Jesus/Historical Jesus

By: Jonathan Klawans

Many assume that Jesus' Last Supper was a Seder, the ritual Passover meal. Examine evidence from the synoptic Gospels with scholar Jonathan Klawans.

By: Megan Sauter

In which year was Jesus born? While this is sometimes debated, the majority of New Testament scholars place Jesus’ birth in 4 B.C. or before.

By: BAS Staff

Was Jesus a Jew? Some people claim that Jesus was a Christian. Some have claimed that he was an Aryan Christian. But in recent decades scholars have been returning to ancient historical settings and discovering the Jewish Jesus.

By: Marek Dospěl

Did Jesus use a magic wand when performing his miracles? It seems so—if we are to judge by some of the earliest depictions of Jesus […]

By: BAS Staff

The Bethesda Pool, where Jesus heals the paralytic man in the Gospel of John, is a complex site. It appears to have been a mikveh, or ritual bath.

By: BAS Staff

Josephus was a first-century Jewish historian whose writings contain the earliest surviving non-Christian account of Jesus. In his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus recounts that Jesus was […]

By: James Tabor

James Tabor discusses the wedding at Cana from the Gospels of Mark and John. Whose wedding was this and why were Jesus and his family present?

By: James W. Barker

Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times By Joan Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2025), xvi + 340 pp., 16 color plates, 12 […]

By: BAS Staff

A lost Syriac manuscript, the Revelation of the Magi, translated into English by Bible scholar Brent Landau, may help answer that key question from the Christmas story: “Who were the magi?”

By: James Riley Strange

In the first century C.E., Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth was a Galilean village like most others