The Jewish Studies Blog

… and His face was like the sun shining in its strength.17 When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, 18 and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I […]

16 …and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength. (Rev 1:16) As dozens of artists attempted to recreate this picture in their art works and mostly without much success, we are pointed to the awkwardness of John’s further description of the Son of […]

We now have over 32,000 people in our Blog Study Group Jewish Studies for Christians. Last year we successfully expended into Spanish and Portuguese languages (About half of our group today).  This could not have happened without committed work of our Spanish and Portuguese volunteers. Thank you, my dear friends! You made this happen! My […]

14 His head and His hair were white like white wool, like snow; and His eyes were like a flame of fire. 15 His feet were like burnished bronze, when it has been made to glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters. 16 In His right hand He held seven stars… […]

How Jacob became Israel? When we look at the names of Biblical characters in Hebrew we see the things that cannot be seen in translation. Take for example, the story of Jacob being transformed into Israel. Jacob’s name in Hebrew (יַעֲקב YAKoV) was connected with the word for “heel” (עָקֵב AKeV) . You remember that […]

INVITATION TO JOIN JEWISH STUDIES FOR CHRISTIANS ABSOLUTELY FREE Thank you for following me on Jewish Studies for Christians. As the first post in this new year I wanted to give you a little tour of the Jewish Studies for Christians site, so that you can see how its logic works and how it can […]

The differences between Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John have for centuries puzzled commentators. Some labored hard to reconcile every jot and tittle, while others reached the conclusion that John contradicts the Synoptics. Many commentators are situated between these positions. They recognized that essentially the Gospels tell one story about Jesus. They also recognized that some of the crucial differences cannot be dismissed nor should they be ignored. In addition to the absence of the incident with the Samaritan woman from the Synoptics, there is another significant feature in which the Synoptics and John part company. John states that the reason Jesus did not return to Judea, but went on to Galilee, was because “Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own homeland (literally fatherland in the sense of motherland in English language).” (4.43) What is of course striking here is that John names Judea as Jesus’ homeland, his fatherland, where he belonged, and not Galilee as do the Synoptics (Mt 13:54-57, Mk. 6.1-4, Lk. 4.23-24). It is likely that the Synoptics treat Galilee, the place of Jesus’ upbringing, as the fatherland. For John, however, Jesus is Judean because of his birth in Bethlehem of Judea.

Was the Samaritan Woman Really Immoral? (by Dr. Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg)  In the gospel of John Jesus engages in a most unusual conversation with a Samaritan woman at the well. “So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and […]

In his talk “Jesus Kept Kosher” Prof. Daniel Boyarin argues that Mark 7:19 passage “Thus He (Jesus) declared all foods clean” has been misunderstood. Daniel Boyarin is a professor of Talmudic Culture at University of California at Berkeley.  There is a saying that goes something like this: “Religion exists to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comforted.” When […]

TL;DR: The Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem, mentioned in John 5, may have functioned as a healing shrine to the Greek god Asclepius, and its archaeological discovery helped confirm the historical reliability of the Gospel of John. The Pool of Bethesda as a healing center of Greek-god Asclepius (John 5) 1 Some time later, Jesus went up […]