Yesterday I participated in a conference organized by the History Students Association at the Faculty of Croatian Studies. The topic was pretty dark: death! The way they organize it was actually quite good! And I applaud them for that! Read more
Remembering the Past: How does our memory work?
As a part of a curriculum, one lecture within my course on Roman Empire is about the Historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity. The logic is simple: Christianity emerged in the 1st century as a minor Jewish movement Read more
Clarity Within the Background Noise: Can We Get to the Historical Jesus?
This is the last post in a series about the Historical Jesus. The basic idea is to suggest a way forward. How do historians today deal with sources about Jesus? For the last several decades scholars have applied something Read more
In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Summing up the Challenges and Pointing out Solutions
A Basic Chronology and the Most Important Sources for the Historical Jesus
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In the last couple of posts (see: here, here, here, and here), I explained the basic methodological problems historians are faced with when Read more
In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: The Evidence from Papias?
As I mentioned earlier, the traditional Church’s view is that the authors of the New Testament Gospels are Mark (the interpreter of St. Peter), Luke (the companion of St. Paul), and two apostles: Matthew the tax collector, and John Read more
In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Who Wrote the Gospels – external evidence?
In the last post, I talked about the internal evidence for the anonymity of the Gospels. I’ve shown that the internal evidence points towards the conclusion that the New Testament Gospels were written as anonymous documents – without Read more
In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Who wrote the Gospels – Internal evidence?
In the previous post, I talked about the oral traditions passed on for decades before they were written down. Our first biography of Jesus was written c. 70 CE (Mark), our last c. 90-100 CE (John). Before that, Read more
In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Oral Traditions (Were the stories about Jesus prone to change and distortion before they were written down?)
In the last post, I introduced the quest for the Historical Jesus defining it as “the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus by critical historical methods, in contrast to religious interpretations”. Furthermore, I have shown the Read more
In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Introduction
A few years ago Steven Skiena and Charles B. Ward developed an algorithmic method of ranking historical figures, just as Google ranks web pages. They defined the “historical significance” as “the result of social and cultural forces acting on Read more