Massacre of the Innocents: History vs Myth

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Going to a Catholic church during the Christmas season brings feelings of warmth, renewal, and hope.

Surrounded by carols, candlelight, and nativity scenes, believers around the world are reminded of the comforting message of God entering the world as a child. The Christmas story evokes peace and joy, shepherds rejoicing, angels singing, and a newborn lying in a manger. 

Yet, tucked within the same Gospel that tells of this wondrous birth lies a very different kind of story, one that darkens the edges of the celebration. It’s the episode known as the Massacre of the Innocents: the account of King Herod ordering the slaughter of Bethlehem’s infant boys.

I remember when I first learned about it as a child. The idea that such cruelty could be part of the Christmas narrative was deeply unsettling. 

I couldn’t understand how violence, fear, and murder could coexist with a story meant to bring joy and light. And yet, as the Gospel of Matthew presents it, this grim scene isn’t an accidental addition. It’s an integral part of the story of Jesus’ birth, however disturbing it may be.

Years later, as I began studying the Bible more seriously, I found myself asking different questions, not just about its emotional impact, but about its historical reality. Did this horrific event really take place? If it did, why is it mentioned only in one Gospel and nowhere else in our ancient sources? Could it be that Matthew included it for reasons beyond the merely historical?

In the pages that follow, we’ll look more closely at this striking episode, first recalling what the Bible actually says, then exploring what we know about Herod the Great, and finally asking what purpose such a story might have served within Matthew’s Gospel. 

Whether history or myth, the Massacre of the Innocents remains one of the most haunting episodes ever linked to the Christmas story.

But before we embark on our journey, I want to invite you to check out Bart D. Ehrman’s excellent course The Unknown Gospels. In eight 30-minute lessons, Dr. Ehrman presents a historically grounded analysis of the documents that form the basis of the Christian religion! If you think everything in the Gospels is accurate history, this course is for you!

What Was the Massacre of the Innocents? Overview of the Biblical Story

What was the Massacre of the Innocents? To answer that question, we need to get back to the pages of the New Testament! 

Writing approximately 50 years after Jesus’ death, the author of Matthew’s Gospel presents an account of events surrounding Jesus’ birth that differs notably from those in the other Gospels. Following the visit of the Magi from the East, Matthew recounts that an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream, warning him that King Herod sought to destroy the child.

Obeying the divine message, Joseph took Mary and the infant Jesus and fled by night to Egypt, where they remained until Herod’s death. When Herod realized that the Magi hadn’t returned to inform him of the child’s location, Matthew says he became enraged. 

In response, he ordered the killing of all male children in Bethlehem and its surrounding region who were two years old and under, the age he had inferred from the Magi’s (wise men that came to visit baby Jesus after following a star) report about the time of the star’s appearance. The act, meant to eliminate a potential rival to his throne, is presented in the Gospel as a calculated political measure driven by fear and suspicion.

According to Matthew, this episode fulfilled a prophecy from the Hebrew Scriptures. He cites the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

In the Gospel narrative, this verse serves to frame the event within Israel’s broader story of suffering and loss. It’s significant that this episode (referred to as the Massacre of the Innocents) appears only in the Gospel of Matthew. The other canonical Gospels, including Luke’s detailed infancy narrative, make no mention of it.

However, before we can address the question of its historical authenticity, we need to take a closer look at the main figure driving the story: King Herod himself.

By the way, to learn more about the boundaries between the history, myth, and tradition in the stories of Jesus’ birth, check out Bart’s course Did the Christmas Story Really Happen? The Birth of Jesus in History & Legend.

King Herod: The Portrayal of the Client King

To understand the Massacre of the Innocents and its central figure, we must first situate Herod the Great within the broader historical context of the late Roman Republic and the early Empire. 

Herod lived through one of the most turbulent eras in Roman history, a time of civil wars and shifting allegiances that reshaped the Mediterranean world. In 44 B.C.E., Julius Caesar was assassinated, and the following year, the Second Triumvirate (composed of Mark Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus) emerged to fill the power vacuum.

Herod, then a young ruler in Palestine, initially allied himself with Antony, whose influence extended across the eastern provinces. When Antony was defeated by Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Herod shrewdly realigned himself with the victor.

Peter Richardson and Amy Marie Fisher describe the shifting of the political tides and the capability of Herod to anticipate possible problems and find the suitable solutions:

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So, accompanying Octavian/Augustus from Egypt and pledging loyalty, Herod secured his position and was confirmed as Rome’s client king in Judea. 

Augustus is said to have later remarked that he would rather be Herod’s pig than his son (melius est Herodis porcum esse quam filium), an ironic comment on Herod’s Jewish adherence to dietary laws and his notorious record of executing members of his own family.

Herod’s lineage reflected the complex ethnic and political landscape of the region. His grandfather, Antipater, was an Idumean (a descendant of the Edomites) who had converted to Judaism and was appointed strategos (military governor) of Idumea by the Hasmonean ruler Alexander Jannaeus. 

Herod’s father, also named Antipater, rose to prominence during Rome’s campaigns in the East. Aligning himself with Pompey during the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E., Antipater helped restore Hyrcanus II to the throne. 

When Julius Caesar later defeated Pompey, he rewarded Antipater for his loyalty by appointing him procurator of Judea and granting him Roman citizenship. Herod’s mother, Cypros, came from Nabatean aristocracy and was related to King Aretas of Petra, further tying the family to both Jewish and Arabian elite networks.

Herod’s early political career was marked by decisive (and often ruthless) action. Appointed governor of Galilee in 47 B.C.E., he swiftly crushed a local uprising led by Hezekiah, executing many of the rebels. 

His efficiency impressed Roman authorities but alarmed the Jewish leadership, and the Sanhedrin sought to try him for overstepping his authority. Herod escaped condemnation, likely due to the intervention of the Syrian governor, who recognized his potential as a stabilizing force in the volatile region. 

From this point onward, Herod proved a capable, pragmatic, and, at times, brutal ruler who secured Roman interests while consolidating his own power base.

Everett Ferguson, in his book Backgrounds of Early Christianity, describes Herod’s rule in the following way:

Despite his reputation for violence, Herod generally avoided direct confrontation with Jewish religious sentiment. He refrained from placing imperial symbols within the Temple precincts and supported Jerusalem’s infrastructure, including improving the city’s water supply.

At the same time, Herod actively cultivated loyalty in Rome and abroad. He contributed funds to public works and temples throughout the Mediterranean, sponsored the Olympic Games (in either 12 or 8 B.C.E.), and supported both Roman and Samaritan cults.

For over three decades, Judea remained relatively peaceful, its borders restored to something resembling the territorial scope of ancient Israel under David.

Herod’s long reign, however, ended in paranoia, intrigue, and family tragedy. In his later years, he executed several of his sons and his beloved wife, Mariamne, under charges of conspiracy, actions that contributed to his reputation for cruelty in both Jewish and Roman sources.

In his study Hérode le Grand (Herod the Great), Christian-Georges Schwentzel explains the outcome of Herod’s paranoia:

It appears that dinner invitations from Herod came with no guarantee of making it to dessert. But again, with relatives like these, he hardly needed enemies!

When he died in 4 B.C.E., the kingdom was divided among his surviving sons, bringing to a close a reign of nearly 40 years. With that historical context set, we can now turn our attention to the infamous episode known as the Massacre of the Innocents!

Did the Massacre of Innocents Really Happen?

Most critical scholars today, as exemplified by Michael Grant’s book, hold that the Massacre of the Innocents cannot be taken as something that really happened. He writes:

As it turns out, when Matthew’s account is examined in light of the available historical evidence, it stands apart as an isolated and unsupported tradition.

The problem isn’t that Herod was incapable of such an atrocity (as we saw, his reign offers many examples of ruthlessness) but that every other source from the period remains entirely silent about it.

The first and most striking fact is that Josephus, our principal historical source for Herod’s life and times, says nothing about any such massacre. Josephus was a 1st-century Jewish historian who chronicled in extraordinary detail the political and social turbulence of Roman Judea.

His works, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, preserve accounts of Herod’s political maneuvering, his architectural achievements, and his acts of violence, including the execution of his wife Mariamne, three of his sons, and several members of his extended family. 

Josephus also recounts lesser uprisings, such as those led by charismatic prophets and insurgents, including one “Egyptian” prophet who stirred up revolt during the Roman procuratorship. In short, he wasn’t inclined to omit the darker aspects of Herod’s rule or the unrest of the age.

That he never mentions a mass killing of infants makes it exceedingly difficult to treat Matthew’s report as a historical event.

It should be noted that Everett Ferguson, for instance, has argued that the massacre might have been too small in scale to attract Josephus’ attention. 

Bethlehem was a modest village, perhaps with only a few hundred inhabitants; the number of male children under the age of two could have been fewer than twenty. It’s conceivable, therefore, that the slaughter of a few infants in an obscure hamlet might have gone unrecorded.

Yet this explanation isn't fully convincing. As Raymond E. Brown explains in his masterpiece The Birth of the Messiah, Josephus’ interest in Herod’s character and the political psychology of his reign was such that even a minor atrocity revealing his paranoia or cruelty would have suited his narrative perfectly. 

Moreover, no other contemporary writer, Jewish or Roman, ever refers to this event, not Philo of Alexandria, not Tacitus, not Suetonius. The silence of all independent sources suggests that Matthew’s account doesn’t rest on historical memory but on something else entirely.

Further reasons reinforce this conclusion. Matthew’s infancy narrative is filled with elements that mirror well-known biblical patterns and ancient story motifs. Herod’s fear of a rival king, the consultation of learned men, the deceit of the ruler, and the slaughter of children all echo scenes from the story of Pharaoh and Moses in the Book of Exodus.

Additionally, in ancient literature, especially within Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions, the birth of a great figure was often surrounded by omens, prophecies, and threats from a jealous tyrant. Such patterns can be found in legends about the births of Sargon of Akkad, Cyrus the Great, and even the Roman emperor Augustus.

Gilbert Picard, in his article ”La date de naissance de Jésus du point de vue romain” (“The Birth of Jesus from the Roman Perspective”), notes:

The Massacre of the Innocents, therefore, fits this literary and symbolic framework far more naturally than it does the historical record of 1st-century Palestine. 

Moreover, Mireille Hadas-Lebel points out that Herod, “toward the end of the year 29 BCE, (…) had executed the woman he cherished, his Hasmonean wife Mariamne. From that moment on, he was no longer the same man: (…) executions multiplied, among the people as well as at court, and even within the royal family. Thus there was formed for posterity the image of a Herod as a ‘slayer [massacrer] of innocents.’” (my translation)

In other words, the memory of Herod’s historical brutality helped create the later image of a ruler capable of any atrocity, providing fertile ground for the development of the Gospel story of the Massacre of the Innocents.

In light of this evidence, the consensus among historians is clear: the massacre of the innocents is almost certainly a legendary episode. Schwentzel even asserts that “it seems pointless [il paraît vain] to look for any historical basis” of this story.

Peter Richardson and Amy Marie Fisher summarize the arguments against the historicity:

But if this episode never happened, why would Matthew include it in his Gospel? What is the meaning of that story? To this question we now turn.

Massacre of the Innocents: A Brief Exegesis

If the Massacre of the Innocents didn’t happen, why did Matthew include it? What was he trying to achieve from both a rhetorical and a theological perspective? Read within 2:13-23, the scene is the center panel of a tightly composed triptych:

#1 – The flight to Egypt with a fulfillment from Hosea;
#2 – The killings at Bethlehem with a fulfillment from Jeremiah;
#3 – The divinely guided return that ends in Nazareth;

Rhetorically, the sequence sharpens the Gospel’s programmatic contrast: Gentiles (the magi) recognize and honor the child, while the Judean ruler and his advisers respond with hostility. The episode therefore functions less as archival reportage than as a literary hinge that moves the story from homage to persecution, all under the rubric of “fulfillment.”

William A. Davies and Dale C. Allison, in their Commentary, note that, thematically, Matthew casts Herod as a new Pharaoh and Jesus as both “new Moses” and “true Israel.” The child’s descent to Egypt, preservation from a tyrant, and return to the land recapitulate Israel’s national story. 

That is why the narrative is framed by fulfillment formulae: Scripture originally applied to Israel can be truthfully applied to Israel’s Messiah who gathers up Israel’s vocation in himself. Joseph’s repeated dreams and exact obedience underline that the plot is governed by divine initiative; human power rages, but the child is preserved because God’s design is at work.

In this way, the narrative is doing Christology by means of Israel’s Scriptures. In other words, it situated Jesus inside the Exodus arc-threat, preservation, and return.

Furthermore, the Jeremiah citation (31:15) shows how Matthew’s exegesis operates. In Jeremiah, “Rachel weeping” laments the catastrophe of exile at Ramah, a deportation point north of Jerusalem; in later Jewish memory Rachel is also linked to a tomb near Bethlehem. 

Matthew fuses these memories so that Bethlehem’s tragedy can be heard through Israel’s archetypal lament. Notably, he quotes only the verse of weeping and leaves aside the following words of comfort and restoration precisely because the accent is on acknowledged grief. 

Even his fulfillment formula is carefully phrased (“Then was fulfilled…”) without the purpose conjunction, avoiding the suggestion that God intended the children’s deaths in order to meet a prophecy. 

The exegetical move isn’t a proof-text for Bethlehem but a theological overlay: Israel’s ancient sorrow is re-voiced to frame the new episode within the larger saga of exile and promised deliverance.

At the same time, the scene advances inside the Gospel’s plot. Herod doesn’t act in isolation. Rather, he is inquiring with “all the chief priests and scribes,” and “all Jerusalem” is disturbed with him.

The hostility of the ruler and establishment, therefore, foreshadows the opposition that will surface again in Jesus’ public ministry and culminate in the Passion.

Set against the reverence of the foreigners, the Massacre marks a second, darker response to the same revelation. 

For Matthew’s audience, this pattern explains their own experience: allegiance to Jesus brings both worship and resistance. Yet the dreams, the timely departures and returns, and the relocation to Galilee all insist that divine guidance is effective. To put it more bluntly, human schemes fail to derail the mission.

Finally, the conclusion of the unit (settling in Nazareth “so that he will be called a Nazorean”) gathers its Christological claims into identity. 

The child preserved from the tyrant isn’t simply a survivor. Instead, he is the one whose life recapitulates Israel’s Scriptures and who will bring light from Galilee. 

Read this way, the Massacre of the Innocents is the narrative’s necessary middle movement: it binds Jesus’ birth to Israel’s deepest wounds, signals the pattern of opposition his mission will face, and prepares the reader for the Exodus-shaped return that follows.

Schwentzel concludes:

Conclusion

When I think back to that childhood Christmas Mass (to the candlelight, the carols, and the priest’s voice recounting the story of Herod’s fury) I can still feel the same unease that first struck me all those years ago. 

The Massacre of the Innocents seemed so out of place amid wise men and angels. Decades later, studying the text with the tools of history and critical scholarship, I now understand that Matthew’s story wasn’t meant to be a journalistic report of a crime in Bethlehem but a theological drama. 

By framing Jesus’ early life through patterns drawn from Israel’s Scriptures (exile, peril, deliverance) Matthew sought to show that even from birth, the Messiah’s destiny was intertwined with both suffering and redemption.

Recognizing that the Massacre of the Innocents never happened as history doesn’t diminish its power as a story. On the contrary, it reveals how early Christians sought to interpret the meaning of Jesus’ life in the idiom of Scripture and memory. 

André Gounelle, who accepts that Matthew's account of Jesus' birth is a theological exegesis, parallel to that of Moses' birth, still maintains that one shouldn't "accuse the evangelists of fraud or dishonesty, for they use methods of writing and composition that were common in their time and widely accepted." (my translation)

In any case, the tale of the murdered kids still echoes because it exposes the tension at the heart of the Christmas story itself: divine light breaking into a dark and violent world.

Even as a historian who no longer reads Matthew’s account as literal fact, I have to admit: whenever that passage is read during Christmas Mass, it still sends a chill down my spine.

Herod the Great: His Rise, Rule, and Brutal Legacy

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Few figures in ancient history evoke as much fascination and villainy as Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed “King of the Jews.” Drawing heavily from the works of the 1st-century historian Flavius Josephus, historians have pieced together the portrait of Herod, a man who was as much a master politician as he was a feared despot.

In this article, I’ll explore the life, reign, and enduring legacy of Herod the Great—a ruler whose greatness was measured not by virtue, but by vision, power, and fear.

All These Herods!

While Herod the Great has a small but pivotal role in the New Testament (more on that later), we really only have exhaustive information about him from one other principle source, the 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Basing his Herod history on the historical work of Herod’s personal secretary Nicolaus of Damascus—a work of which we only have fragments—Josephus writes about Herod’s life in The Antiquities of the Jews, specifically in books 15, 16, and 17. He also writes a bit about Herod’s military and political exploits in The Jewish War, books 1 and 2.

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According to Josephus— and scholars such as Andrew Steinmann in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple generally agree with him—Herod was born in 72 BCE in Idumea, a land south of Judea which had previously been called Edom, while its people were known as the Edomites. In Genesis 36, the Edomites are said to be descendants of Esau, the son of Isaac and brother of Jacob. “Idumea,” then, was the Greek version of the name Edom, while the people, including Herod, were referred to in Greek as Idumeans.

Herod’s father, Antipater, had some type of official, high-status position in the court of the Hasmonean king Hyrcanus II. The Hasmoneans were the ruling Jewish dynasty of Judea, (although within the Greek Seleucid Empire) from 141 BCE to 37 BCE. So, while Antipater was not, properly speaking, a Hasmonean, he was closely connected with them.

Herod’s mother, Cypros, was a princess of the Nabatean people from the city of Petra (modern-day Jordan). The Nabateans were an ancient Arab people. While Josephus doesn’t tell us anything significant about Herod’s childhood, we can infer that, as the child of a princess and a high official in the royal court, he lived a very privileged life. However, even though neither of Herod’s parents were technically Jewish, we know that a previous Hasmonean leader and High Priest, John Hyrcanus, had conquered Idumea and forced its citizens to convert to Judaism. For this reason, Herod was raised as a Jew.

In 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompey had conquered Jerusalem and made it a client state. That is, Rome allowed local Jewish rulers to run the day-to-day affairs of state in Judea, but Rome remained the controlling military and political authority. Hyrcanus II, under whom Herod’s father served, was briefly the first client king of Judea on Rome’s behalf. Therefore, Herod’s family also had connections to Rome.

Josephus picks up the story of Herod’s life when Herod was about 25. According to the Jewish Antiquities, Herod’s father was particularly well-connected to the Roman dictator Julius Caesar who ruled from 44-49 BCE. Antipater was thus put in charge of Judean political affairs for Hyrcanus II. Because of this connection with Caesar, in 47 BCE, the young Herod was appointed governor of Galilee, the northernmost region of Palestine and the home region of Jesus and his disciples. Josephus acknowledges that Herod was young for the job (he actually claims that Herod was only 15, but most scholars doubt this).

Josephus goes on to write that vanquishing these bandits made Herod popular, not only in the region he was governing but also with his Roman masters. So it was then that Herod, always the great networker, developed a good relationship with the governor of Syria, who then appointed him as governor of two regions of Roman Syria, Coele-Syria and Samaria.

In 41 BCE, Herod and his brother Phasael were appointed tetrarchs, co-rulers under the current king of Judea Hyrcanus II. However, just a year later, Hyrcanus’ nephew Antigonus staged a coup and took over the throne, ousting not only Hyrcanus II, but Herod and his brother as well. Herod fled to Rome and appealed for Roman help in reinstating Hyrcanus II as king. However, while he was there, Herod, who was known to have served Rome well in Judea, was appointed King of the Jews by the Roman senate. This all but assured that he would have the Roman backing needed to oust Antigonus and take the throne himself.

Thus began a war for the throne of Judea, which lasted several years. During this campaign, Herod, who had already been married and had a child, married Hyrcanus II’s granddaughter, Mariamne. This was clearly a political marriage, done purely to legitimize his claim to the throne. He thus had his first wife and son banished.

Josephus writes that in 37 BCE, Herod and the governor of Syria at the time gathered a large army, apparently at the urging of the Roman general and politician Mark Antony, and entered Jerusalem. They conquered the city and captured Antigonus, whom they sent to Mark Antony, to be put to death.

This marked a major turning point in Herod’s life and Jewish history: the end of the Hasmonean dynasty and the beginning of the Herodian dynasty. King Herod the Great would rule Judea as Rome’s client king for more than three decades. Afterwards, members of his family, including his son Herod Antipas and his grandson Herod Agrippa, would go on to rule in Israel as well.

Herod, King of Judea (37 BCE-4 CE)

Through his appointment as King of the Jews by the Romans and his conquest of the usurper Antigonus of the Hasmonean dynasty, Herod became the sole client king of the province of Judea for Rome. However, like all kings, Herod faced some difficult challenges.

One major challenge would come from his mother-in-law Alexandra. Her daughter Mariamne had been given to Herod in marriage with the understanding that Herod would help reinstate the Hasmonean dynasty. However, soon after Herod’s conquest of Jerusalem, it became apparent to Alexandra that Herod had no intention of doing that.

Mark Antony, soon to be engaged in a civil war over the rule of the Roman Empire after the assassination of Julius Caesar, had recently married Cleopatra of Egypt in order to join forces with her and become the next Roman ruler. Alexandra, therefore, approached Cleopatra, asking her for help in installing her son, Mariamne’s brother Aristobulus III, who was only 17 at the time, as the High Priest in Jerusalem. While High Priest was obviously a religious position, it also was a position of power which often led to the throne. Hyrcanus II had initially been High Priest, for example, before becoming king.

Cleopatra instead told Alexandra to take Aristobulus to Mark Antony and ask for his help directly. Herod, hearing about this and fearing that Mark Antony would place Aristobulus on the throne of Judea, began sending spies to follow Alexandra and Aristobulus. Soon after, while Aristobulus was bathing in the palace at Jericho, Herod had him drowned. He would later have his wife Mariamne and Alexandra killed as well.

Meanwhile, the Roman civil war between Mark Antony and Octavian had begun, and Herod had to choose a side. Having had a previous connection with Mark Antony, he chose to support him, only to see Mark Antony lose the final battle at Actium in 31 BCE. Herod had backed the wrong horse.

Octavian now became Caesar Augustus, the first true Roman Emperor. Herod desperately sought to forge a connection to him in order to maintain his throne. He was eventually able to convince Augustus that if he were to be allowed to remain as King of Judea, he would remain loyal to Rome. With Augustus’ acceptance of this agreement, Herod became a (mostly) autonomous ruler of Judea. As long as nothing happened to challenge Rome’s wealth or power, Herod could rule as he pleased.

Interestingly, Josephus depicts Herod’s rule as generally good, glossing over the brutalities he inflicted on his subjects and even his own family. Nevertheless, in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, Shaye Cohen notes that, in the Jewish Antiquities, Josephus clearly writes about oppressive tactics that many today believe characterized Herod’s reign.

Cohen goes on to write that Herod aggressively suppressed dissent by forbidding protest and often killing any who opposed him. In The Army of Herod the Great, Samuel Rocca writes that Herod was known to be highly paranoid, at one time using 2,000 soldiers as his personal bodyguards. This paranoia and cruelty fit well with the story of Herod in the New Testament usually called the Massacre of the Innocents.

King Herod in the New Testament

In Matthew 2, after the magi visited his court and asked him for the whereabouts of the newborn “King of the Jews”—the very title given to him by Rome—Herod lies to them, telling them to find the child and report back to him so that he, too, can worship him. However, when the wise men don’t return to him, Herod flies into a rage:

While Herod’s brutality makes this story seem plausible, scholars have long doubted its historical validity for a few reasons. First and foremost, if Herod had done this horrible thing, why wouldn’t anyone else have mentioned it? Not only do the other Gospels say nothing about this incident, but Josephus doesn’t either. Such a monumental cruelty would surely have been noted by multiple sources.

In addition, the story fits a bit too well with the underlying purpose behind Matthew’s depiction of Jesus. L. Michael White in his book Scripting Jesus writes that in Matthew, Jesus is portrayed as “the new Moses, clarifying and even modifying the law of Moses.” Knowing that, the story of the Massacre of the Innocents bears more than a passing resemblance to the story of Moses’ infancy in Exodus 1, when Pharaoh commands that every Israelite male baby be killed, while Moses miraculously escapes.

By the way, this is the only instance of Herod the Great’s involvement in the Bible. All the rest of the Herod references in the NT refer to his son, Herod Antipas, who ruled during Jesus’ lifetime.

Herod the Great’s Building Projects

King Herod was not given the title “Herod the Great” because he was friendly. Instead, his “greatness” stems from the monumental construction projects he accomplished. Here are a few of them.

In about 19 BCE, Herod initiated a massive expansion of the Temple Complex in Jerusalem, eventually doubling it in size until it took up around 450 acres. Shaye Cohen points out that Herod’s buildings, such as his palace at Caesarea Maritima, were built with impressive technology for the time, including the use of hydraulic cement and even underwater construction.

Herod also built several impressive fortresses, including Masada, Herodium, Alexandrium, Hyrcania, and Machaerus. While these were monumental sites, some of which, like Masada, can still be seen today, he actually built them mostly for himself and his family in case of mass insurrection against him. He even built an entire city, Sebaste, designed specifically to appeal to the Greek-speaking pagans of Judea.

Unfortunately, to cover the costs of such massive building projects, Herod taxed the people of Judea mercilessly. However, in A History of Israel to Bar Kochba, Henk Jagersma also points out that, during a severe famine in 25 CE, Herod used his own resources to feed his people.

Herod died in 4 BCE, around the time of Jesus’ birth, in the city of Jericho. He contracted some kind of disease which, according to Josephus, made his body begin to rot. There is not enough information for scholars to know what it could have been, but Josephus tells us that, ever after, it was called “Herod’s Evil.”

He also says that the pain of the disease was so terrible that Herod attempted to commit suicide but was prevented by a relative. Finally, Josephus says that Herod was worried that no one would mourn for him, a valid concern. He therefore ordered his family members to kill a large number of his well-known subjects after his death, believing that the widespread mourning for them would compensate for the lack of mourners for himself. Fortunately, we’re told that his family did not do this.

Conclusion

Herod the Great was an impactful, if not always benevolent, ruler. Born in the 1st century BCE into a high-ranking Idumean family, he became the governor of Galilee while still in his 20s. Through networking and a successful campaign against bandits, Rome expanded his powers to include other territories. He then became tetrarch of Judea, ranking just below King Hyrcanus II in status and power.

Through a series of twists and turns, Herod was then appointed as King of Judea by Rome. After conquering Jerusalem, he went on to rule Judea for decades. However, his rule was a mix of  brutal suppression of dissent and impressive building projects. He will never be forgotten, which was surely the goal of his manifold constructions, but he will also never know how terrible he looks to history.

Pontius Pilate vs Herod Antipas: Different Roles in Jesus’ Death

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

When it comes to the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, two names often stand out—Pontius Pilate and Herod. Both were rulers under Roman authority and both make appearances in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ final hours. Yet the roles they play are very different.

In this article, we’ll examine those roles as told in the Gospels. By looking at who these historical figures really were—Pontius Pilate vs. Herod, if you will—we’ll understand not only what happened to Jesus but also how early Christians were trying to make sense of their world—a world caught between Jewish tradition and Roman power.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about the historical Jesus, check out the courses in Bart Ehrman’s The Historical Jesus Mastery Pack.

All These Herods!

Let’s start by talking about the historical Herod, or rather Herods. It turns out that the Bible mentions no less than six kings named Herod. Before we look into which one (or ones) were contemporaries of Jesus, here’s a list of them, along with the Jewish territories over which they reigned:

Herod the Great - 37-4 BCE, reigned over Judea.

Herod Antipas - 4 BCE-39 CE, reigned over Galilee and Perea.

Herod Philip - 4 BCE-34 CE, reigned over Iturea, Trachonitis, Gaulanitis, Trachonitis, Paneas, Batanea, and Auranitis.

Herod Archelaus - 4 BCE-6 CE, reigned over Idumaea, Judea and Samaria.

Herod Agrippa I - 37-44 CE, reigned over Judea and Samaria.

Herod Agrippa II – c. 50s CE-93 CE, reigned over Chalcis, Batanaea, Trachonitis, Abilene, Ituraea, Gaulanitis, and Auranitis.

Although these rulers all came from the same family, they all ruled territories in Judea as client kings of the Roman Empire.

The first Herod from the Bible is known to history as Herod the Great. This isn’t because he was a great guy, but because he accomplished a lot, specifically in the realm of building. For example, it was he who expanded the Second Temple complex in Jerusalem that would be destroyed by Roman forces in 70 CE. The Temple was massive and impressive, covering 450 acres and visible for miles around.

Oddly enough, though, Herod was not even technically Jewish. He was born to a father who was an Edomite (from the region of Edom, now part of southern Jordan and southern Israel) and an Arabian mother from the Jordanian city of Petra. However, Herod’s father’s ancestors had been forcibly converted to Judaism in the distant past. For this reason, Herod was raised as a (very privileged) Jew.

We know something about Herod’s life before he became king from the book Antiquities of the Jews (14.8.5) written by 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus. Because Rome already controlled Palestine and his father had good relations with Julius Caesar, in 47 CE, a young Herod was made governor of Galilee, the region from which Jesus and his disciples came. By 37 CE, just 10 years later, Herod had been appointed King of Judea by Rome. In other words, he ruled the Jewish people, but only on behalf of Rome. His reign ended with his death in 4 BCE.

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Now, according to Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making by James D.G. Dunn, the vast majority of scholars believe that Jesus was born between 6 and 4 BCE. This means that, while Herod the Great was probably king of Judea around the time of Jesus’ birth, Herod never witnessed most of the life and death of Jesus. However, Herod the Great is the Herod referred to in the story known as the Massacre of the Innocents, as told only in Matthew 2:16-18. It’s a great story,  but one that the author likely invented because it’s told nowhere else.

Herod had four sons, three of whom are mentioned in the Bible: Archelaus (Matt 2:22), Herod Antipas (Matt 14:1-12, Mark 6:14-28), and Philip (Luke 3:1, Matt 14:3). There was a fourth son, Aristobulus, whom Herod had assassinated because he believed Aristobulus’ popularity made him a threat to his own reign.

After Herod the Great’s death, Josephus says that his last will and testament divided his territories up among his remaining three sons (Antiquities, 7.12.317-319). This is why his sons’ reigns overlapped in time—they each ruled parts of Judea simultaneously. Herod Antipas, the next significant Herod mentioned in the Gospels, became ruler of the regions of Galilee and Peraea.

For this reason, outside of the references to Herod the Great in Matthew’s birth story of Jesus, all the important stories about Herod in the Gospels refer to Herod Antipas. This includes the beheading of John the Baptist and Antipas’ brief involvement in Jesus’ trial. But before we get to that, let’s proceed with the Pontius Pilate vs. Herod Antipas discussion by examining the life of the other ruler involved in Jesus’ execution.

Who Was Pontius Pilate?

As I noted in my previous article on Pilate, we have almost no information on Pilate’s early life. In a 2009 article, classical scholar J.G.F. Powell writes that wealthy Roman men were normally given three names: the praenomen, or first name, the nomen, the last name in our time, and the cognomen, used only by wealthy Romans to refer to each other.

So while his praenomen isn’t given in the Gospels or anywhere else, his nomen was Pontius and his cognomen was Pilate (Latin: Pilatus). While scholars have speculated on the possible significance of those names, all we can know for sure is that he came from a fairly wealthy family.

In fact, in Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation, Helen Bond writes that, while Pilate was certainly not from the top level of Roman society, he would certainly never been allowed to become the governor of a Roman territory had he not been wealthy and, therefore, educated.

According to Josephus, Pilate was governor of Judea for 10 years, while Bond estimates that this probably occurred between the years 26 and 36 CE, which certainly included the years when Jesus was crucified (30-33 CE).

Josephus also notes that Pilate was infamous in Judea for being an absolutely brutal, merciless governor who had no respect for the people he governed and was willing to slaughter them at the slightest hint of rebellion. In his book On the Embassy to Gaius, 1st-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that Pilate was renowned for his

Clearly, Pilate was not a nice guy. However, the Gospels, which admittedly were written decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, seem to portray Pilate as a far more likeable character than other sources. Let’s look at those portrayals, along with those of Herod Antipas.

What Did Pontius Pilate Do to Jesus?

Pilate is mentioned in all four Gospels, as well as many other sources, many of which acknowledge that Jesus was crucified under his governorship. Second-century Roman historian Tacitus, for example, writes that Jesus was executed “in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate.” Since Herod Antipas is mentioned much less in relation to the crucifixion, let’s start with Pilate.

In Mark, our earliest Gospel, the Jewish priests bring Jesus to Pilate for questioning. Pilate asks Jesus if he is king of the Jews. This implies that the charge brought against Jesus was a form of sedition against Rome. Jesus merely says “You say so” (15:2). Other than this, Jesus is silent during this episode in Mark.

But then Pilate offers to release one Jewish prisoner since it is the time of Passover. Although Mark says this was a common tradition at the time, scholars have long noted that there is no evidence for this at all. Given the brutal reputation of Pilate, scholars including Bart Ehrman find the idea of such a merciful act unlikely at best. Nevertheless, in Mark 15:14, after the crowd has shouted that Jesus should be executed, a mild, compassionate Pilate asks the crowd

This is consistent with Pilate’s depictions in the other three Gospels as well (Matt 27:11-26, Luke 23:1-25, John 18:28-40). Pilate seems to want to release Jesus but, because of the angry crowd, feels obligated to execute him instead. Having seen in sources such as Philo of Alexandria how heartless he could be, often beating and killing anyone who got in his way, this kinder, gentler Pilate seems, at best, implausible. So why did the Gospel writers show him in such a sympathetic light?

There are two possible answers to this question. First, when the Gospels were written near the end of the 1st century, Christianity was, at least some of the time, illegal. By refusing to participate in Roman religious rites, which were supposed to garner favor with the gods, Christians were often seen as actively working against the well-being of the empire. The Gospel writers may, therefore, have figured that it was a good idea to make the Roman procurator look almost innocent of Jesus’ death, thus not antagonizing any Roman higher-ups.

The second answer might be found in the portrayal, especially of Matthew, of “the Jews.”

This passage has been used for millennia to justify Christian antisemitism. However, since we know that the author of Matthew was almost certainly a Jew himself, as was Jesus and all of his original disciples, it is not reasonable to believe that Matthew’s author intended to put the blame of Jesus’ death on all Jews.

Instead, the author of Matthew, whose group of Christian Jews had probably been kicked out of the synagogue for adhering to a faith most Jews wouldn’t accept, was angry at the Jewish religious leaders. By making Pilate look less guilty, most of the guilt for Jesus’ execution fell on the Jewish priesthood.

But what about Herod Antipas? So far we haven’t seen him in the story of the crucifixion at all. In looking into the roles of Pontius Pilate vs. Herod, where does Herod come in?

What Did Herod Antipas Do to Jesus?

Part of the reason it’s easy to miss Herod Antipas’ part in the crucifixion is that it’s only found in one of the four Gospels, specifically in Luke 23:6-12. In Luke’s version, Pilate once again notes that Jesus has done nothing wrong. This time, however, he wants to pass the buck, giving authority for the trial and sentencing of Jesus to someone else.

For this reason, Pilate asks if Jesus is from Galilee. When he is told that he is, he orders that Jesus be sent to him to be sentenced because Herod Antipas is the ruler over that region. But before going any further, what kind of ruler was Herod Antipas?

First of all, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark acknowledge that it was Herod Antipas who arrested and executed John the Baptist. The Gospels say that the reason was that John called Herod out publicly for marrying his brother’s wife. However, Josephus writes that Herod killed John because he was a very popular preacher and had a large following. Herod felt that this might turn to some kind of mass rebellion against him and so killed him preemptively. Either way, no one thought of Herod Antipas as a nice guy. He could be just as brutal as Pilate.

To continue with the story from Luke 23, when Jesus arrives at Herod’s court, Herod is delighted to see him and asks him to perform miracles because he has only heard about Jesus’ miracles from others. Jesus not only refuses to oblige but even refuses to speak, while the chief priests, who have once again come along, continue loudly accusing Jesus. Apparently bored with this, we are told that

That’s all there is to Herod’s part in the trial and execution of Jesus. In fact, because Luke is the only Gospel containing this story and since there is no evidence that Pilate or any Roman ruler ever deferred to a regional king for the sentencing of criminals, most scholars believe this part of the story never happened.

In The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, Robin Lane Fox argues that the story of Herod’s involvement may have its origins in the words of Psalm 2, in which "the kings of the earth" are described as challenging the anointed one of God. Fox believes these words were included in Luke’s story to show that multiple sources of authority failed to find any valid reason to condemn Jesus.

Conclusion: Pontius Pilate vs. Herod

There are quite a few rulers named Herod in the Bible, all belonging to the same dynastic family. However, only two of these are said to have been involved in any way with Jesus. Herod the Great, the patriarch of the family, was an impressive builder, but a cruel king. His death and Jesus’ birth roughly coincided. Although most scholars doubt the historicity of the Massacre of the Innocents in Matthew, there is no doubt that the author of that story was referring to Herod the Great.

His son, Herod Antipas, was the ruler who ruled over Galilee, Jesus’ home turf, after his father’s death. Herod was an impressively violent ruler himself. He executed John the Baptist, for example, either for publicly denouncing his lack of morality or simply to prevent any possible mass rebellion.

However, in the Gospel stories of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion, it is Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who played the starring role as the ruling authority. Historical references to Pilate paint him as cruel and entirely indifferent to the traditions and people over whom he presided.

Nevertheless, all four Gospels portray him as sympathetic to Jesus, almost begging the crowd to let Jesus go and insisting that Jesus was innocent. While this was likely done by the authors to make Christianity more palatable to Romans, it is historically unlikely.

Herod Antipas, on the other hand, has a tiny, walk-on role in the story of Jesus’ trial, but only in the Gospel of Luke. In this version, Pilate doesn’t want to condemn Jesus himself and so sends him to Herod, because Jesus was from his territory. Herod, however, simply mocks Jesus and sends him back. If Herod was really involved at all, it seems odd that the other Gospels would not have mentioned it. Most scholars believe that the story merely had narrative value, reinforcing that no ruling authority could find a legitimate reason to crucify Jesus.

Virgin Mary: Life, Legacy, and Role as Mother of Jesus (VERSES)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

The relationship between the Virgin Mary and my Croatian culture is so pervasive that almost no wedding can pass without a traditional song that begins, “Hail Virgin, Queen of the Croats.” This small example captures something much larger, the extraordinary power of Mary, mother of Jesus, to shape not only religious devotion but also art, music, and collective identity across centuries.

From the Adriatic coast to the Andes, she stands as one of the most enduring and beloved figures in the history of Christianity.

Few women in world history have been remembered, celebrated, and reinterpreted as much as the Virgin Mary. For two millennia, she has inspired painters, poets, theologians, and ordinary believers. Her image appears in cathedrals and chapels, in the prayers of the devout and the lyrics of folk songs.

Yet for all the beauty and reverence surrounding her, Mary’s historical story begins in an unassuming setting, among the villages of Galilee, within the narratives of the earliest Christian writings.

The fascination with the blessed virgin Mary didn’t end with the New Testament; it only began there. Over the centuries, Christians sought to understand her role more deeply (as a mother, disciple, and model of faith) and to explore what her life revealed about God’s action in the world.

Our aim in this article is to trace that journey: from the historical glimpses we find in the earliest sources, through the rich imaginative traditions of the early Church, to the living devotion that continues to define Catholic spirituality today.

But before we begin, I’d like to invite you to explore Bart D. Ehrman’s fascinating course, The Unknown Gospels. In this carefully designed 8-lecture series, Dr. Ehrman offers a compelling scholarly perspective on the origins of the New Testament and a critical look at the sources that lie at the heart of the Christian faith. If you’re interested in discovering how historians distinguish historical truth from later tradition in the Gospels, this course is the perfect place to start! 

Mary in the Bible

The New Testament writings were never intended to be objective, journalistic reports of historical events. Rather, they are theological reflections shaped by faith, memory, and the distinct perspectives of their authors. 

For instance, each Gospel writer sought to interpret Jesus’ significance for his own community, weaving together oral traditions, scriptural allusions, and personal convictions.

As Bart D. Ehrman explains in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium:

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This doesn’t mean the Gospels are historically useless, but it does mean that they must be read as theological narratives rather than modern biographies.

Within this context, the figure of Mary (later venerated as the blessed virgin Mary) appears only occasionally. Even though she would later play an enormous role in Christian devotion and Catholic theology, her presence in the New Testament is surprisingly limited.

Stephen J. Shoemaker, in his study Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion, notes the contrast between her later prominence and her early obscurity:

When we turn to the Gospels, Mary’s appearances vary widely, reflecting each author’s distinct theological focus. In the earliest Gospel, Mark, she is mentioned only briefly, and not always positively. At one point, her family tries to restrain Jesus, thinking he has gone out of his mind (Mark 3:21).

When told that his mother and brothers are outside, Jesus redefines family in purely spiritual terms: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” 

The author of Matthew’s Gospel, writing a decade or two later, expands Mary’s story by introducing the miraculous conception. Here she fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy that “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,” linking her to Israel’s history and divine providence. Yet Joseph, not Mary, dominates the narrative; she remains a silent participant in God’s plan.

Luke’s Gospel, by contrast, places mother Mary at the very center of the story. His account of the Annunciation, where the angel Gabriel greets her as “favored one,” presents her as the model believer who accepts God’s will in faith.

Her song, the Magnificat, echoes the prayer of Hannah in the Old Testament and celebrates the reversal of worldly power. Luke’s portrait of Mary as a contemplative, faithful disciple who “ponders these things in her heart” profoundly shaped later Christian reflection. 

The Gospel of John, meanwhile, portrays her in more symbolic terms. She appears only twice (at the wedding in Cana and at the foot of the Cross). Yet, both scenes are highly theological. At Cana, she initiates Jesus’ first “sign,” revealing his divine glory. At the Cross, Jesus entrusts her to the beloved disciple, creating a new spiritual family that symbolizes the birth of the Church.

Finally, in the Acts of the Apostles, Mary appears one last time, praying with the disciples after the Ascension (1:14).

What can we say, then, about the historical Mary behind these portrayals? Most scholars agree that she was a Jewish woman named Mariam (the Hebrew form of Mary), from the small Galilean village of Nazareth in Roman-controlled Palestine.

She was likely young at the time of her betrothal to Joseph, perhaps in her early teens, as was customary for Jewish women of the period. 

Her family would have lived a simple, agrarian life under difficult economic conditions. Joseph is described as a tekton (a craftsman or builder) and their world was one marked by political instability and heavy taxation under Roman rule. It’s also probable that Mary, like most women of her class, was illiterate but deeply shaped by the rhythms of Jewish piety and family life.

Beyond these sparse details, the New Testament offers little historical information. There is no mention of her age at Jesus’ death, no record of her later years, and no account of what happened to her afterward. This leads naturally to the question: How did Mary die?

The Bible itself says nothing about her death or burial. From a historical standpoint, we simply do not know. What we do possess are later theological traditions, stories that emerged from the second century onward and would profoundly shape Christian imagination. 

To those traditions we now turn. Beyond the New Testament, early Christian writers and communities began to expand upon the biblical portrait, weaving a tapestry of stories, doctrines, and devotions that would transform Mary from a humble Jewish mother in Galilee into one of the most enduring symbols of faith in the Christian world.

However, before we embark on this fascinating journey through the world of early Christian literature, we decided to pause for a moment and look back at the biblical roots of the devotion to St. Mary. The following table highlights the key New Testament passages that mention or involve the Virgin Mary.

Virgin Mary in Early Christian Tradition

By the 2nd century, belief in the virgin conception of Jesus, first introduced in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, had already spread widely throughout Christian communities. This conviction became a central element of early Christian confession, appearing in creedal-like statements among figures such as Ignatius of Antioch.

The emphasis, however, was still primarily on Christology: Mary’s virginal conception served to demonstrate Jesus’ divine sonship, rather than to elevate her own status. 

The earliest generations of Christians were far more concerned with who Jesus was than with who his mother was. Yet, as time went on, reflection on her role deepened, and the figure of the Virgin Mary began to acquire new theological and symbolic dimensions.

Writers like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons, both active in the mid to late 2nd century, played a decisive role in this transformation. 

In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin introduced the powerful image of Mary as the “New Eve”: just as death entered the world through Eve’s disobedience, so life entered through Mary’s obedience. Irenaeus adopted and expanded this idea in his Against Heresies, describing Mary as the “cause of salvation” because her faith reversed the disobedience of the first woman. 

In both cases, her significance remained theological rather than devotional. To be precise, Mary wasn’t yet an object of prayer or veneration, but a model within the larger story of redemption.

At the same time, an anonymous author produced the Protevangelium of James, the earliest Christian writing devoted entirely to Mary’s life. 

This apocryphal work, written, as Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše note, around the end of the 2nd century, recounts her miraculous birth to Joachim and Anna, her upbringing in the Temple, and her virginal conception of Jesus. It portrays her as a figure of extraordinary holiness, so pure that divine grace seemed to radiate from her existence.

Ronald F. Hock emphasizes the purity of Mary as one of the major features of this document. He explains:

It’s an understatement to say that the Protevangelium of James had an enormous influence on Christian imagination! 

Its depiction of Mary giving birth in a cave, of angels feeding her in the Temple, and of her perpetual virginity after Jesus’ birth shaped centuries of iconography, liturgy, and devotion.

It also offered the first narrative of her death and assumption, although in a rudimentary form. Later versions of this story (known as the Transitus Mariae traditions) would elaborate on how Mary peacefully passed from this world and was taken into heaven, but even at this early stage, the seeds of that belief were being sown.

While these writings were never included in the New Testament canon, their influence on the Christian imagination was immense, ensuring that Mary’s image grew far beyond what the canonical Gospels had described.

The 3rd century brought both continuity and contrast. Some leading theologians, such as Tertullian of Carthage, remained skeptical of the more exalted views of Mary. Tertullian accepted the virgin conception but rejected her perpetual virginity, arguing that she later lived as Joseph’s wife. 

In Alexandria, Clement defended Mary’s purity. Then, his successor Origen maintained her lifelong virginity but also emphasized her humanity and capacity for doubt, interpreting the “sword” that would pierce her soul as a moment of spiritual trial. 

Around the same time, a short Greek prayer, preserved on papyrus and known today as Sub tuum praesidium, addressed Mary directly: “Under your protection we seek refuge, O Theotokos [Mother of God].” 

This remarkable text, probably from the late third century, is the earliest known Christian prayer to the Virgin Mary, revealing that ordinary believers had already begun to turn to her for intercession even before the great theologians formally acknowledged such devotion.

By the end of the 3rd century, the image of Mary had expanded dramatically: from a quiet, faithful woman of the Gospels to a cosmic figure woven into the drama of salvation. 

Theological reflection hadn’t yet fully caught up with popular devotion, but the foundations of later Marian piety were firmly laid. The Virgin Mary was increasingly seen not only as the mother of Jesus but as a model of holiness, obedience, and divine favor. 

Her life, from miraculous conception to her peaceful departure, had become an integral part of the Christian story. And as later centuries would show, this story was only beginning to unfold.

To understand how this transformation unfolded (how the Virgin Mary came to occupy such a central place in the spiritual imagination of millions) we must now turn to her enduring legacy within the Catholic tradition.

Virgin Mary in Catholic Tradition: Faith, Devotion, and Reflection

When we talk about the role and importance of the Virgin Mary in the Catholic tradition, it’s important to note that, essentially, it all comes down to the complex relationship between history, tradition, and theological reflection. While these three dimensions, in some sense, go back to the earliest years of Christianity, the major developments occurred as we entered the 4th century.

This was, broadly speaking, the time when the Catholic Church entered a new world that followed Constantine’s conversion. After all, the Church became, in a sense, an imperial partner, a political body with the support of the most powerful figure in the Roman Empire. 

And like it or not, that new political reality influenced the way the Church understood and developed its views about Mary.

In her sweeping study Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, Miri Rubin observes:

It was precisely within these debates about Christ’s nature that Mary’s theological role became more sharply defined. 

By the early 5th century, the title Theotokos (already, as we saw, used in Egypt a century earlier) was officially affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, primarily to safeguard the doctrine of Christ’s full divinity. 

Around the same time, other ideas that had circulated in earlier centuries began to crystallize. The doctrine of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity (the belief that she remained a virgin before, during, and after Jesus’ birth) was most eloquently defended by Jerome in his treatise Against Helvidius. For Jerome, Mary’s perpetual virginity symbolized the Church’s total devotion to God and its purity of faith. 

The belief in her Assumption, her being taken body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life, emerged later from apocryphal sources known as the Transitus Mariae traditions. These stories, immensely popular in both the East and West, expressed the conviction that the woman who bore the incarnate God could not be subject to decay. 

Although not defined as dogma until 1950, the Assumption reflects the older Christian intuition that Mary’s life was uniquely united to her Son’s resurrection.

Alongside these theological developments came the rise of Marian devotion in the Catholic Church. It basically represented the emotional and affective side of piety that deeply marked medieval (Catholic) Christianity. By the Middle Ages, Mary wasn’t only a doctrinal figure but the compassionate mother, the intercessor, and the refuge of sinners.

Pilgrimages to Marian shrines, from Walsingham in England to Lourdes and Guadalupe centuries later, became among the most popular expressions of Catholic piety. The recitation of the Rosary, the celebration of Marian feasts, and the flowering of art and music devoted to her all reveal how profoundly the Virgin Mary had entered the religious imagination of Christian Europe. 

Of course, much more could be said about the breadth of her influence (her theological symbolism, artistic representations, social role, etc.). However, that would require an article of its own, entirely devoted to the subject. And, perhaps, we’ll write one in the future! 

Even though the articles I write are almost always presented from a scholarly and neutral perspective, aiming to reflect the communis opinio among historians, this topic, I believe, allows space for a small personal reflection.

As a person born into a Catholic family and raised within a predominantly Catholic culture, I have always found Mariology (the study of Mary’s person and role) one of the most fascinating aspects of the Catholic tradition.

What continues to intrigue me is how this single figure has served as both a theological mirror and a cultural bridge: at once a symbol of divine grace, maternal care, and human fragility. The Virgin Mary embodies the tension between transcendence and tenderness, between heaven and earth, qualities that make her devotionally almost irresistible, even to those who approach her story from a critical distance.

Yet my own research into the historical Jesus and the history of early Christianity, as I advanced from undergraduate studies to doctoral research and beyond, has inevitably shaped how I see Catholic teachings about Mary.

From the perspective of a critical historian, doctrines such as the Perpetual Virginity are difficult to affirm as historical claims. But that doesn’t make them meaningless. Rather, it shows how theology and history, while related, often speak in different languages. I have come to appreciate that recognizing those differences can deepen, not diminish, one’s understanding of both.

And I take some comfort in knowing that I am not alone in this tension. Some of the brightest Catholic minds and scholars (such as John P. Meier and Raymond E. Brown) have wrestled with the same question. At least, I’m not in bad company!

Conclusion

Across two millennia, the image of Virgin Mary has evolved from the quiet presence in the Gospels to one of the most theologically and culturally powerful symbols in the Christian imagination. The sparse biblical data (just a few verses scattered across the New Testament) became the seed for a vast and diverse tradition.

Early Christian writers including Justin Martyr and Irenaeus gave her theological depth, apocryphal authors such as the creator of the Protevangelium of James supplied narrative color, and later theologians from Jerome to Aquinas defined her role within the grand architecture of Catholic doctrine.

For me, as a historian, the challenge lies in recognizing both sides of this legacy. The historical Mary was a poor Jewish woman of 1st-century Galilee; the Mary of theology and tradition became Saint Mary, Queen of Heaven.

And that’s an irony, isn’t it? There are more than two billion Christians in the world. The Mary of history is known only to, perhaps, a thousand of critical scholars who are experts in the origins of Christianity. For the other billions of Christians, the only Mary they know (and pray to) is the remembered Mary, the one shaped by tradition, theology, and personal piety.

When Was the Gospel of John Written? It’s Later Than You Think!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

When was the Gospel of John written? Recently, a friend of mine returned from a trip to Rome with a story that perfectly illustrates how most people think about the Gospels. During one of the tours, the guide began weaving together remarkable tales about Jesus’ apostles.

He spoke of Peter’s martyrdom, of Thomas traveling all the way to India, and of John, “best known for writing the fourth Gospel in the New Testament.” My friend, intrigued at first, later admitted feeling disappointed. The guide had presented these legends as solid historical facts, without even hinting that scholars have long questioned their historical reliability.

If you ask most Christians today, they would likely repeat a version of that same story: that the Gospel of John in the New Testament was written quite soon after Jesus’ death, by one of his closest disciples, the Apostle John himself, an eyewitness who faithfully recorded what he saw and heard. 

It’s a deeply appealing idea. After all, the Gospel’s intimate tone and vivid dialogues seem to come from someone who was there, personally knew Jesus and wished to preserve his memory.

However, according to critical scholars, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The theory most contemporary experts hold tells a very different (yet no less fascinating) story about how this Gospel came into being.

Rather than a straightforward eyewitness account, the Gospel of John appears to be the result of decades of reflection, interpretation, innovation, and theological development within the early Christian movement.

So that you won’t be left as frustrated as my friend in Rome was, this article will take you behind the traditional stories to explore what historians and biblical scholars have actually discovered.

We’ll look at who really wrote the Gospel of John, the sources that may have shaped it, and (most importantly) when and why it was composed.

When Was the Gospel of John Written? A Brief Look at the Issue of Authorship

The issue of when the Gospel of John was written is inseparable from the question of its authorship. From the time of Irenaeus in the late 2nd century, Church tradition maintained that the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, composed the fourth Gospel.

Irenaeus claimed to have received this information from Polycarp, who, in turn, was believed to have known John personally. This attribution, once accepted, became the dominant view in Christian thought and remained virtually uncontested throughout the Middle Ages.

Generations of theologians and believers regarded the Gospel as the direct testimony of an eyewitness who had walked with Jesus, witnessed his miracles, and faithfully recorded his words. Only with the rise of modern biblical criticism in the Enlightenment period did scholars begin to question whether the Apostle John could truly have been its author.

Even as late as the twentieth century, some of the most respected experts on the Gospel of John still defended the traditional view. Raymond E. Brown, one of the most erudite Johannine scholars of his generation, initially argued that the apostle remained the best candidate.

In his Commentary on John, Brown wrote:

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As we’ll see shortly, Brown later revised this opinion, moving toward the growing scholarly consensus that the Gospel wasn’t written directly by the apostle but perhaps by a later follower within the Johannine tradition.

Still, even today, a number of highly trained and deeply learned scholars continue to defend the older position. Craig A. Keener, for example, in his extensive Commentary on the Gospel of John, concludes:

However, most critical scholars today would argue against Keener’s conclusion. Let us take a brief look at the evidence they use to challenge the traditional attribution.

Arguments Against the Traditional Attribution

“Parenthetically, I am inclined to change my mind … from the position that I took in the first volume of my AB commentary identifying the Beloved Disciple as one of the Twelve, viz., John son of Zebedee.” With this candid admission in The Community of the Beloved Disciple, Raymond E. Brown signaled a decisive shift in his thinking.

First, the internal evidence offers little to confirm apostolic authorship. Nowhere in the Gospel does the author identify himself by name, and the “beloved disciple” functions more as a literary and theological symbol of faithful witness than an autobiographical signature.

Moreover, the final chapter (John 21) appears to distinguish between the beloved disciple and the actual writer: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true” (21:24). 

The shift from he to we suggests that an editor or group within the community is affirming the reliability of the beloved disciple’s witness while composing the final version of the text.

Second, the external evidence for John’s authorship emerges far too late to carry historical weight. The first explicit attribution comes from Irenaeus around 180 C.E., more than a century after the events. Irenaeus claimed that Polycarp, his teacher, had known “John the disciple of the Lord,” but this link is tenuous.

Irenaeus thought that the same person wrote both the Gospel and the Book of Revelation. Yet, beginning already in the 3rd century, scholars and (even!) Church writers have rightly questioned this conflation. 

The evidence clearly suggests that the Gospel and the Apocalypse were written by different individuals, and thus Irenaeus’ testimony likely reflects a degree of confusion or harmonization in his understanding of who “John” actually was.

Even if genuine, Irenaeus wrote at a time when early Christians were eager to anchor their Gospels in apostolic names. Similarly, his words must be interpreted in the light of Irenaeus’ polemical battles against other popular Christian movements that, for him, were nothing more than common heresies! 

A third difficulty lies in the socio-historical and linguistic context. The idea that a Galilean fisherman from the lower classes could compose such refined Greek prose stretches historical plausibility. 

Literacy rates in the 1st-century eastern Mediterranean were strikingly low. Catherine Hezser’s comprehensive study Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine estimates that only a small percentage of the population (mostly urban males from the elite) were literate beyond the most basic level. 

The Acts of the Apostles (4:13) explicitly describes Peter and John as “agrammatoi,” meaning “unlettered” or “illiterate,” which fits what we know of their social background. Even Josephus, a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy and trained scholar, admitted he struggled with Greek and had to rely on assistants.

It’s extremely unlikely that John, a rural fisherman from Galilee, could have authored a Gospel marked by sophisticated vocabulary, rhetorical elegance, and philosophical reflection worthy of a Hellenistic intellectual.

For these and related reasons (textual, historical, and linguistic) most critical scholars today conclude that the Apostle John didn’t write the Fourth Gospel. That, of course, brings us to the main question of this article: When was the Gospel of John written? Let’s take a look!

When Was the Gospel of John Written?

Dating any ancient text is an inexact science. Historians and biblical scholars rely on two main categories of evidence: internal clues, drawn from the text’s own language, themes, and historical references, and external evidence, such as quotations by later authors or surviving manuscript copies.

But even with these tools, determining when a work was written often involves educated reconstruction rather than certainty. The Gospels, written anonymously and without explicit historical markers, are especially challenging in this regard.

When it comes to when the Gospel of John was written, scholars have long agreed on at least one thing: it’s the latest of the four canonical Gospels. The precise date, however, continues to invite debate. 

The majority position in contemporary critical scholarship situates the Gospel’s composition somewhere between 75 and 110 C.E., after the Synoptic Gospels had already circulated.

This range reflects both caution and consensus! Caution because the evidence isn’t as good as we would like it to be, and consensus because the Gospel’s theology and social context still presuppose a later stage of Christian reflection.

Yet, when one tries to narrow this broad window, disagreements emerge among otherwise like-minded scholars.

Robert Kysar represents one of the more moderately early voices within the scholarly discussion. In his influential work John, the Maverick Gospel, he proposes that John was written between 75 and 85 C.E., within a decade or so after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple.

Kysar’s reasoning rests on several converging observations. 

First, the Gospel’s concern with the conflict between Jewish believers in Jesus and the synagogue authorities (as seen in John 9:22 and 16:2) reflects the decades immediately following 70 C.E., when Jewish communities were redefining their identity after the catastrophe. He argues that the Johannine community was likely expelled from synagogue life during this transitional period, giving the Gospel its distinctive tone of tension and separation.

Second, Kysar points to the Gospel’s pastoral, rather than missionary, purpose. The book’s long, meditative discourses, he suggests, weren’t aimed at converting outsiders but at strengthening an internal, suffering community. Such a setting fits naturally in the years following the Temple’s fall, when Jewish-Christian groups were clarifying their beliefs and facing social exclusion.

While Kysar’s thesis is compelling and elegantly argued, most critical scholars, including Raymond E. Brown, push the date of composition somewhat later, into the last decade of the first century, around 90-100 C.E.

Brown’s argument is notable for its extraordinary balance and breadth. 

He begins by rejecting overly simplistic theories that once dated John as late as 150-170 C.E. He observes that theological development cannot serve as a reliable clock. Paul’s writings, which predate the Synoptics, already contain a “high” Christology, and, therefore, John’s theological sophistication doesn’t necessarily require a 2nd-century setting.

Likewise, the Gospel’s apparent ecclesial organization doesn’t imply a late Church structure, since comparable organization existed among 1st-century Jewish and Christian groups, such as the Qumran community. In other words, nothing in John’s theology or church life demands a post-1st-century origin.

Brown then turns to external evidence, where he meticulously dismantles the claim that no one knew John before 150 C.E. 

Drawing on studies by François-Marie Braun, Christoph Maurer, and John S. Romanides, he shows that the Gospel was recognized and used in orthodox Christian circles by the early decades of the 2nd century, in Egypt, Rome, Syria, and Asia Minor! 

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110 C.E.) appears to echo the Johannine language, and Justin Martyr (c. 150 C.E.) almost certainly knew the Fourth Gospel. This wide and early circulation makes it impossible to push the Gospel’s composition much beyond 100 C.E.

Moreover, Brown refutes the old notion that John originated in Gnostic circles and only later entered the Church. The Nag Hammadi discoveries (such as the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Thomas) show that 2nd-century Gnostic works are far more removed from primitive Christian thought than John. 

Furthermore, no 1st century Gnostic text has been discovered and most experts today believe that ‘Gnosticism” was a 2nd century phenomena. 

Next, Brown examines John’s relationship to the Synoptic Gospels. If John depended literally on Matthew or Luke, it would imply a later date, but Brown sides with those who see independence rather than dependence.

If you’d like to learn more about the scholarly discussions on the relationship between John and the Synoptic Gospels check out Mark Goodacre’s new book, The Fourth Synoptic Gospel. Furthermore, if you purchase his amazing 16-lesson course, The Mysteries of the Synoptic Gospels, this (2025) October, you’ll receive a free copy of the book. It’s a fascinating, accessible deep dive into one of the most hotly debated topics in New Testament scholarship.

Moreover, the Gospel preserves a remarkably accurate knowledge of Palestinian geography, customs, and topography, suggesting that its underlying traditions were formed before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., when such local details were still remembered. 

This early stage (which Brown calls Stage 1 of the Gospel’s composition) was then developed over several decades into the final written form. It would be implausible, he argues, for such a living Palestinian tradition to remain unrecorded well into the 2nd century.

Perhaps Brown’s most decisive argument comes from manuscript evidence. The famous Rylands Papyrus P52, containing a few verses from John 18, is dated to around 125 CE or earlier, demonstrating the Gospel was already being copied and circulated in Egypt within a generation of its composition.

Additional witnesses, such as the Bodmer Papyri P66 and P75, dated to the late 2nd or early 3rd century, already reflect distinct textual traditions, implying the text had been circulating long enough to develop local variations. 

For that to happen, Brown concludes, the Gospel must have been written no later than 100-110 C.E., and probably closer to 90-100 C.E.

Finally, Brown weighs internal indicators. The Gospel’s references to believers being expelled from synagogues, in his opinion, fit best in the period 80-90 C.E, when Jewish communities, reacting to growing Christian claims about Jesus, began excluding his followers.

The Gospel also presupposes the death of Peter (John 21:18-19) and possibly the death of the Beloved Disciple (21:20-23), both of which suggest composition after the passing of the apostolic generation. 

Its realized eschatology (the emphasis on eternal life already present rather than a future expectation) reflects a theological response to the delay of Jesus’ return, a theme that arose only after decades of unfulfilled hope.

These cumulative internal clues point naturally to the last decade of the 1st century as the moment when the Gospel reached its final form.

Thus, Mark A. Powell, in his book Introducing the New Testament concludes:

Similarly, Keener notes:

Finally, German scholar, Udo Schnelle is more skeptical, concluding:

Now that we have examined what scholars say about the authorship and when the Gospel of John was written, we can turn to the next major question: what sources and traditions lie behind it, and how does it relate to the earlier Synoptic Gospels?

Sources Behind the Gospels and John’s Relationship to the Synoptics

The issue of when the Gospel of John was written is also related to the question of its sources. Today, most scholars are quite certain that no canonical Gospels were written by eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life.

As far as the evidence allows us to tell, evangelists were second- or third-generation Christians, living decades after Jesus’ death. These authors inherited a growing body of traditions about Jesus (some oral, some written) and wove them into coherent narratives aimed at preserving, interpreting, and proclaiming the story of Jesus to their communities.

Scholars have spent more than two centuries reconstructing the literary relationships among the Synoptic Gospels whose overlapping material, sequence, and wording make them clearly interdependent. 

The prevailing consensus, known as the Four-Document Hypothesis, holds that Mark was written first, probably around 70 C.E., and that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark as one of their primary sources. 

In addition to Mark, both seem to have drawn on a second written source, now lost, known as “Q” (from the German Quelle, meaning “source”). 

This hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings would account for the material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. Each evangelist also had access to his own unique sources, traditions or documents sometimes labeled “M” (for Matthew) and “L” (for Luke).

Yet even this well-established model isn’t without dissent. A number of respected scholars have challenged the existence of Q, arguing that Matthew and Luke need not have shared an additional written source at all. Among the most prominent voices is Mark Goodacre, who contends that Luke used both Mark and Matthew directly, thus rendering the hypothetical Q unnecessary. 

Goodacre’s argument has gained considerable traction in recent years and remains an important reminder that even long-standing scholarly models are subject to revision. 

When we turn to the Gospel of John, the picture changes dramatically. For more than a century, scholars have recognized that John stands apart from the Synoptics in both content and style. 

Its narrative structure, chronology, and theological outlook diverge sharply. Jesus speaks in long, reflective discourses instead of short parables; his ministry extends over several years rather than one; and his self-understanding and portrayal are more overtly divine. 

These differences raise the question: Was the author of John aware of the Synoptic Gospels, and did he depend on them in any way?

According to Brown and his Commentary on John, the answer is no! 

In his exhaustive comparison of parallel episodes (the cleansing of the Temple, the feeding of the five thousand, the anointing at Bethany, and the passion narratives) Brown found no consistent pattern of dependence on any one Synoptic Gospel.

At times, John seems closer to Mark or Luke, yet, just as often, he diverges completely. If John had used one or more of the Synoptics as a written source, the resulting inconsistencies would require assuming that he deliberately altered nearly every detail for no apparent reason.

For Brown, such a scenario strains credibility. Instead, he concluded that John drew on an independent stream of tradition, rooted in early Palestinian memories of Jesus but transmitted through a distinct community of believers.

This doesn’t mean, however, that John was composed in total isolation. Brown allows for the possibility of limited cross-influence between Johannine and Synoptic traditions, most likely at the level of oral storytelling rather than written borrowing.

Yet overall, Brown insists that John’s Gospel preserves an independent theological and narrative vision, concluding:

Similarly, Robert Kysar believes that John is, strictly speaking, based on earlier independent traditions that circulated within a stream of the early Christian movement separate from the one that produced the Synoptic Gospels. 

According to Kysar, both the Synoptic and Johannine communities drew from a common reservoir of oral stories, sayings, and theological reflections about Jesus, but each group interpreted and organized these materials in different ways to address its own historical situation. 

For Kysar, the most striking evidence of John’s independence lies in the Gospel’s distinctive structure, style, and theology. 

Rather than recounting a linear ministry culminating in the Passion, as Mark does, John reshapes the story around a series of revelatory “signs” and extended theological discourses that reveal Jesus as the preexistent Word made flesh.

Even where John includes stories known from the Synoptics (such as the cleansing of the Temple, the feeding of the five thousand, or the Passion) he transforms them into vehicles for theological reflection rather than historical narrative. 

The discrepancies are too systematic to be mere editorial revisions of existing Gospels. They instead show that John’s author was working from a distinct interpretive framework and oral base, translating older traditions into the idiom and theology of his own community.

Kysar further observes that John’s language and worldview bear the marks of a long process of community reflection rather than dependence on written sources. The Gospel’s unique vocabulary (words like light, life, truth, and world) and its absence of key Synoptic expressions, such as Kingdom of God or parable, indicate that the Evangelist wrote in a different conceptual universe. 

Likewise, its chronology, which stretches Jesus’ ministry across three Passovers and places his death on the eve of the festival rather than during it, reflects deliberate theological shaping, not historical error or copying. 

For Kysar, these differences make best sense if the author wasn’t revising the Synoptics but reworking independent traditions through the lens of particular Johannine theology.

Consequently, Delbert Burkett, in his book An Introduction to the New Testament, notes:

Conclusion

When was the Gospel of John written? As we have seen, the question has intrigued scholars for centuries and continues to shape our understanding of early Christian history. 

While the exact date cannot be determined with certainty, the evidence points to a period between 90 and 110 C.E., when the first generation of eyewitnesses had already passed away and Christian theology was significantly more developed in contrast to the earliest years of the Jesus movement. 

In this sense, the Gospel of John in the New Testament occupies a unique place. It stands at the culmination of a decades-long process of reflection, offering an interesting perspective on who Jesus was and what his life and death meant for the particular community whom this text was written to.

It's independence from the Synoptic tradition underscores the diversity of early Christian thought, while its profound unity of theme and vision demonstrates how memory, theology, and innovation could merge into one of the most enduring works of the Christian canon.

The Gospel of John thus serves not only as a witness to the historical development of early Christianity but also as a timeless expression of how later believers sought to understand and articulate Jesus’ public ministry and alleged resurrection.

Appendix: To Whom Was the Gospel of John Written?

Most scholars today agree that each of the New Testament Gospels was originally written with a particular community of Christians in mind. These weren’t general-purpose documents produced for the entire Church at once, but pastoral and theological works addressing the concrete needs, questions, and challenges of specific groups of believers.

The Gospel writers sought to preserve the story of Jesus for their own congregations, communities that had already embraced faith in the resurrected Jesus but were wrestling with how to live it out in the complex world of the late 1st century. 

The Gospel of John, in this light, appears to have been written for a distinct group of Christians shaped by their conflict with the synagogue. 

Previous generations of scholars (early 20th-century) believed that John is primarily a Hellenistic Gospel, without any strong Jewish ideas. However, that isn’t the case in contemporary scholarship.

As Burkett explains:

The second reason is the fact that the text, as already noted, repeatedly alludes to followers of Jesus being “put out of the synagogue” (John 9:22; 16:2), suggesting a community of Jewish believers who had come to see Jesus as the Messiah and were consequently expelled from Jewish communal life. 

These believers, separated from their roots yet still deeply formed by Jewish Scripture and symbols, seem to have developed a theology that presented Jesus as the ultimate revelation of God, the one who replaces the Temple, fulfills the feasts, and embodies the divine Word. 

The Gospel’s high Christology, rich symbolism, and reflective tone all make sense when seen as the product of a group struggling to define its identity apart from both Judaism and the broader Greco-Roman world.

At the same time, the Gospel’s repeated emphasis on “the world” and its concern with faith and unbelief suggest that the author also hoped to strengthen and unify an expanding Christian audience.

While rooted in a particular local situation, the Gospel’s language about truth, light, and eternal life transcends its setting, and has the ability to speak to believers of every generation. Perhaps, that is, at the core, the most vivid literary and theological force of this composition!

How Many Gospels Are There? (Inside and Outside the Bible)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Most people, when they hear the word “gospel,” think of the four we have in the Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But what if I told you that the word originally had nothing to do with Jesus, or that there are more than 40 other gospels that never made it into the New Testament?

In this article, I’ll trace how that transformation of the word “gospel” happened — first from a general word to a theological term, and then to a literary genre. Along the way, I’ll look at how the four Gospels in the New Testament came to be, explore the many other gospels that were written and later excluded from the canon, and ask what exactly makes a text a “gospel” in the first place.

What is a Gospel?

The English word “gospel” comes from the Old English word godspel, which literally meant “good spell.” No, this is not a reference to magic. The word spel originally meant message or story, so gospel essentially means “good news.” In fact, it’s a translation of the biblical Greek word euangelion (pronounced eh-van-GELL-eeon), which simply meant any kind of good news. You might also recognize that it’s the root of words like evangelize and evangelical.

However, with the rise of Christianity, the word eventually came to refer not just to any good news but specifically to the good news Christians believed Jesus represented. The apostle Paul used it this way, for example, in Romans 1:16:

The fact that Paul uses the word euangelion so specifically here indicates that the word had already begun to take on a distinctly Christian flavor in his time. In fact, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes that “the way Paul uses [the word gospel] without explanation in writing to believers in Rome whom he didn’t know suggests the Christian sense was already current.” However, it’s important to note that the word gospel did not yet refer to a literary genre in Paul’s time. In fact, the four canonical Gospels would be written after Paul’s death.

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Early in the 2nd century CE, a Christian intellectual named Justin Martyr quoted from at least three of the canonical Gospels in his own writings, calling them “the memoirs of the apostles.” It isn’t until around 175-185 CE that we find a Christian writer, Irenaeus, calling these biographical books about Jesus gospels.

In The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, Loveday Alexander writes that we can define the genre of gospels as “a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of a Galilean holy man named Jesus.” That’s a decent general definition, at least applied to the four Gospels in the New Testament.

Let’s start, then, with a brief introduction to the four canonical Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

Although the four Gospels are ordered Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament canon, scholars know that wasn’t the order in which they were written. With that in mind, I’m going to introduce the four Gospels in the chronological order in which scholars acknowledge they were written. By the way, I’ve been asked how many Gospels there are in the Catholic Bible. While the Catholic Bible includes a few Old Testament books not found in Protestant Bibles, it still only contains four Gospels in the New Testament.

Mark, although the second book in the New Testament canon, was actually the Gospel that was written first, probably in about 70 CE. It contains no birth story for Jesus, which is likely one of the reasons some early Christians believed that Matthew, which does have a birth story, had been written first.

Instead, Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. It ends with Jesus’ crucifixion and the women finding his empty tomb. However, in Mark’s original ending, the women told no one about it out of fear, giving the Gospel an abrupt and confusing ending in 16:8. This was deemed unacceptable by a later scribe or scribes, who added resurrection appearances and Jesus’ ascension to heaven.

Matthew was probably the next Gospel to be written. Most scholars place its date of composition between 80 and 90 CE. After beginning with a genealogy of Jesus, Matthew contains a birth story that explains Jesus’ semi-divine origins. Matthew is also considered the most Jewish of the four Gospels, in that Jesus’ teachings often focus on interpretations of the Jewish Law.

However, Matthew also used Mark as a formative source and many stories and sayings from Mark appear verbatim in Matthew. Matthew ends with Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, as well as the Great Commission where the risen Jesus tells his disciples to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

Luke may have been written between 80 and 90 CE like Matthew, although some scholars now put its composition as late as 120 CE. The anonymous author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts which was meant to be the second volume of his history of the founding of the church. Like Matthew, Luke follows Mark in including many of Mark’s incidents and sayings and like Matthew, it includes a birth story outlining Jesus’ conception through the Holy Spirit. Luke, however, focuses much more than the other Gospels on helping the poor and oppressed.

Finally, John was written between 90 and 110 CE according to most scholars. John is quite different from the other three Gospels in several ways. First, while there is no birth story, there is a prologue which explains Jesus has existed with God since the beginning of time. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is “the man from heaven,” as Bart Ehrman puts it in his The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. As such, Jesus in John is less concerned with earthly matters and more concerned with spiritual matters. Instead of teaching about the coming kingdom of God, as he does in all three other Gospels, Jesus focuses mostly on his identity as God’s divine agent.

So there we have it, right? There are four Gospels in the New Testament and that’s it. Or is it?

How Many Gospels Are There Outside the Bible?

While most Christians are familiar with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, fewer are familiar with the gospels that didn’t become part of the biblical canon. However, we know that many more gospels were written than the four we have in the New Testament.

While we have full copies of some of these gospels, many of them are only known from polemical treatises written against them, and then only in fragmented form. Let me give you a couple of examples.

The Gospel of Thomas, discovered along with other lesser known Christian texts, was discovered fully formed in a cache of codices (early forms of books) near the town of Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. Like the four canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas contains lots of sayings attributed to Jesus, some of which it shares with the NT Gospels.

Unlike those Gospels, however, it contains almost no narrative. In fact, the introduction to the book plainly says, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke.” The Gospel of Thomas is usually labeled as a Gnostic gospel – one emphasizing the importance of secret spiritual knowledge – and from the point of view of our biblical canon, has some pretty unusual sayings. A few scholars have dated it to as early as 60 CE, but most put its date of composition around 140 CE.

The Gospel of the Hebrews, on the other hand, is a Jewish Christian gospel known only from seven citations of it in the work of early Church Fathers. In An Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha, Fred Lapham writes that the fragments contain the belief that the Holy Spirit is Jesus' Divine Mother. It also contradicts the canonical Gospels in that the resurrected Jesus first appears to James his brother, thus giving James priority as leader of the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem instead of Peter. This gospel was written in the middle of the 2nd century and except for those citations, is otherwise lost.

So those two gospels, added to the four from the NT, give us six. But there are many, many more. In fact, below is a list of all the gospels we know about that I haven’t yet mentioned, in no particular order. Scholars have all or part of these, or at least know something about them from other references. While it’s fun to attempt a count of total gospels written, it’s important to note that even scholars don’t have a consensus about how many total gospels may have existed. New gospels could still be found, as well.

By the way, in this list I won’t include the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife which proved to be a modern forgery, or the Secret Gospel of Mark, which, while not every scholar agrees, I believe has also been proven as a modern forgery.

1. Gospel of Perfection
2. Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians
3. Gospel of the Nazarenes
4. Gospel of the Ebionites
5. Gospel of the Twelve
6. Armenian Infancy Gospel
7. Protoevangelium of James
8. Gospel of the Nativity of Mary
9. Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew
10. History of Joseph the Carpenter
11. Infancy Gospel of Thomas
12. Latin Infancy Gospel
13. Syriac Infancy Gospel
14. Gospel of the Lots of Mary
15. Gospel of Peter
16. Gospel of Valentinus
17. Gospel of the Encratites
18. Gospel of Marcion
19. Gospel of Basilides
20. Gospel of Truth
21. Gospel of the Four Heavenly Realms
22. Gospel of Judas
23. Greek Gospel of the Egyptians
24. Gospel of Philip
25. Gospel of the Twelve Apostles
26. Gospel of Andrew
27. Gospel of Bartholomew
28. Gospel of Hesychius
29. Gospel of Lucius
30. Gospel of Merinthus
31. Gospel of the Adversary of the Law and the Prophets
32. Gospel of Eve
33. Gospel of Mani
34. Gospel of the Savior
35. Coptic Gospel of the Twelve
36. Gospel of Cerinthus
37. Gospel of Apelles
38. Gospel of the Seventy
39. Gospel of Nicodemus
40. Gospel of the Secret Supper
41. Gospel of Barnabas

With the six gospels I’ve already mentioned, and the 41 in this list, we have a total of 47 written gospels. This, of course, doesn’t include modern “gospels,” written in the 20th century or later, nor does it include tiny fragments which may or may not point to the existence of completely new gospels.

Conclusion: How Many Gospels Are There?

Part of the problem with counting the number of written gospels is that not everyone agrees about what constitutes a gospel. For example, if there is a papyrus fragment containing sayings of Jesus from the canonical gospels, but worded slightly differently, does that mean it’s a separate gospel? Answers vary, and uncertainties like this make it all but impossible to count the total number of gospels objectively.

The word gospel originally just meant good news — any good news at all. However, Paul’s letters make it clear that fairly early on in the life of the Christian church, the word took on a meaning specific to Christian teachings. For Paul and his contemporaries, the gospel was the good news of salvation through Christ.

After Paul’s death, the four canonical Gospels were written. Early Church Father Justin Martyr called these the “memoirs of the apostles,” believing that Jesus’ original apostles had written them. However, by the end of the 2nd century, the word gospel had become the literary genre of these “memoirs,” focusing on the life and teachings of Jesus and those around him.

Mark was our earliest written gospel, likely put together from oral traditions about Jesus that had circulated in the 40 years since his death. Next came Matthew and Luke, both of whom copied a lot of Mark but added birth stories and other material. Finally, John was the last of the canonical Gospels written, and it redefined Jesus’ role as a cosmic figure who had existed eternally with God and participated in the creation of the world.

Later, other Gospels were written, mostly starting in the 2nd century, including the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel with little to no narrative content. There were also Jewish Christian gospels, such as the Gospel of the Hebrews, that we know only from quotations in other people’s writings.

However, if we define the word Gospel as a literary genre containing “a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of a Galilean holy man named Jesus,” there are more than 40 others written all the way up to the Middle Ages.

Nicodemus in the Bible: Who Was He? (Chapter & Verses)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Nicodemus in the Bible is both a side character and mysterious figure, giving a stark reminder that the origins of Christianity don’t revolve solely around key individuals such as Jesus, Peter, and Paul. When we look closely at the New Testament, we begin to see a host of “hidden” individuals who appear briefly and then vanish, yet whose presence leaves a lasting impression.

Some of these figures are mentioned only once, others surface a handful of times, but together they remind us that the story of early Christianity was more crowded and complex than it might first appear.

Nicodemus is one of the most intriguing among them. He doesn’t dominate the stage, yet his encounters with Jesus raise profound theological questions and have inspired centuries of interpretation. 

Readers of the Gospel of John quickly realize that his appearances are carefully placed within the narrative, each time adding another layer of depth to his character and additional dimension to the unfolding story.

Who was this man, and what does his role tell us about the earliest Christians’ understanding of Jesus and his mission?

In what follows, we’ll explore Nicodemus’ place in the Gospel of John, consider the historical question of whether his story reflects real events or theological imagination, and trace how later Christians remembered and reshaped his identity.

By doing so, we can better appreciate both the mystery of this elusive figure and the ways his story has echoed across Christian tradition.

But before we step into our journey exploring Nicodemus in the Bible and beyond, I’d like to invite you to check out Bart D. Ehrman’s eight-part course The Unknown Gospels.

In these engaging 30-minute lectures, Dr. Ehrman unpacks the New Testament Gospels, showing how historians distinguish between authentic memories of Jesus and later legendary embellishments. If you’ve ever wondered how scholars sort history from theology in the Gospel narratives, this course is the perfect next step.

Who Was Nicodemus in the Bible? A Brief Look at His Story

When we turn to the New Testament, one of the first things to notice is that Nicodemus doesn’t appear in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or Luke.

His name is entirely absent from those accounts. Instead, he features only in the Gospel of John, the latest of the four Gospels and the one most often considered to present a theologically elaborate portrait of Jesus, with a strong emphasis on his divine identity.

That makes Nicodemus in the Bible a uniquely Johannine figure! 

The first and most famous appearance of Nicodemus occurs in John 3:1-21. He is introduced as “a Pharisee” and “a leader of the Jews” who comes to Jesus by night. In the conversation that follows, Nicodemus acknowledges that Jesus must be a teacher from God, given the signs he performs, but quickly becomes confused when Jesus speaks of the need to be “born from above” or “born again.”

This dialogue leads into one of the best-known passages of the New Testament, culminating in the statement that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Nicodemus, though intrigued, departs without showing a full understanding of what Jesus has said.

The second reference to Nicodemus comes later, in John 7:45-52. Here, during a heated debate among the chief priests and Pharisees about Jesus’ growing influence, Nicodemus speaks up in his defense. 

He doesn’t openly declare himself a follower, but he appeals to the law, reminding his colleagues that a person should not be judged before being given a fair hearing. 

His intervention is met with ridicule, and the exchange ends without resolution. This episode portrays him as a cautious figure, willing to speak but not yet to risk open identification with Jesus.

Nicodemus appears for the final time after the crucifixion, in John 19:38-42. Together with Joseph of Arimathea, he assists in Jesus’ burial. Nicodemus brings an extraordinary mixture of myrrh and aloes, an amount far beyond normal usage. 

The two men wrap Jesus’ body with the spices in linen cloth, laying him in a tomb near the site of the crucifixion. 

This act is presented as a gesture of honor and devotion, contrasting with his earlier hesitancy. By this point, Nicodemus has moved from nighttime curiosity to a more tangible, though still discreet, involvement in Jesus’ story.

Taken together, these three episodes form the complete biblical record of Nicodemus. He enters John’s narrative suddenly, converses with Jesus at length, reappears briefly in a moment of tension, and finally steps onto the stage once more in a scene of quiet reverence at the end of the Gospel.

But are these stories historically accurate? Can we trust the accounts found in our latest Gospel of the New Testament? Let’s check that out!

Nicodemus in the Bible: Historical Analysis

Since Nicodemus in the Bible appears on three separate occasions, it makes sense to take each one in turn and ask whether there are elements that point to the authenticity of his existence, and if the stories themselves reflect genuine historical events.

The Story of Nicodemus: John 3:1-29

The first episode, found in John 3:1-21, is also the most elaborate. Here Nicodemus, as we mentioned, comes to Jesus by night, acknowledges him as a teacher sent from God, and quickly finds himself in a long and complex discussion about the need to be “born from above.”

Before turning to the question of historicity, it’s worth pausing to consider what the story itself is trying to communicate.

Ernst Haenchen, in his Commentary on John, argues that the dialogue is carefully crafted to highlight the incomprehension of sign-based faith, with Nicodemus serving as a literary foil for the evangelist’s theological agenda.

Later editorial layers, such as the reference to baptismal rebirth and the church’s voice breaking into the speech, further suggest that the story as we now have it is the product of reflection within the Johannine community rather than a simple record of remembered conversation.

This means that before we can even ask if the encounter “really happened,” we must recognize that the text itself isn’t simply reporting but interpreting. It conveys the evangelist’s convictions about the nature of new birth, the role of the Spirit, and the judgment that comes through belief or unbelief in Jesus.

From a literary standpoint, the episode succeeds in presenting Nicodemus as the representative of those who are drawn to Jesus but remain unable to understand him fully. 

While Marc Michel, in an interesting literary study, agrees that we shouldn’t read Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus as a straightforward historical (authentic) dialogue, he offers a slightly different interpretation of the meaning behind this amazing story. 

For him, the encounter dramatizes the problem of interpreting Jesus’ “signs”: Nicodemus embodies “le non-lieu de la vérité” (“non-place of truth”), a figure standing outside the proper locus from which Jesus can be rightly understood.

Baptism, in this view, is the passage that relocates the believer into the sphere of light, where true vision and knowledge become possible.

As Michel himself concludes:

From a historical standpoint the question whether such a conversation between Jesus and a Pharisee could ever have taken place in this form remains. 

To answer questions of this kind, contemporary scholars turn to what are often called the “criteria of authenticity.” These aren’t mechanical rules that can provide certainty, but rather tools for assessing the probability that a given tradition goes back to the historical Jesus.

Among the most frequently used are the criterion of multiple attestation (is the tradition found in more than one independent source?), the criterion of dissimilarity (does the tradition differ from what Christians later would have wanted to say, or from what we know of contemporary Judaism?), and the criterion of contextual credibility (does the tradition fit into the historical and linguistic context of 1st-century Palestine?).

None of these criteria are foolproof, but, together, they help scholars weigh the evidence and distinguish between traditions that may plausibly trace back to Jesus and those that are more likely products of later reflection.

When these criteria are applied to John 3:1-21, the story of Nicodemus fares poorly. It’s found only in the Gospel of John, with no parallel in earlier or independent traditions. It’s entirely in keeping with Johannine theological themes rather than standing apart from them, and most significantly, it fails the test of contextual credibility.

As Bart Ehrman and Hugo Méndez point out in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, the entire dialogue hinges on a play on words in Greek: Jesus says one must be born anōthen, which can mean both “from above” and “again.” 

Nicodemus mistakes the one sense for the other, prompting Jesus to explain further. 

This pun works in Greek, the language of the Gospel, but it can’t be reproduced in Aramaic, the language that Jesus and Nicodemus would have spoken. In Aramaic, “from above” and “again” aren’t expressed by the same word.

This linguistic fact makes it highly improbable that the conversation unfolded in history as John narrates it.

Raymond E. Brown, in his Commentary on John, summarizes the arguments against the historical authenticity of this pericope:

Similarly, Hugo Mendez, in his recent book The Gospel of John: A New History, concludes:

So, even if there were once some kind of dialogue between Jesus and a Jewish leader about new birth or spiritual transformation, the form in which it appears in John is thoroughly shaped by the evangelist’s own theological imagination.

Nicodemus in the Bible: John 7:45-52

The second occasion where Nicodemus appears is in John 7:45-52, during a heated scene among the chief priests and Pharisees. The officers who had been sent to arrest Jesus return empty-handed, reporting that “no one ever spoke like this man.”

The religious leaders react angrily, dismissing both the officers and the crowds who support Jesus. At this point Nicodemus, who is identified again as “one of them,” speaks up: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” 

His intervention is cautious but noteworthy. He doesn’t openly profess faith in Jesus, but he appeals to the principle of due process. The other Pharisees, however, immediately ridicule him, asking whether he too is from Galilee and insisting that no prophet arises from that region.

Brown notes:

From a historical standpoint, of course, the question is whether this episode can be traced back to an actual event or whether it serves primarily a literary function in John’s narrative.

Again, several observations can be made. First, this episode is found only in the Gospel of John and is absent from the Synoptic accounts. That in itself doesn’t prove it to be unhistorical, but it does mean we lack the support of multiple independent witnesses.

Second, the story strongly emphasizes the frustration and helplessness of the Sanhedrin authorities, a portrayal that may reflect post-Easter Christian perceptions of the Jewish leadership more than the actual situation in Jesus’ lifetime.

The sharp dismissal (“no prophet arises from Galilee”) seems more like a rhetorical flourish than a carefully reasoned legal statement, particularly since at least one prophet, Jonah, did in fact come from that region.

When measured by the usual criteria of authenticity, the passage doesn’t yield strong results. It’s singly attested, and the content fits comfortably within John’s broader theological narrative of mounting hostility toward Jesus rather than standing apart from it. 

Unlike the Nicodemus dialogue in John 3, however, this passage doesn’t depend on a linguistic pun or any feature that clearly rules out historicity. 

It’s therefore harder to dismiss outright. What can be said with some confidence is that the scene, as presented, reflects Johannine literary and theological interests, especially the contrast between the openness of some and the hostility of others.

Whether there lies behind it a historical reminiscence of a Jewish leader who spoke a cautious word in Jesus’ defense remains uncertain, though it seems less likely that we are dealing with a straightforward historical report.

Nicodemus in the Bible: 19:38-42

The final appearance of Nicodemus comes in John 19:38-42, at the burial of Jesus. After the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for permission to remove the body, and together with Nicodemus he prepares it for burial. 

Nicodemus brings an extravagant mixture of myrrh and aloes (weighing about one hundred pounds), and the two men wrap the body with spices in linen cloth before placing it in a nearby tomb.

While this episode rounds out Nicodemus’ arc in John’s narrative, moving from nighttime seeker to public participant, the question remains whether such a scene reflects historical memory or Johannine theology.

Some critical scholars have questioned the historicity of Jesus’ burial altogether. Bart D. Ehrman, for example, has argued, among other things, that Roman practice with crucifixion victims usually excluded honorable burials.

Condemned criminals, especially those executed for sedition, were often left to decompose on the cross as a warning to others or else thrown into shallow graves or common pits.

Still, this view hasn’t persuaded the majority of scholars. Many (including Dale C. Allison and John P. Meier) maintain that, while details may have been shaped theologically, the core tradition of Jesus’ burial is historically credible. They argue that Roman governors sometimes allowed bodies to be released to family or sympathizers, particularly in Judea. 

Even if we accept that Jesus was in fact buried, the role of Nicodemus in the story raises additional questions. All four Gospels report that Joseph of Arimathea was responsible for the burial, but only John adds Nicodemus into the scene.

Mendez explains the key differences:

These changes are significant. They could suggest that his participation may not reflect an independent tradition but instead serves a rhetorical purpose within John’s Gospel.

Considering all the available evidence (or the lack thereof), it seems entirely plausible that Nicodemus is, as Laurence Cantwell notes, merely a symbol or “mere allegorical representation” standing “for Pharisaism and the established Judaism of his day.”

Beyond Nicodemus in the Bible: A Brief Look at Later Tradition

As is the case with many side characters in the Bible, even though we might wish to know more about his life, Nicodemus doesn’t appear in other early sources. Did Nicodemus follow Jesus in his later life?

Consequently, we have no firm evidence about what became of him after the events recorded in the Gospel of John. No reliable information exists about his later life, his death, or whether he continued to follow Jesus.

What we do have are later legends and traditions that filled the gap, but these aren’t grounded in history. They tell us more about the imagination of early and medieval Christians than about the man himself.

One of the most prominent of these traditions is the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, a work that emerged in the 4th century and was later widely circulated under the title Acts of Pilate. 

This text, attributed to Nicodemus in the prologue, presents itself as his eyewitness account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate and the subsequent events, including the descent of Christ into Hades to liberate the righteous dead.

It soon became one of the most popular apocryphal texts in the Christian tradition. Rémi Gounelle and Zbigniew Izydorczyk, in their rigorous translation and commentary explain:

While the work proved enormously influential in shaping Christian imagination about Jesus’ Passion and afterlife, virtually no scholar today believes that Nicodemus in the Bible was the real author.

Gounelle and Izydorczyk note:

The attribution to Nicodemus reflects a common tendency in apocryphal literature to lend authority to a text by attaching it to a well-known biblical name. If you want to know more about it, I highly recommend Bart Ehrman’s excellent study Forgery and Counterforgery. 

Beyond apocryphal writings, Nicodemus also came to be remembered in the liturgy, hagiography, and even art of the medieval church. In certain traditions, he was venerated as a saint. His role in helping to bury Jesus was understood as an act of devotion that revealed his true allegiance.

This development isn’t as unusual as it might seem. Early Christian memory often transformed marginal figures into models of faith. 

In fact, even Pontius Pilate was, in some circles, thought to have repented and become a believer. The Coptic Church, for instance, preserved a tradition that Pilate later converted and, remarkably, venerated him as a saint.

Historically, we know next to nothing about Nicodemus’ later life and death. Yet, in the collective memory of the church, he came to stand as a witness to Jesus, whether as the supposed author of an apocryphal gospel or as a saint honored due to his role in Jesus' burial.

Conclusion

Nicodemus in the Bible remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the New Testament. He steps onto the stage of John’s Gospel three times, raising questions that touch both theology and history. His nocturnal dialogue with Jesus conveys profound symbolic meaning, yet fails the historians’ tests of authenticity. 

Despite that, his story didn’t end with John’s Gospel. In apocryphal texts like the Gospel of Nicodemus, and in later hagiography and art, this marginal figure became a central witness, even venerated as a saint in some traditions.

Historically elusive but theologically rich, Nicodemus stands as an example of how early Christian memory could transform secondary characters into important symbols of popular piety.

John in the Bible: Life, Death & Interesting Facts

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

The Apostle John is traditionally known as one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples and a member of his inner circle. Yet, despite his high status among the apostles and his close relationship with Jesus, much about John remains shrouded in mystery — including whether he actually authored the Gospel that bears his name.

Who was John in the Bible? In this article, I’ll explore what the Bible says about John, how he came to be viewed as a foundational leader in the early church, and whether he could have written one of the theologically richest texts in the Christian canon.

Who Was John in the Bible?

In the New Testament, John is said to have been one of Jesus’ original disciples. He was both a disciple, a follower of a wise person, and an apostle, one who is sent, in that Jesus sent him to preach the gospel to the world.

His name, in his native Aramaic language, would have been Yochanan which means “Yahweh is gracious.” The Greek form, since Greek is the language of the New Testament, was Iōannēs. This was a common Jewish name in Jesus’ time, so this was not the only instance of a John in the Bible. There are several other prominent Johns in the New Testament besides the apostle, including John the Baptist, John Mark (Acts 12:12), and John of Patmos, who wrote the book of Revelation.

John the Apostle is first referred to, chronologically speaking, in Mark 3:17 where Jesus calls his original 12 disciples, who are said to include “James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder).” Unfortunately, we are never told why Jesus calls the brothers this, only that he did.

As we’ll see, in Matthew, Jesus first encounters John in the Bible by the sea of Galilee. Since most ancient people lived and died in one area, he was probably born and raised in Galilee, the same region where Jesus was from. He was probably also born around the turn of the 1st century CE, like Jesus, although he is traditionally said to have been the youngest apostle.

Matthew 4:21 gives us a bit more information about John in the Bible: “Going on from there, He [Jesus] saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets.” So John was apparently a fisherman, as were his brother and their father. It was the family business, so to speak. Luke 5:10 says that Simon Peter was their partner in the endeavor.

Alicia Batten writes that the life of a fisherman in Jesus’ time, a time when Israel was controlled economically by the Roman Empire, was no picnic.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though, from my use of the word “business” above. Fishermen were very poor, usually living hand to mouth, and therefore almost certainly uneducated. More on that later.

Oddly enough, the Gospel of John makes no explicit mention of John the Apostle, although it does mention unnamed “sons of Zebedee.” The Beloved Disciple, found only in the Gospel of John and traditionally assumed to be John, is never actually named.

We are also shown in the Synoptic Gospels that John in the Bible was one of the most prominent disciples, along with his brother James and Peter. How do we know this? Jesus sets these three apart for special experiences with him. In Mark 9:2-10, for example, Jesus specifically takes James, John, and Peter with him to the top of a mountain where his glory is revealed only to them, an episode known as the Transfiguration.

Similarly, in the Garden of Gethsemane before Jesus is arrested, Mark 14:33-34 says that he tells most of the disciples to sit and pray while he goes to another place to pray himself. However, he doesn’t go alone:

Even in his greatest anguish, Jesus wanted these three with him. Whether or not these incidents are historical, they indicate that John in the Bible was considered one of the most important apostles in the early Church.

Even Paul mentions the importance of these three in the Jerusalem church, saying this in Galatians 2:9:

Not only did Paul meet John the Apostle, but he recognized that John was one of the “acknowledged leaders” of the church (Galatians 2:2).

How did John die? Church tradition has long said that John was the only one of the 12 disciples who was not martyred. However, since we don’t have any historical information on him after Paul’s letter to the Galatians (written between the late 40s and early 50s CE), we really can’t know how or when he died. Nevertheless, if John in the Bible was around the same age as Jesus, he died sometime after the early 50s, making him at least 50 years old at his death.

Let’s summarize what we know so far: John the Apostle was the brother of James and the son of Zebedee, he was a fisherman living in Galilee when he met Jesus, who called him and his brother “Sons of Thunder,” although the Gospels never say why. Finally, he was one of the three most important leaders of the early church after Jesus’ death, acknowledged by Paul as such and by the Gospels as having been present at some of the most important moments of Jesus’ life.

Did John the Apostle Write the Gospel of John?

Church tradition has long held that John the Apostle was the author of the Gospel of John. Additionally, as I mentioned above, he has often been assumed to be the unnamed Beloved Disciple who is so favorably mentioned in the Gospel. But is this accurate? What evidence do we have to prove or disprove this theory?

There are several reasons for thinking that the Apostle John could not have written the Gospel of John. First, the Gospel of John, like the other three Gospels, was originally written anonymously, with the title added much later. How do we know this? In The Women's Bible Commentary, Carol Newsom notes that the oldest manuscripts we have of John contain no title or authorial information. Again, like the other Gospels, the author did not apparently care about claiming authorship. We’ll talk below about how later people ascribed the book to John.

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Second, it is highly unlikely that a Galilean fisherman in Jesus’ time would have been literate. In her book Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, Catherine Hezser, who wrote the definitive study on the topic, concludes that Jewish literacy in Jesus’ time hovered around 3%. That is, only 3% of all Jews in Palestine could read and/or write in their own language of Aramaic. Who would those 3% have been? They would certainly have been the elite, the wealthiest citizens who could afford an education and who had the leisure time to learn. The vast majority of other Palestinian Jews lived as poor laborers, John the Apostle included. It is therefore highly unlikely that he would have had the necessary knowledge to write a book.

Given that, is it likely that St. John could have not only written a book but written it in Greek? While we have some Aramaic writings from Palestine in the time of Jesus, we have no Greek writings written by Palestinian Jews during Jesus’ lifetime. In fact, Bart Ehrman points out that we only have one set of writings in Greek by a Palestinian Jew, the historian Josephus, from the entire 1st century CE. Josephus was from that top 3% class and even he admits it was difficult for him to learn Greek.

Ehrman also points out that even if John had learned some functional Greek on later missionary journeys, this would surely not have been sufficient to write an entire book in Greek. Writing a book requires years of schooling and, as I pointed out, John probably had none. How then, did Christians come to believe that John the Apostle had written the fourth Gospel?

How an Anonymous Gospel Became The Gospel of St. John

In the Gospel of John, there are several references to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 20). In John 21:24, the author writes this about this Beloved Disciple: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.” Note that he doesn’t say that the disciple himself is the author of the book. Rather, the author says he used this disciple’s stories as source material, and that “we” — presumably the Christian community for whom the book was written — trust the word of this disciple.

But since the Beloved Disciple is never named, later Christians were forced to speculate about who he was. While the Gospel of John never even mentioned John the Apostle by name, the other Gospels and Paul did. As I pointed out earlier, John in the Bible was part of Jesus’ inner circle in the Gospels. Christians, knowing that Peter was not the Beloved Disciple since they were distinguished from each other in John’s Gospel, were left with either James or John as possibilities. However, they thought it probably wasn’t James because according to Acts 12:1-2, James was martyred quite early in the history of the church. Therefore, the Beloved Disciple must have been John.

The first Christian author to claim this was Irenaeus in his work Against Heresies, written around 185 CE (a little over a century after the Gospel of John was written). Scholars disagree about whether this Beloved Disciple was a real person or a real disciple of Jesus. According to Bart Ehrman, they also differ on whether the Beloved Disciple was the author of the Gospel of John, although Ehrman believes that he was not.

Whatever the case, John the Apostle was certainly a real person, and we can be reasonably sure that he did not write the Gospel of John.

Conclusion

There is very little we can say with absolute certainty about the Apostle John. He was probably a fisherman from rural Galilee and thus spoke Aramaic. As a poor fisherman, he would have received no formal education and would thus have been illiterate like 97% of the Jewish population of 1st-century Palestine. The Synoptic Gospels say that he, along with his brother James, became a disciple of Jesus and formed part of Jesus’ inner circle, along with his brother James and Peter. We can confirm this by Paul’s testimony about John in the Bible, which mentioned that these three parties were considered the “pillars” of the early church.

He has been assumed for many years to be the author of the document we know as the Gospel of John. However, there are good reasons for thinking that this is improbable. First, the book was actually written anonymously. Second, an Aramaic-speaking fisherman would have been illiterate even in his own language. Furthermore, even if he had been literate, he would not have been able to write a book in Greek, a language he probably didn’t know.

Despite this, more than a century after the book was written, Christians were ascribing the book to John the Apostle. They also identified him with the Beloved Disciple written about only in John. In these stories and speculations about him, John in the Bible lives on.

Matthew in the Bible: Life, Death & Interesting Facts

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Most readers assume that the Gospel of Matthew is the earliest of the four Gospels simply because it appears first in the New Testament. However, this order reflects not chronology but status. The Gospel of Matthew gained immense popularity in the early Church due to its careful structure, extensive teaching content, andJewish-Christian orientation. 

But behind its prestige lies a deeper mystery: Who was Matthew in the Bible? What can we, as historians, say about his life, identity, and the tradition that connects him to this foundational text?

In what follows, we’ll explore Matthew in the Bible in two dimensions: As a figure who briefly appears in the New Testament narrative and as the name traditionally attached to one of Christianity’s most influential texts. 

We’ll trace how the early Church came to associate the apostle with the Gospel, examine why modern scholars reject that attribution, and review what historical evidence (if any) exists for Matthew’s life and death.

In the end, the story of Matthew (both the man and the Gospel) is as much about the shaping of cultural memory as it is about history.

However, before we embark on our pursuit to uncover the identity of Matthew, readers interested in the broader landscape of Gospel origins should check out Dr. Bart D. Ehrman’s course The Unknown Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In eight engaging 30-minute lessons, Dr. Ehrman explores how these foundational texts emerged, navigating the boundaries between history, myth, and tradition.

Who Was Matthew in the Bible: A Brief Overview

Matthew in the Bible is mentioned only a handful of times, yet his name has become one of the most recognizable in Christian tradition. 

In the Gospel of Matthew (9:9), he is introduced as a tax collector sitting at a toll booth, whom Jesus calls to follow him: “As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.”

Matthew is then listed among the twelve disciples in Matthew 10:3. Interestingly, the Gospel of Mark (2:14) and the Gospel of Luke (5:27-29) narrate the same calling story but refer to the tax collector as “Levi,” not Matthew. Both of these Gospels also include lists of the Twelve, and in those lists, the name Matthew appears, but without any mention of Levi.

This discrepancy has long puzzled scholars and sparked debates about whether Matthew and Levi were the same person, different individuals, or the result of redactional decisions made by later Gospel writers.

John P. Meier favors the last option. He notes:

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Despite the level of uncertainty that Meier affirms, the Matthew-Levi identification became largely accepted within Christian tradition, which brings us to our next question: How did St. Matthew become the evangelist? 

The traditional attribution of the first Gospel to Matthew the apostle arises not from the Gospel text itself but from early Christian writings, particularly those of the 2nd century.

One of the earliest (possible) references is found in the writings of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, whose statement is preserved by the 4th century historian Eusebius. As Mark A. Powell explains in Introducing the New Testament:

Papias’ comment was interpreted by later figures such as Irenaeus, writing toward the end of the 2nd century, as solid evidence that the apostle Matthew had composed the only of the four Gospels that mention “Matthew” as the tax collector. 

In his work Against Heresies (3.1.1), Irenaeus confidently stated that “Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church.”

Such affirmations reflect an emerging tendency in the early Church to ascribe apostolic authorship to texts that held theological and liturgical authority within the community. The association between Matthew the apostle and the Gospel attributed to him would become foundational for centuries of Christian thought. However, that wouldn’t last forever!

Matthew in the Bible: Assessing the Traditional Theory

At the end of the 16th century, as Europe was shaken by profound social and religious transformations, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne perceptively documented the rising tensions within society. Reflecting on the religious wars that tore through families and communities, he wrote:

The centuries that followed (particularly the Enlightenment) saw the rise of secular approaches to religious texts. For the first time, Christian Scripture was subjected to historical and literary scrutiny, and long-standing assumptions, such as the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of Matthew, began to be questioned in earnest.

Today, most critical scholars reject the traditional theory that Matthew in the Bible — the tax collector — was the author of the Gospel that bears his name. 

One of the most basic but essential observations is that the Gospel itself is anonymous. Nowhere does the text identify its author by name, not even in the passage that introduces Matthew as a character (Matt. 9:9). The narrative remains in the third person throughout.

A key turning point in modern scholarship came with the recognition that the Gospel of Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as one of its primary sources. Through careful redactional and literary analysis, scholars such as A. M. Honore and Robert H. Stein have demonstrated that over 90% of Mark’s content appears in the Gospel of Matthew, often with high levels of verbal agreement.

This raises a significant question: Could someone who personally followed Jesus rely so heavily on a text written by someone like Mark — who, according to tradition, wasn’t an eyewitness? In other words, it seems improbable that an eyewitness would borrow so extensively from a second-hand source.

The tradition, as noted in the previous section, traces back to Papias, who stated that Matthew compiled the sayings of Jesus in the “Hebrew dialect.” However, our current Gospel of Matthew wasn’t written in Hebrew or Aramaic but in Greek.

Moreover, it’s not a mere collection of sayings (like the hypothetical Q source might have been) but a fully developed narrative Gospel, complete with infancy stories, a structured passion account, and carefully arranged teaching blocks.

Additionally, the style and vocabulary indicate that the author was a highly literate Greek-speaking Christian with a deep understanding of Jewish scripture in its Greek form (the Septuagint). 

This is difficult to reconcile with what we know (or rather, what little we know) about Matthew in the Bible. 

He was a telōnēs, a tax collector likely tasked with door-to-door revenue collection or toll booth duties in Roman Galilee. There is no historical basis to assume that such a person would have received the kind of literary education required to compose a sophisticated Greek narrative of this magnitude.

Dutch Reformed theologian Herman N. Ridderbos summed up the arguments in the following way:

While the traditional theory linking the apostle to the Gospel has been largely set aside, this doesn’t mean we are left entirely in the dark. In the next section, we’ll explore what can be said about the author of the Gospel of Matthew, not the tax collector mentioned in the Bible, but the anonymous writer who shaped one of Christianity’s most influential texts.

Who Was Matthew in the Bible?

The name “Matthew” became associated not only with one of Jesus’ twelve disciples but also with one of the most influential Gospels in the New Testament. Yet, beyond his fleeting appearances in the biblical text, what do we truly know about him?

In what follows, we’ll explore what can be known (or at least plausibly inferred) about the life and death of Matthew in the Bible, drawing on both biblical references and early Christian traditions.

Matthew in the Bible: Birth and Life

When it comes to the birth of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, the historical record is silent. Unlike some key figures in early Christianity (such as Paul, whose background is partially accessible through both his letters and Acts), there are no biographical details in the New Testament about where the author of Matthew was born or raised. 

Later traditions attempted to fill in this void, locating his origins in places such as Capernaum or even Antioch, but these accounts are speculative and stem from much later centuries. As such, scholars today uniformly agree that there is no reliable historical data regarding the birthplace or early life of the person responsible for the Gospel of Matthew.

Regardless of the naming issue (Matthew-Levi?), the story of Matthew’s acceptance of Jesus’ call is very memorable: Matthew is a tax collector, a profession regarded with suspicion and even contempt in 1st century Jewish society. Yet, Jesus’ call overrides social stigma and draws him into the circle of followers.

This raises an important question: Was Matthew merely a disciple, or was he also an apostle? As John P. Meier explains in A Marginal Jew, the category of “disciple” in the Gospels refers broadly to those whom Jesus calls and who choose to follow him.

Meier outlines two basic conditions for becoming a disciple: 

#1 – Jesus must take the initiative in calling the individual.
#2 – The person must literally leave behind home and possessions to follow. 

The category “apostle” is more specific, referring to the twelve men chosen by Jesus to represent the twelve tribes of Israel and to participate in his mission symbolically and organizationally. 

Matthew, listed among the Twelve in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matt 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15), is thus considered both a disciple and an apostle.

What can we say, then, about his cultural background and the broader contours of his life? Virtually all scholars agree that the Matthew who appears in the Bible was of Jewish origin. So was the author of the Gospel! 

As William Davies and Dale Allison emphasize in their commentary, the Gospel of Matthew displays a pervasive Jewish character: It’s saturated with quotations from the Hebrew Bible, it shows a deep concern for the Law, and its theological motifs often emerge from debates within Jewish tradition.

R. T. France, in his book Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher, likewise highlights the Gospel’s profound engagement with Jewish identity and its tensions with emerging Christian self-understanding. 

Though there are harsh criticisms of the Pharisees and Jewish leadership, these shouldn’t be taken as evidence of Gentile authorship. Rather, they reflect the polemical tone of intra-Jewish disputes in the late 1st century.

As for the Gospel’s place of composition, scholarly opinion has varied over time, but the most likely candidates are cities with vibrant Jewish-Christian communities in the Eastern Mediterranean. Antioch in Syria has long been favored due to its early Christian prominence and proximity to Judaism, though, as R. T. France notes, the evidence remains circumstantial.

How Did Matthew Die?

When it comes to biblical clues about the death of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, historians find none. The New Testament offers no indication of how or where this individual died, nor does it provide any information about the later stages of his life. 

Unlike figures such as Paul or Peter, whose deaths are at least hinted at, the Gospel writer known as Matthew leaves no biographical trace beyond the text itself. As a result, we have no historical data concerning his fate.

However, later Christian tradition didn’t remain content with this silence. Over the centuries, a number of legends emerged surrounding the death of St. Matthew. These legends, of course, (wrongly) assume that the apostle and the Gospel author were one and the same. 

The most widespread version of the story appears in hagiographical texts such as the Acts of Matthew and in later medieval compilations like the Golden Legend. According to these accounts, Matthew traveled to distant lands (often named as Ethiopia or Persia) to preach the Gospel.

In one popular version, he is said to have converted the daughter and wife of a local king, which enraged the ruler. As a result, Matthew was martyred while celebrating the Eucharist at the altar. Referring to this narrative, Hans-Josef Klauck explains:

While these stories are rich in narrative detail and reflect the theological values of the communities that produced them, they aren’t historically reliable.

Scholars agree that these legends were written many generations after Matthew's time and contain numerous anachronisms, miraculous embellishments, and literary tropes common to other apostolic martyrdom stories.

Conclusion

The figure of Matthew in the Bible remains enigmatic. While he appears briefly in the Gospel narratives as a tax collector called to discipleship and listed among the Twelve, the historical trail quickly fades. The Gospel attributed to him, though central to Christian tradition, offers no internal claim to apostolic authorship.

Modern scholarship has shown that the Gospel’s sophisticated literary structure, reliance on Greek sources like Mark, and theological depth all point to a highly educated, anonymous Jewish-Christian author writing in the latter part of the 1st century.

And yet, the memory of Matthew the apostle endured and evolved through tradition, legend, and liturgical devotion.

What we encounter in both text and tradition isn’t a fully recoverable biography, but a layered figure shaped by tradition, legends, and the early Church’s desire to root its foundational texts in apostolic witness. In the end, the historical Matthew didn’t end up making history. The remembered Matthew did! 

The Prostitute in the Bible: Name, Verses, and The Real Story

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Although many people know there is one prostitute in the Bible, that there are more mentioned is less common knowledge. The portrayal of prostitutes in the Bible often sparks curiosity and debate. Some of these figures are symbolic of faith and redemption, while others are used to convey moral lessons. In the Bible, we encounter women whose roles as sex workers complicate their identities and challenge conventional views of righteousness. Yet when examining these stories, a deeper investigation of cultural contexts and historical interpretations reveals a more complex picture.

In this article, I’ll explore these intriguing stories, examining how the Bible depicts prostitutes, the real historical context of their lives, and how their stories challenge or reinforce ancient social and religious norms

Beyond a Prostitute in the Bible: Prostitution in the Ancient World

When it comes to academic studies of prostitution in the ancient world, there is a fair amount of controversy. In general, academics of the past divided prostitutes into two types. The first of these were cultic or sacred prostitutes. These were thought to be women who engaged in ritual sexual activity in temples dedicated to a deity.

Ancient historian Herodotus, for example, wrote of this practice at the Temple of the goddess Ishtar in Babylon. He mentioned how all women in Babylon were required to sit at least once in Ishtar’s temple and "expose themselves to a stranger" for money. Herodotus found this deplorable. Similarly, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote that in Persia, girls as young as 12 were dedicated to cultic prostitution. But is this accurate?

In their article “With This Body I Thee Worship: Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity,” classicists Mary Beard and J. Henderson are skeptical. They write that it is more likely that accounts like those of Herodotus and Strabo are either misinterpretations of sacred institutions or simply lies meant to defame the respective civilizations. Furthermore, in her book The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Stephanie Budin writes that the idea of sacred prostitution “has come into being as a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty methodology” by scholars.

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The second type of ancient prostitution is the kind which, in some ways, still exists today: secular prostitution for money. Rebecca Denova writes that, in ancient Israel, prostitution was not technically considered a sin. The reason for this begins with the fact that in the law of Moses, as in most civilizations of the ancient Near East, women were considered property. They belonged to their fathers until they were given to a husband under a marriage contract. Prostitutes, however, since they were not under any such marriage contract, were not violating any law by having sex, even with married men.

However, Denova is quick to point out that despite this, prostitutes were definitely at the bottom of the social ladder in ancient Israel. Nevertheless, the Bible has several stories about prostitutes who serve God’s purpose despite their profession. Having established some background, I’ll now look into a few of the prominent biblical characters who are prostitutes

Prostitutes in the Bible

Rahab

Rahab is the name of the prostitute in the Bible associated with the Book of Joshua. In chapter 2, the Israelite leader Joshua sends two spies into the city of Jericho to get information on its defenses before the Israelites attack it. Without mentioning how they met her, verse 1 says the two spies “went and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab and spent the night there.” As you can see, the verse is quite vague, not detailing whether they were Rahab’s clients or merely lodged with her.

However, the king of Jericho finds out that Rahab is harboring foreign spies. The king accordingly sends a message to her, ordering her to send the spies out so that they can be captured. Rahab hides the men, telling the king that they have already gone. She cleverly encourages the king’s men to pursue the spies, sending them in the wrong direction.

When the king’s men are gone, Rahab takes them to the roof, where she hides them again under stalks of flax. She later speaks to them, requesting mercy when the Israelites conquer the city:

The spies are only too happy to comply. They ask her to tie a red thread over her door, a sign which will prevent Israelite conquerors from attacking her and her family, after which Rahab lets them out of her window on a rope since her dwelling is within the closed city walls of Jericho.

Since the Israelites are the heroes of Joshua, it seems Rahab is righteous despite her profession. Note, though, that she (understandably) only protects the spies out of fear for her safety and that of her family. Of course, the Israelites are also brutal conquerors throughout the book of Joshua, so it’s actually hard to find any moral high ground.

Gomer

An arguably much stranger story is told of a prostitute in the Bible that appears in the  prophetic book of Hosea. In Hosea 1:2-3, we see this about the beginning of Hosea’s prophetic calling:

It's clear from this passage that God is using this marriage and the resulting family merely to symbolize for the Israelites how unfaithful they have been to him by worshipping other gods. In other words, in this analogy, Israel is the prostitute and God the husband. In addition, Hosea and Gomer go on to produce children with ominous names: Jezreel (God sows) to indicate that God will cut down Israel as one cuts down the crops in the field, Lo-ruhamah (not pitied) to indicate the lack of pity God will have for them when he tears them down, and Lo-ammi (not my son), to indicate how he has cut Israel off from his affections.

Hosea then divorces Gomer for infidelity, using this at God’s behest to symbolize God’s “divorce” from Israel. Later, however, Hosea seeks Gomer out again. This time, she is enslaved to someone, and Hosea is forced to buy her back. He does so, but then refrains from sex with her for a long time, symbolizing that Israel will have no king for a prolonged period.

What is most disturbing about this story is the cavalier attitude with which God — and Hosea at God’s request — treats Gomer. Because of her profession and lowly social status, it is clear that her life means nothing more than a symbol of unfaithfulness and degradation. She has no personal agency, a condition which likely mirrors that of most prostitutes in the ancient world.

Mary Magdalene

While prostitution is referred to generally in the New Testament (see Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6:15-20, for example), only one character is later called a prostitute. Mary Magdalene, while only appearing in a few verses in the Gospels, is clearly a key figure in the early church. This is a description of her in one of the Gospels.

In addition, both Matthew and John say that Mary was present at Jesus’ crucifixion and all four Gospels say she was at Jesus’ empty tomb, an early witness to his resurrection. She was probably a real person and was certainly highly-regarded by early Christians. So why is it that she is often considered most famous for being a prostitute in the Bible, despite no NT book actually saying that?

In Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament, Carol Meyers writes that this myth has its origins in a sermon given in 591 CE by Pope Gregory I. In this sermon, the Pope mistakenly conflated three distinct biblical characters: Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50 who anoints Jesus’ feet.

Ever after, stories about Mary’s life as a sex worker circulated throughout Christendom, seeming all the more powerful since Jesus allowed her to be part of his inner circle. While we don’t know a lot about Mary’s background, there is absolutely nothing in our sources to indicate that she was ever a prostitute.

Conclusion

In the ancient Near East, prostitution was a common, albeit low-status profession. While there was a long-standing myth of temple prostitution in which women served a deity by performing ritual sex acts in that deity’s temple, most scholars today doubt the meaning, if not the sheer veracity, of ancient accounts of these practices.

In ancient Israel, since women were considered property, first of their fathers and then of their husbands, prostitutes did not technically violate any social codes by having sex with married men since they were under no such social contracts. However, it is clear that they were considered the lowest of the low in society and that they had little to no power or individual agency over their lives.

The Hebrew Bible contains a couple of prominent stories involving prostitutes. Rahab, in the book of Joshua, is a prostitute in Jericho who takes in Israelite spies and helps them escape from the king. While she is often presented as a righteous woman for helping the Israelites, it is clear from the biblical text that her help was an act of self-preservation. By helping the coming conquerors, she was able to secure the lives of herself and her family when Israel razed the city.

Gomer, on the other hand, was a hapless prostitute in the Bible from the book of Hosea.  God uses her as a symbol of degradation and corruption in order to send a message to Israel. God makes Hosea marry and father children with her, explaining that in this analogy, Gomer is Israel. Like a prostitute, Israel is unfaithful to her “husband.” The story is troubling in that Gomer’s own life and welfare are treated as expendable and valueless.

Finally, we have the story of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. Although one passage in Luke says Jesus had removed “seven devils” from her, it says nothing about her being a sex worker. However, a mistaken sermon in the 6th century CE mixed up Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and a sinful woman who anoints Jesus’ feet. Afterwards, stories circulated about Mary’s life of prostitution before she met Jesus. However, there is no evidence in our sources that this ever happened.