatic Jewish preacher.
 * Judah Goldin is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Oriental Studies. He is a very famous professor of Jewish history.
 * Solomon Grayzel wrote a very popular one volume history of the Jews in which he briefly talks about the historical Jesus.
 * Biography: Solomon Grayzel was born in Minsk on February 18, 1896. He and his family came to the United States in 1908 and settled in Brooklyn. Grayzel received a BA from the City College of New York in 1917, an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1920, was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1921, and earned a PhD in history from Dropsie College in 1926. While working on his doctorate Grayzel took his first and only full-time pulpit position at Congregation Beth El in Camden, New Jersey. After receiving his PhD Grayzel left for Europe to continue his research on the Church and the Jews. His dissertation, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (1198-1254) was published in 1933. In 1928 Grayzel returned to the United States and took a teaching position at Gratz College in Philadelphia. In 1939 he became the editor of the Jewish Publication Society, a position which he held until 1966. On leaving JPS he joined the faculty of Dropsie University. Grayzel is the author of A History of the Contemporary Jews From 1900 to the Present (1960), A History of the Jews From the Babylonian Exile to the Present (1968), and numerous articles and essays on Jews and the medieval church, his field of specialization.

Now, granted, none of these historians are arguing one way or another as to whether Jesus existed. They all simply take it for granted that he existed. Mention of him occupies no more than a paragraph or two in their books, so his existence is not in any way central to their books. But surely, their "faith" (or what we may speculate is their faith) can't bias them towards believing Jesus existed. Slrubenstein | Talk 09:36, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Bruno Bauer
A 19th Century disciple of Hegel and a compatriot of Marx and Engels. He is credited with the Marcan Priority hypothesis and with coining the phrase "Messianic Secret." He is one of the founders of the original "Jesus Myth" school. He is worth citing on the minority position note, when we create it. Since he is 19th century, however, he does not contribute to our knowledge of the current state of Jesus research. (for example, he dates Mark's composition to 125 AD/CE, not 40-75 AD/CE as the field currently does. --CTSWyneken 04:22, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Shaye Cohen
Shaye J.D. Cohen is the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University. This is one of the oldest and most distinguished professorships of Jewish studies in the United States. Before arriving at Harvard in July 2001, Prof. Cohen was for ten years the Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Prof. Cohen began his career at the Jewish Theological Seminary where he was ordained and for many years was the Dean of the Graduate School and Shenkman Professor of Jewish History. He received his Ph.D. in Ancient History, with distinction, from Columbia University in 1975.

The focus of Prof. Cohen's research is the boundary between Jews and gentiles and between Judaism and its surrounding cultures. What makes a Jew a Jew, and what makes a non-Jew a non-Jew? Can a non-Jew become a Jew, and can a Jew become a non-Jew? How does the Jewish boundary between Jew and non-Jew compare with the Jewish boundary between male Jew and female Jew? The Jewish reaction to Hellenism in antiquity and to Christianity from ancient to modern times consisted of both resistance and accommodation, and both stances had far-reaching influence on the history of Judaism. On these and other subjects Prof. Cohen has written or edited nine books and over fifty articles. He is currently working on a study of circumcision and gender in Judaism. He is perhaps best known for From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (1987), which is widely used as a textbook in colleges and adult education, and his recent The Beginnings of Jewishness (1999). He has also appeared on educational television, including From Jesus to Christ and Nova on PBS and Mysteries of the Bible on A&E.

Prof. Cohen has received several honors for his work, including an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary and various fellowships. He has been honored by appointment as Croghan Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion (Williams College), the Louis Jacobs Lecturer (Oxford University), the David M. Lewis Lecturer (Oxford University), Lady Davis Visiting Professor of Jewish History (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), the Block Lecturer (Indiana University), the Roland Visiting Lecturer (Stanford University) and the Pritchett Lecturer (University of California, Berkeley). He appeared on a Nova episode as an expert on Jewish history. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:15, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

John Dominic Crossan
Crossan, a Catholic Priest, is Professor of Biblical Studies at DePaul University of Chicago. He is a prolific writer from the higher critical school of New Testament studies, a member of the Jesus Seminar and frequent guest scholar on television specials related to the life of Jesus, along with Paula Fredrikson and Paul L. Maier.--CTSWyneken 22:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Bart Ehrman
James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Previously taught at Rutgers University (UNC and RU are both secular, state universities). PhD. Princeton Theological Seminary (Magna Cum Laude). He has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity, having written or edited nineteen books, numerous articles, and dozens of book reviews. Among his most recent books are a college-level textbook on the New Testament, two anthologies of early Christian writings, a study of the historical Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet (Oxford University Press), and a Greek-English Edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press). He has served as President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical literature, chair of the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society, book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and editor of the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (Scholars Press). He currently serves as co-editor of the series New Testament Tools and Studies (E. J. Brill) and on several other editorial boards for monographs in the field. Winner of numerous university awards and grants, Prof. Ehrman is the recipient of the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:01, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Jack Finegan
Education: Drake University, B.A., 1928, M.A., 1929, B.D., 1930; Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, B.D., 1931, M.Th., 1932; University of Berlin, Lic. Theol., 1934. Fulbright research scholar in India, 1952-53; LL.D., Drake University, 1953; Litt.D., Chapman College, 1964.

Pastor of First Christian Church, Ames, IA, 1934-39; Professor at Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa, 1939-46; Frederick Billings Professor of New Testament History and Archeology, Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, CA, 1946-75; Pastor, University Christian Church, Berkeley, 1949-74; Sierra Nevada College, humanities instructor, 1986- Prolific author. --CTSWyneken 15:40, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Paula Fredriksen
A William Goodwin Aurelio Professor at Boston University (a secular university). B.A., Wellesley College (1973); Theol. Diploma, Oxford University (1974); Ph.D., Princeton University (1979). Previously taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pittsburgh. Lady Davis Visiting Professor, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1994-95). Professor Fredriksen specializes in the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, from the Late Second Temple period to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Besides her books on Augustine (Augustine on Romans, 1982) and on Jesus and Christian tradition (From Jesus to Christ. The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, 1988), she has written extensively on conversion, apocalypticism, Paul and his interpreters, and Jewish/Gentile relations in Late Antiquity. In 1999 she received a national Jewish Book Award for her most recent publication, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (Knopf). Slrubenstein | Talk 14:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Paul L. Maier
Maier is Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University. His Ph.D. is from the University of Basel (1957). A graduate of Harvard University (M.A., 1954) and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis (M. Div., 1955), he pursued post-graduate studies on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Universities of Heidelberg, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland. After studying at the latter under famed scholars Karl Barth and Oscar Cullmann, he received the Doctor of Philosophy degree summa cum laude in 1957.

In 1984, Dr. Maier was named "Professor of the Year," as one of America's 25 finest educators, by the Washington-based Council for Advancement and Support of Education. He currently travels and lectures widely and appears frequently on national radio and television.

Dr. Maier's is a specialist in correlating data from the ancient world with the New Testament. His research includes a variety of methodologies involved in manuscript and text analysis, archaeology, and comparison of sacred and secular sources from the first century A.D. His scholarly monographs include: (ed., trans, with G. Cornfeld) Josephus – The Jewish War (Zondervan, 1982),(ed., trans.) Josephus – The Essential Works (Kregel, 1995),(ed., trans.) Eusebius – The Church History (Kregel, 1999) He appeared as a guest historian on several television specials on the New Testament including: "Peter Jennings Reporting: Jesus and Paul--The Word and the Witness" (2004)

Michael Martin
"Michael Martin is a professor of philosophy at Boston University. His books include Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Temple University Press, 1990) and The Case Against Christianity (Temple University Press, 1991). His most recent attack on the Christian faith comes in his article The Transcendental Argument for the Non Existence of God (Autumn 1996, The New Zealand Rationalist)." Michael Martin, "Responses to Atheist Philosopher, Michael Martin" Reformed Apologetics Center for Reformed Apologetics and Theology, 2002. Accessed 10 February 2006.  He also is not a historian, therefore, not a scholar in this field. We can quote him in support of the minority position, however, since he qualified as an "academic."

''Disclaimer: this is from a very partisan site. When reading it, you need to do so with a grain of salt. It was the only bio CTSWyneken could find online about him.''

John P. Meier
Meier is Professor of Theology at Notre Dame University. He has served from time to time as an editor for Catholic Biblical Quarterly and New Testament Studies. --CTSWyneken 00:45, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Msgr. Meier is a professor of New Testament in the Biblical Studies Department at Catholic University of America, where he has taught since 1984. He holds a doctorate in sacred Scripture (1976) from the Biblical Institute in Rome, where he graduated summa cum laude and received the papal gold medal. He had received the same honors in 1968 when he graduated from the theology program at Gregorian University. He is a former president of the Catholic Biblical Association (1990-91), has authored numerous books and is widely published in a variety of journals and reference works. In a recent Catholic University interview with St. Anthony Messenger, Msgr. Meier explains why he considers studying Jesus of history to be worthwhile and what he sees as the serious shortcomings of some scholars studying the historical Jesus.
 * Q: Why do we need Jesus scholarship in the first place?


 * A: The need is in the eye of the beholder. If one is a professional historian, then one is interested of course in the great figures of history that had an impact on history, whether one believes in them or not....I don’t think we need any more apologetics for a quest for the historical Jesus as a historical discipline, say in the department of history, than you would have to apologize for trying to find out something about the historical Socrates or the historical Plato or the historical Mohammed. I think a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that people claim they are doing a quest for the historical Jesus when de facto they’re doing theology, albeit a theology that is indeed historically informed. Go all the way back to Reimarus, through Schleiermacher, all the way down the line through Bultmann, Kasemann, Bornkamm. These are basically people who are theologians, doing a more modern type of Christology [a faith-based study of Jesus Christ].


 * Q: Can historians address the Resurrection, then?


 * A: We can verify as historians that Jesus existed and that certain events reported in the Gospels happened in history, yet historians can never prove the Resurrection in the same way. Why not? Perhaps some fundamentalists would claim you can. Apart from fundamentalists, perhaps even some more conservative Catholic theologians would claim you could. I myself along with most questers for the historical Jesus—and I think a fair number of Catholic theologians as well—would say the Resurrection stands outside of the sort of questing by way of historical, critical research that is done for the life of the historical Jesus, because of the nature of the Resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is certainly supremely real. However, not everything that is real either exists in time and space or is empirically verifiable by historical means.
 * I interpret this interview to mean that Meier is a devoutly religious Catholic, but that he sees a clear and unbreechable wall between his religious faith and his work as an historian. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:21, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

John Mackinnon Robertson
According to the wikipedia article, a Scottish Journalist and rationalist. He is not a historian, therefore his work does not count as scholarship in this field. As a philosopher, we can quote him in support of the minority position since he may qualify as an "academic." --CTSWyneken 02:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Bertrand Russell
Noted twentieth century philosopher.

I think Homestarmy or CTSWyneken raised this question. Bertrand Russell definitely accepted the historical existence of Jesus. In his book, A History of Western Philosophy he states on p. 739 that Jesus is (was) one of his heroes. That said, I still think we should privilege what historians have argued concerning history, rather than what a philosopher accepts as history (except perhaps the history of philosophy!) Slrubenstein | Talk 15:04, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

E.P. Sanders
Professor, Duke University (secular private university) Department of religion. Received his Th.d. from Union Seminary (NY) 1966. In 1990, he was awarded a D. Litt. by the University of Oxford and D.Theol. by the University of Helsinki. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (a secular scholarly institution in the UK, extraordinarily prestigious). The author, co-author or editor of thirteen books, as well as articles in encyclopedias and journals, he has received several awards and prizes, including the Grawemeyer Prize for the best book on religion published in the 1980s (Jesus and Judaism). His work has been translated into nine different languages. He came to Duke from Oxford, where he was from 1984-1990 the Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis and also fellow of the Queen's College. If you go to his Duke University web-page, there is a link to his "intellectual autobiography." Whatever it suggests about his personal religious convictions, it shows that his scholarship has been driven by non-theological or faith-based concerns, and he has employed the same methods used by other historians and classicists regardless of the object of their study. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:11, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Robert E. Van Voorst
Robert E. Van Voorst is professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan. --CTSWyneken 21:50, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Geza Vermes
Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924. He studied in Budapest and in Louvain where he read Oriental history and languages and in 1953 obtained a doctorate in theology with a dissertation on the historical framework of the Dead Sea Scrolls. From 1957 to 1991 he taught in England at the universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1957-65) and Oxford (1965-91). He is now Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, but continues to teach at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. He has edited the Journal of Jewish Studies since 1971, and since 1991 he has been director of the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Professor Vermes is a Fellow of the British Academy (again, incredibly prestigious), the holder of an Oxford D. Litt. and of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Sheffield. Vermes was a Priest in the Sion Order but left the Priesthood and the Catholic Church after his groundbreaking work on the Dead Sea scrolls, no longer considering himself a Christian. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:13, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

G. A. Wells
G. A. Wells is professor emeritus of German Birkbeck College. Interestingly enough, a website claims he believes Jesus existed, but was not crucified under Pontius Pilate. Our copy of the book cited is off the shelf here, so I can't verify that. He could be listed, if true, as supporting at least that Jesus lived. But since, as far as history goes, his opinion does not count as scholarship, we should not use him for that. We can quote him in support of the minority position, however, since he qualified as an "academic." --CTSWyneken 16:23, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

N. T. Wright
Professor of New Testament at Downing College, Cambridge (1978-1981), McGill University, Montreal (1981-1986), Lecturer in New Testament at Worcester College, Oxford,(1986-1993), Anglican Bishop of Durham, England since 2003. --CTSWyneken 15:33, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Thomas L. Thompson
Dr. Thompson [l thompson.htm] is Professor of Old Testament at the University of Copenhagen. He holds a Ph. D. in Biblical Studies and the Ancient Near East. He may well be our missing nonexistence hypothesis scholar, but its unclear still. The reviews in Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly think so, the Kirkus Review seems to think he's not. my initial scan through the work did not do any better. For the most part, Thompson reviews everyone else's work. More late. --CTSWyneken 23:48, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

The author info at Basic Books, Thomspon's publisher, adds: "Thomas L. Thompson is one of the leading biblical archaeologists in the world. He was awarded a National Endowment fellowship, has taught at Lawrence and Marquette Universities in Wisconsin" [detail.jsp?id=1000014539 Basic Books Bio] --CTSWyneken 23:48, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Apparently Thompson is a member of the minimalist Copenhagen school of Biblical studies, according to John Mark Ministries. Other members of this school include:


 * Philip R. Davies (University of Sheffield)
 * Niels Peter Lemche (University of Copenhagen)
 * Frederick Cryer (University of Copenhagen)
 * Giovanni Garbini (University of Rome)

These names might be worth looking into. Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring Talk  TCF  12:28, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

From his faculty page: "Thomas Thomson does research related to The Old Testament, with concentration in five areas; 1) The history of Palestine in the 2nd and 1st millennium, BCE; 2) The question of the historicity related to biblical narrative and narrative traditions; 3) Intellectual history and theology of the Old Testament; 4) Comparative literature in relationship to the Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern literature; and 5) The interpretation of the Old Testament with concentration on the Pentateuch. At present Thomas Thomson is preparing a monograph with the title: The Myth of the Messiah: Creating the Figures of Jesus and David, which is scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2005.". Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring Talk  TCF  17:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)