Biblical Time Machine

Try as you might, you won't find Santa Claus in the Bible. Or Christmas trees, or camel-riding Magi, or even December 25th! In the first centuries of Christianity, Christmas wasn't really a "thing." The birth of Jesus was far less important than his death and resurrection. So how did Christmas evolve from an afterthought into the biggest holiday on the planet?

We're thrilled to have Kyle Smith back on the podcast to present a deep-dive cultural history of Christmas. Why do we have so many different dates for Christmas? (12/25, 1/6, even 1/19!) Did the Three Kings have names (and were there actually three)? And how did St. Nicholas, a 4th-century bishop from Turkey, transform into rosy-cheeked St. Nick?

Kyle is hard at work on a cultural biography called The Many Lives of Saint Nick, which should be coming out in the next year. In the meantime, enjoy these fascinating articles from our content partner Bible Odyssey:

• Luke's Nativity and the Battle Over Christmas
• The Nativity (written by Helen!)
• The Political Significance of Luke's Christmas Story

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

In the first of two Christmas episodes, Helen and Dave take another look at arguably the "best-known and least-known" woman in history: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Our guest, the fantastic James Tabor, collects the few breadcrumbs of information about Mary in the New Testament and weaves together a compelling narrative about a Jewish matriarch at the center of the Jesus movement.

James Tabor's latest book, The Lost Mary: How the Jewish Mother of Jesus Became the Virgin Mother of God, will be published in 2025 (the French version is available now!). 

More on Mary from Bible Odyssey:

• Mary, the Mother of Jesus
• Portraits of Mary in the Gospels
• Virgin Birth and What It Means

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

The Jewish festival of Hanukkah is based on real historical events — the Maccabean Revolt of 167-160 BCE. In today's episode, Helen and Dave travel back to a time when Judaea was ruled by the Hellenized (Greek) Seleucid Empire. When a Jewish priest named Mattathias refused to make a sacrifice to the pagan gods, it sparked a violent revolution led by Judah "The Hammer" Maccabee. 

Learn More About Hanukkah at Bible Odyssey

• Hanukkah
• Maccabees
• The Commemoration of War in Early Jewish Festivals
• Life Under Empire

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

The Bible is largely silent about race. People are identified by their lands of origin and beliefs, not their skin color. Yet centuries of biblical interpreters have read race into the Bible, for good and for ill.

As our guest Stacy Davis explains, the biblical land of Cush (sometimes translated as Ethiopia) has long been associated with Black people, a point of pride for African and African-American Christians. And Josephus believed that the legendary Queen of Sheba was Black.

But the Bible has also been misused for racist purposes. In the 1800s, pro-slavery forces in America cited a convoluted reading of Genesis 9 and 10 to justify the enslavement of Black people under the so-called "Curse of Ham."

To learn more, check out Stacy's excellent book, This Strange Story: Jewish and Christian Interpretation of the Curse of Canaan from Antiquity to 1865.

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

Starting in the 1st century CE, there was an explosion of Christian literature — dozens of gospels, letters, apocalypses and more — but only a fraction of those texts made it into the New Testament canon. Who decided which books were in and which books were out?

For this episode, Helen and Dave welcome New Testament scholar Francis Watson, who introduces us to important figures like Athanasius of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, some of the earliest influential Christian writers to weigh in on which texts were authoritative and which were "spurious."

Check out Francis's excellent books on the making of the NT canon: Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective and The Fourfold Gospel: A Theological Reading of the New Testament Portraits of Jesus .

To learn more about how the NT canon came together, here are some great articles from Bible Odyssey:

• Noncanonical Gospels
• The New Testament Canon
• Why Does the Bible Look the Way It Does?

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

When we recognize the Bible as a product of the ancient world, we can look for subtle ways that biblical authors incorporated elements of everyday life — including coins! We spoke with historian Michael Theophilos about everything we can learn from ancient coins (politics, economics, visual culture, propaganda), and then we found some fascinating examples of how language and symbols from coins made their way into the Bible.

If you want to dive deeper into coins and the New Testament, check out Michael's book, Numismatics and Greek Lexicography. 

Here are some cool images of coins Michael described in the episode:

• A denarius minted by Caesar Augustus with the image of the comet or bright star
• An ancient coin from Yehud (Persian-ruled Judaea) featuring a disembodied ear

Also, the newly redesigned Bible Odyssey website has some great articles about coins, taxes and the Temple in the 1st Century:

• Money
• Commerce and the Temple in First-Century Jerusalem
• Taxes in First-Century Palestine

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

It's easy to read the New Testament and come away with the idea that Jesus was in opposition to the Jewish ritual impurity laws. In fact, that's what most Christian theologians have taught for the past 2,000 years. Is it possible that we've (gasp!) been misreading the Bible this whole time?  Our guest Matt Thiessen says, "Yep."

In today's episode, we travel back to the 1st century to understand how everyday Jewish people understood ritual impurity, and what Jesus's miracles — healing a leper, curing a woman of a hemorrhaging condition — would have meant in that historical context. 

Matt's excellent book on this subject is Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels' Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism. And if you're a fan of funny Twitter accounts — like, actually funny — follow Matt at @MattThiessenNT. 

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

There aren't any werewolves or vampires in the Bible, but God deploys his own terrifying army of monsters. Have you heard of cherubs? Not what you think! Even angels have some less-than-angelic duties. It turns out that the shepherds abiding in the field had good reason to be "sore afraid."

Just in time for Halloween, special guest Esther Hamori joins Helen and Dave to talk about her fantastic new book, God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible.  Maybe next year you'll dress your kid up as a six-winged, snake-skinned seraphim. 

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

At first reading, the Gospel of John feels a world apart from the other gospels. The language is different, there are new stories (see our episode on "the woman taken in adultery") and Jesus speaks about himself in bolder terms ("I am the resurrection and the life." "I am the light of the world.") That has led some scholars to argue that the author of John didn't know the synoptic gospels and was instead working from other sources, probably oral traditions about Jesus circulating in the 1st century CE.

Our guest doesn't buy it. Mark Goodacre, creator of the pioneering biblical studies podcast NT Pod, argues convincingly that the author of John not only knew the other gospels, but wrote his version in direct response to them.

Mark is hard at work on a book about John, but in the meantime you can check out some of his other groundbreaking work: The Case Against Q:  Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, and The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze. 

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Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson. 

Jonah and the whale (fish, technically) is one of the best-known Bible stories, but it's also completely bonkers. It stars Jonah—the worst/best prophet ever—and reads more like a fable or satire than a serious biblical treatise. Were the authors of Jonah trying to be funny? And how the heck did this silly little fish tale become a beloved and meaningful narrative for Judaism, Christianity and Islam?

To help unravel the mystery, Helen and Dave welcome back Eckart Frahm, author of the impressive new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. Eckart shares a convincing theory that the Judaean authors of Jonah may have been inspired by a popular Assyrian legend. 

Support the show

Theme music written and performed by Dave Roos, creator of Biblical Time Machine. Season 4 + 5 produced by John Nelson.