James d tabor biography of barack

DH What was Judaism like at the time of Jesus and Paul? A lot of people think of it as a monolithic system.

JT It’s a broad misconception that there was a single Judaism during the time of Jesus or during the first century. We could probably rightly talk of Judaisms. Even one of our best contemporary sources, the Jewish historian Josephus, talks about three main schools of Judaism: the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes. But from other sources we know of as many as 20 additional variations. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has really made this clear. To talk about somebody today being a Christian, without any sort of differentiation, would be very similar to saying in the first century, “Oh, he’s Jewish.” It wouldn’t tell you very much.

DH How would you categorize first-century followers of Christ?

JT One of the most interesting questions to ask when you open the New Testament is “What were they called?” Two things begin to come out in the book of Acts, which is our earliest internal record of the history of the group. First, they are not called Christians until quite a bit down the road when they go to the Hellenistic city of Antioch. There, a decade or so after the movement starts, they pick up the name “Christian.” But it is clearly not the dominant name. The name that comes up is a descriptive term: “the people of the Way” or “the Nazarenes.” If we could go back to the first century in a time machine to do a survey of ancient Judaisms, we would have to include them.

DH Some say that Paul wasn’t a Christian because there weren’t any Christians in those days.

JT If anyone could be labeled as a Christian, you might think it is Paul, until you back off a bit and look. I often point out t

The following is a review of my book, The Jesus Dynasty (Simon & Schuster, 2006), by professor Dennis E. Groh, noted scholar of early Christianity.  If you find this very thorough review intriguing I urge those who have not to “read the book” itself, see more information here, and you can “like” it on our new Facebook page here. This study of the “historical Jesus” is a precursor to my new book, Paul and Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2012), published last November.

James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty. The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN # 13: 978-0-7432-8723-4

Is there anyone who has been so cut off from the religious scholarship and news reporting of the last decade that s/he does not realize that our portrait of the person and message of Jesus has been seriously “messed with,” if not “messed over” [i.e., intentionally distorted] as it has been transmitted to us in the traditions of both the New Testament and early catholic Christianity? We can now add to the myriad of books offering new pictures of what has come to be called “The Jesus Movement” yet another reinterpretation of its founder and progress.

James D. Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a distinguished scholar of the texts and archaeology of first century Palestinian movements, has written a book that offers a real alternative to historic interpretations of Jesus founded on, and (he thinks) obscured by, the literature of early Gentile Christianity—most notably Paul’s letters and Luke/Acts. In fact, Tabor proposes a different list of literary sources from which he reconstructs a far different picture of Jesus and his movement, one that builds on Jewish prophetic and royal messianic movements:

“The Christianity we know from the Q source,  from the letter of James, from the Didache, and some of our other surviving Jewish-Christian sources, represents a v

American Bible scholar

For other people named James Tabor, see James Tabor (disambiguation).

James Daniel Tabor (born 1946) is an American Biblical scholar and retired Professor of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he taught from 1989 until 2022 and was chair from 2004 to 2014. He previously held positions at Ambassador College (1968–70 while a student at Pepperdine University), the University of Notre Dame (1979–85), and the College of William and Mary (1985–89). Tabor is the founder and director of the Original Bible Project, a non-profit organisation aimed to produce a re-ordered new translation of the Bible in English.

Background

Tabor was born in Texas but lived all over the world as the son of an Air Force officer. He was raised in the Churches of Christ and attended Abilene Christian University, where he earned his B.A. degree in Koine Greek and Bible. While earning his M.A. from Pepperdine University he taught Greek and Hebrew part-time at Ambassador College, founded by Herbert W. Armstrong, founder and president of the Worldwide Church of God.

Tabor earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1981 in New Testament and Early Christian literature, with an emphasis on the origins of Christianity and ancient Judaism, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, John the Baptist, Jesus, James the Just, and Paul the Apostle. The author of six books and over 50 articles, Tabor is frequently consulted by the media on these topics and has appeared on numerous television and radio programs.

During the Branch Davidiansiege in Waco in 1993, Tabor and fellow religion scholar J. Phillip Arnold "realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts." After contacting the FBI, they sent Koresh an alternative in

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