General Information

• Palestine in the Time of Jesus - Resource pages on various sites in Galilee, Judea and the Decapolis, offering a map of and bibliography for the site.


• Artifacts Related to the Historical Jesus - Resource pages on various sites in Galilee, Judea and the Decapolis, offering bibliography for the artifact.


• FRONTLINE: From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians - Interviews with several scholars about the rise of Christianity and the diversity of early beliefs and groups.

Dead Sea Scrolls

• The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls - Google Books collaborated with scholars at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem to digitize the excellent, almost full-length manuscripts found in Cave 1 at Qumran and now housed at that museum. You can zoom in on the scrolls and see English translations of the Hebrew text. The site also has a supplementary video in which Dr. Alofo Roitman, Lizbeth and George Krupp Curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Head of the Shrine of the Book, takes you down into the underground vault beneath the Shrine to show you where and how the actual scrolls are kept. (Most of the fragmentary scrolls—all 870+ of them—are kept in another museum in East Jerusalem, the Rockefeller Museum.)


• Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hebrew University of Jerusalem - A rich site oriented to both academic research (with its complete bibliography) and to the interested lay person.


• Virtual Tour of Qumran - Take a virtual tour of the Qumran site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Hosted by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.


• Andrew Lawler, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, Smithsonian (January 2010) - A discussion of recent theories about how the Dead Sea Scrolls got into the 11 caves near Qumran, and other recent controversies about the interpretation of the texts. (thanks to Jerry Tennant for this reference)

Early Christian Texts

• Biblia.com: NRSV - This online Bible is actually multiple Bibles rolled into one. You can choose which translation you are reading, from the scholarly New Revised Standard Version (NRSV; the link takes you to this version) to the more colloquial Good News Bible, and everything in between. Here's a quick tutorial for how to use it.


• The Five Gospels - John Marshall's synoptic layout of different groupings of gospels.


• The Text of Q - The NRSV translation of Lukan passages thought to trace to Q (using Funk/Miller's designation of Q passages in The Complete Gospels).


• The Lost Sayings Gospel Q - Resources on Q compiled by Peter Kirby on his Early Christian Writings website.


• The Nag Hammadi Library - A resource on the Nag Hammadi corpus that includes an alphabetic index to all the gnostic tractates discovered there in 1945.The translations here are older and have been supplanted by the improved translations in the book I brought to class, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (ed. Marvin Meyer; rev. ed., New York: HarperOne, 2009). If you're interested in the gnostic literature, you might also take a look at Karen L. King's book, What Is Gnosticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). There are also resources on this literature available from the website for the Osher class I teach, Scriptures Lost and Found.


• The Gospel of Jesus' Wife - In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King published a fourth-century Coptic papyrus fragment in which Jesus refers to someone (probably Mary Magdalene) as "My wife" and mentions that "she will be able to be my disciple." The document has since proven to be a forgery; the link provides information about the original scientific analysis, rather than the subsequent controversy.