“[T]here is no such thing as an objective approach to the historical Jesus.”
– Brandon Massey, “Rewriting the History of Scholarship,” in The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, edited by James Crossley and Chris Keith (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 48.
- Sarah Bond let readers of Past Imperfects know that she’s moved her site from Substack to Ghost. (Again, thanks to Nazis. See last Sunday’s Roundup for a similar story.)
- Brent Nongbri contributed to the volume Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE – 300 CE (Oxford University Press, 2025). If you want to read his chapter, you can shoot him an email! (I also heard through the grapevine that an open access version of the book will be available soon. But don’t quote me on that.)
- Is the Shroud of Turin really the burial cloth of Jesus? John Nelson explains why it probably isn’t. Of the various lines of argumentation he provides, one of the more interesting ones is that the shroud depicts Jesus as he was conceived in the popular imagination of the medieval period and not how he likely would have looked as a Jewish man of the first century. This (to me) seems all but a decisive blow to the legitimacy of the artifact.
- A new episode of the New Testament Review had dropped!
- Over at the YouTube channel “Bible and Archaeology,” Mark Goodacre gives a preview of an upcoming talk he is going to give at an upcoming conference. His talk will be titled “The Missing Pieces in the Quest for the Historical Jesus.” Conveniently, if you have the 2024 volume The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus then you can find Goodacre’s contribution entitled “Missing Pieces.”
- I finished reading Michael Kok’s latest book Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter. It is an excellent little primer on the authorship of the canonical Gospels set against the backdrop of the work of Irenaeus of Lyons. If you haven’t engaged with Kok’s work, I recommend doing so. His book on the Gospel of Mark is still one I return to with some frequency.
- If you’re looking to add another book to your digital library, the recently published volume Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration is available for free right now!
- Did the ten northern tribes of Israel disappear following the Assyrian exile? Mary-Joan Leith, writing for thetorah.com, argues that they didn’t and, moreover, the myth of the “lost” tribes was intended to “delegitimize” Samaritans.
- Blogger καταπέτασμα writes about the Matthean narrative’s guarded tomb and argues that the story seems to suggest Pilate was aiming to kill a resurrected Jesus if push came to shove.
The Amateur Exegete 
“Really” on that last one? How does he get in a semi-critical roundup? Oh, per a previous comment, I one-starred Schmidt’s book on Josephus and the TF. If his motive was to try to convert the likes of me (with a book that comes off as apologetics as much or more than exegesis) it backfired.
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I’m a big fan of the blogger, so that’s why he is in the Roundup.
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Of course the Bible itself gives us little cause to accept the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity. At most, we get somewhat inconsistent descriptions of JC’s burial linen(s) and the post-Resurrection discovery. But there’s flat-out nothing in the Gospels or Acts (or elsewhere in the NT) about an image being left behind on the cloth, the disciples taking this precious relic from the tomb, or its preservation and veneration among early church leaders. NT authors saw fit to include a story about JC bullying a fig tree, purported details of apostolic travels and Roman bureaucracy, etc., but didn’t think to mention that Peter or Mary Magdalene or someone had gathered up and passed along the shroud bearing the only known image of The Most Important God-Man Ever? I mean, c’mon.
–Lex Lata
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I’m sure some apologist somewhere is arguing that the fact that we don’t read about the Shroud of Turin in the NT is somehow evidence for its authenticity.
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Oh, this is cool. In the latest issue of the Journal of Medieval History, Nicolas Sarzeaud has a paper (open access, woot!) discussing a newly-discovered 14th-century characterization of the Shroud of Turin as a “patent” example of relic fraud. Interesting stuff about the Shroud specifically, and about medieval/Scholastic approaches to the epistemology of mirabilia more generally.
“A New Document on the Appearance of the Shroud of Turin from Nicole Oresme: Fighting False Relics and False Rumours in the Fourteenth Century”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03044181.2025.2546884#d1e290
–Lex Lata
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