Paul and Jesus

28. See James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 158–204; Paul Nadim Tarazi, The New Testament: Introduction: Paul and Mark (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999).

29. See Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 191–201.

30. Eusebius, Church History 2.23.24–25.

31. See Peter H. Davids, “Palestinian Traditions in the Epistle of James,” in James the Just and Christian Origins, eds. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 33-57.

32. For a restored copy of the Q source see www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jdtabor/Qluke.html.

33. Pronounced: díd-a-kay.

34. Several English translations are in the public domain and are available on the Web at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/didache.html. I have used here the new translation by Bart Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library 24, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 417–43. The Loeb edition has a critical Greek text on facing pages with the English translation.

CHAPTER 2: RETHINKING RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

1. Shimon Gibson, The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence (New York: HarperOne, 2009), p. 165, in his chapter called “Who Moved the Stone?”

2. The gospel of Mark, considered by most scholars to be the earliest of our four New Testament gospels, is usually dated between A.D. 75 and 80. I put it at least as late as A.D. 80, and perhaps even a bit later. See John Kloppenborg, “Evocatio Deorum and the Dating of Mark,” Journal of Biblical Literature 124:3 (2005): 419–50, for a discussion of the various proposals and arguments. Luke and John are generally thought to be the latest of our four gospels and recently a number of scholars have begun to put them into the early second century A.D. There is a papyrus fragment (John Rylands Library, Manchester, catalogued as P51), the oldest of any New Testament writing, containing a few lines from the gospel of John that some experts have dated on paleographic grounds alone to the early second century. The early dating is quite suspect. See Brent Nongbri, “The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 23–48. Since all four authors of our gospels are anonymous, despite the personal names attached to these works by editors, and no explicit dates are given in any of these texts, one has to judge by internal evidence, particularly the relationship of the authors to the catastrophe of the first Jewish revolt, A.D. 66–73, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and Judea and Galilee were brutally subjugated. David Trobisch has presented a convincing case for the production of an edited edition of the first New Testament in the mid-second century A.D., possibly by Polycarp; see The First Edition of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

3. James D. Tabor, “What the Bible Really Says About Death, Afterlife, and the Future,” in What the Bible Really Says, edited by Morton Smith and Joseph Hoffmann (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), pp. 33–51, also available at http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jdtabor/future.html.

4. The most extensive treatment of these issues is that of Alan F. Segal, Life After Death: The History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

5. Plato, Phaedo 65C, translation by Harold North Fowler, Plato, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914).

6. See Arthur J. Droge and James D. Tabor, “The Death of Socrates and Its Legacy,” chap. 2 in A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

7. Plato, Phaedo 107A.

8. Translation by C. W. Keyes, Cicero, De Re Publica, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).

9. See Droge and Tabor, A Noble Death, chap. 4, “Acquiring Life in a Single Moment,” pp. 85–112.

10. Segal, Life After Death, pp. 120–45.

11. Two possible exceptions are Enoch, whose death is not recorded with the explanation that “God took him,” and Elijah, who ascends to heaven in a heavenly chariot, presumably escaping death, though this is not explicitly stated (Genesis 5:24; 2 Kings 2:11–12). See Segal, Life After Death, pp. 154–57.