In the last century, especially in the last few decades, historians of Christianity have increasingly understood Jesus of Nazareth as a participant in the Judaism of his day. Many scholars, however, while emphasizing Jesus’ articulation of Jewish ethics, or his Jewish scriptural sensibility, or the apocalyptic convictions he shared with so many contemporaries, draw the […]
Until the discoveries of modern archaeology, we knew about ancient Jewish ritual immersion baths only from literary texts. Now, however, archaeology has provided us with numerous examples of Jewish ritual immersion baths, called miqva’ot (singular, miqveh), dating to the late Second Temple period, prior to and during the time when John the Baptist lived. These […]
That Jesus spoke Aramaic there is no doubt. By Jesus’ time numerous local dialects of Aramaic had emerged. Jesus, like other Palestinian Jews, would have spoken a local form of Middle Aramaic1 called Palestinian Aramaic. Palestinian Aramaic developed along with Nabatean Aramaic (in the area around Petra in modern Jordan), Palmyrene Aramaic (in central Syria), […]
Many people assume that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Seder, a ritual meal held in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. And indeed, according to the Gospel of Mark 14:12, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on the “first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb.” If Jesus and his disciples […]
Poor Pilate. If ever a man was caught unwittingly in the net of historical circumstance, it was Pilate. A simple Roman governor just doing his job, he could see that Jesus wasn’t the villain the Jewish crowd thought him to be. In the end, he washed his hands of the affair—tormented, it seems, by the […]
Whereas crucifixion, a form of state terror described by Josephus as “the most wretched of deaths” (Jewish Wars 7,23) persisted for hundreds of years, few are aware of its widespread use with victims being crucified on all three continents in the Ancient World. As late as the third century A.D. poets, murderers, robbers, mischief makers […]
From ancient literary sources we know that tens of thousands of people were crucified in the Roman Empire. In Palestine alone, the figure ran into the thousands. Yet until 1968 not a single victim of this horrifying method of execution had been uncovered archaeologically. In that year I excavated the only victim of crucifixion ever […]
Sculpture of Augustus with a cross superimposed on his forehead, Ephesus Museum. At Ephesus, crosses were added in a very public way to the forehead of Augustus, transforming the emperor into a Christian penitent.
Christian graffiti in the Temple of Artemis at Sardis. Closer to Laodicea, the Temple of Artemis at Sardis is covered with similarly carved crosses.
Column drum fragment inscribed with a menorah and a superimposed cross, Laodicea. This fragment, which was published in a brief note by the excavator, Celal Şimşek, in 2006, was discovered in the ruins of Nymphaeum.
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